Truth

Chase Wrenn

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745663241, 9780745663234
• eBook ISBN: 9780745688145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

What is truth? Is there anything that all truths have in common that makes them true rather than false? Is truth independent of human thought, or does it depend in some way on what we believe or what we would be justified in believing? In what sense, if any, is it better for beliefs or statements to be true than to be false?

In this engaging and accessible new introduction Chase Wrenn surveys a variety of theories of the nature of truth and evaluates their philosophical costs and benefits. Paying particular attention to how the theories accommodate realist intuitions and make sense of truth's value, he discusses a full range of theories from classical correspondence to relatively new deflationary and pluralist accounts. The book provides a clear, non-technical entry point to contemporary debates about truth for non-specialists. Specialists will also find new contributions to those debates, including a new argument for the superiority of deflationism to causal correspondence and pluralist theories.

Drawing on a range of traditional and contemporary debates, this book will be of interest to students and scholars alike and anyone interested in the nature and value of truth.

1

What is Truth?

It is true that the earth is closer to the sun in the northern hemisphere's winter than in the northern hemisphere's summer. It is not true that the Himalayas are older than the Appalachians. What's the difference? What does it mean for something to be true, or for it not to be? What, to be succinct, is truth? This book is about some of the ways philosophers have tried to answer that question.

As is often the case, answering the question requires us first to get clear about what it means. There are some common confusions about truth that can get in the way of making progress toward explaining what it is. The purpose of this chapter is to clear away some of those confusions and to set the stage for the rest of the book.

1.1 Truth and the Truth

The question, ‘What is truth?’ strikes some people as one of the deepest and most elusive philosophical questions. Some people seem to think it is all but unanswerable. They might think knowing what truth is would mean knowing everything there is to know, or knowing the ultimate secrets of the universe – the explanations of everything puzzling, strange, surprising, wonderful, mysterious, or confusing in the world. Knowledge of the nature of truth then seems to be a kind of mystic wisdom that might be possible for gods and prophets, but not for us ordinary people.

Fortunately for philosophers interested in truth, that view is mistaken. It derives from a couple of different confusions. One is to confuse truth with the universe or reality as a whole. But truth is not the universe. It is a property had by the claim that chickens hatch from eggs and lacked by the claim that amphibians have fur. Explaining the nature of truth means explaining the nature of that property, not explaining the universe as a whole.

A second confusion that makes ‘What is truth?’ seem to require mystical insight is the idea that answering the question means knowing all the most important and fundamental things. This idea might confuse the question ‘What is truth?’ with the similar sounding question, ‘What is the truth?’.

Ordinarily, if you want to know the truth, you want to know the truth about something in particular. You want to know whether your romantic partner is faithful, or when the train is scheduled to depart, or how the new welfare policies will affect the economy. Unless you are asking about some topic that is already philosophical, ‘What is the truth?’ is not usually a philosophical question.

Sometimes, though, someone might ask what the truth is, and mean something very general. Such a person wants to know the truth about everything, either by knowing all there is know, or by knowing deep principles that explain everything there is to explain. This is probably impossible. We humans are incapable of omniscience, and there probably are no deep principles that explain absolutely everything, apart from the most fundamental laws of nature. Thus it might be impossible to answer the most general version of the question ‘What is the truth?’. But ‘What is truth?’ is a very different question. Its answer need not tell us everything there is to know, or enable us to understand everything there is to understand. All it needs to do is to explain a certain property that ‘2 + 2 = 4’ and ‘Canada is north of Mexico’ have in common but ‘Seven is an even number’ and ‘France is an island’ lack.

In asking ‘What is truth?’, we are asking the sort of ‘What is X?’ question Socrates was famous for pursuing. In Euthyphro, for example, he asks, “What is piety?” and he refuses to accept an answer that is just a list of pious acts. He wants an explanation of what makes acts pious or impious, not a list of examples. He wants to know what the nature of piety is. Likewise, when we ask what truth is, we are not interested in compiling a list of examples of true claims. We are not asking for the truth about some subject matter (apart from the truth about the nature of truth), and we are not asking for an explanation of the universe as a whole. We want to know what it means for a claim to be true or false. A good answer will explain what makes true claims true and false claims false, and it will thereby tell us about the nature of truth.

In Metaphysics, Aristotle says, “To say of what is not that it is, or of what is that it is not, is false, while to say of what is that is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” This may not be a complete answer to the question, ‘What is truth?’, but it is a start. In particular, it helps to clarify the problem. We use the adjective ‘true’ in many different ways. We talk about true friends and false friends. A carpenter might describe a properly aligned beam as “true.” True diamonds are worth more than fakes. Elvis Costello released an album called My Aim is True, and the title is not nonsense. Although these notions of truth might have some family relation to what Aristotle was talking about, he was clearly concerned with something else. He was concerned with the notion of truth in the sense of accuracy, of getting it right about how things are. Asking what truth is, in this sense, is asking what it means for something to be accurate or get it right about how things are.

1.2 Truth Bearers

Before we can say much about what truth is, we need to have some idea about what sort of things are capable of being true or false, in the Aristotelian sense of getting it right or wrong about how things are. There are a lot of candidates, including sentences, propositions, utterances, statements, beliefs and theories. All of these things are “truth bearers,” which means they are the sorts of things that can be true or false. They all contrast with such things as mailboxes and marbles, which are not capable of being true or false in the relevant sense. Mailboxes and marbles are not truth bearers.

Among truth bearers, some might be more fundamental than others. Take utterances and sentences, for example. A sentence is a sequence of words that satisfies certain grammatical rules. An utterance is an event consisting of someone using a sentence. For example, Jack might say, “There is water in the well on Goose Hill at 7:00 p.m. local time, October 1, 2001,” and Jill might also say, “There is water in the well on Goose Hill at 7:00 p.m. local time, October 1, 2001.” Those are two utterances of the same sentence. If we already had an explanation of truth and falsity for sentences, we might be able to use it to explain truth and falsity of utterances: Utterances of true sentences are true, utterances of false sentences are false, and that's all there is to it. Such an explanation treats sentences as more fundamental truth bearers than utterances.

Philosophers disagree about what the most fundamental truth bearers are. Some think sentences are the most fundamental. Once we understand what it means for a sentence to be true, they think, we will be in a position to explain what it means for any other truth bearer to be true as well. Others think propositions are the most fundamental truth bearers.

A proposition, as philosophers use the term, is a certain kind of abstract object. The general idea is that a proposition is what is said when you say something and what is believed when you believe something. If Jill says, in English, “London is pretty,” and Jacques says, in French, “Londres est jolie,” there is a sense in which they have said the same thing. If you and I both believe that water is wet, there is a sense in which we believe the same thing. And if you tell me that there are potatoes in the pantry, and I believe you, there is a sense in which what I believe is what you said. Philosophers who believe in propositions think that, in order for a person to believe or say something, there must be a thing that the person believes or says. That thing is a proposition. Those who think of propositions as the fundamental truth bearers think that other truth bearers are made true (or false) by their relationships to true (or false) propositions. A belief is true when what is believed is a true proposition, for example, and an utterance is true when what is said is a true proposition.

Philosophical debates about the fundamental truth bearers can be very complicated. Sentences and propositions are the main candidates. Philosophers who think of sentences as the fundamental truth bearers often think it is metaphysically extravagant to believe in propositions. They might think so because they do not believe in any abstract objects, including numbers, properties, and propositions. Or they might think so because those who believe in propositions have been unable to give a clearly correct explanation of their so-called identity conditions – what it takes for two sentences to express the same proposition and what it takes for them to express different propositions. Philosophers who think of propositions as the fundamental truth bearers are often doubtful that anything else, including sentences, could have the features required to serve as properly fundamental truth bearers, and they sometimes claim that work in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language relying on the idea of propositions has been too fruitful and successful to discard.

This book will mostly ignore the debate about the fundamental truth bearers. Instead of taking a side, I will use the neutral term ‘claim’ to refer to the fundamental truth bearers, whatever they might be. Some theories, however, are expressly designed with sentences or propositions in mind as the fundamental truth bearers. When this choice makes a difference, it will be noted.

1.3 Being True and Being Taken to be True

Some people think that, when it comes down to it, there really isn't very much truth. Maybe even nothing is true. They might say, for example, that we really can't call claims about the relative positions of the earth and sun, the molecular structure of DNA, the events of the War of the Roses, or very much else true. We can't call them true because we cannot be certain of them, and, the reasoning goes, we must be certain of something before we can call it true. Some people might even take this line of thought further. They might point out that there is always room for some doubt; we can never be 100 percent certain of anything. And, since whatever is true is 100 percent certain, there really aren't any true claims. There are only more or less probable ones.

Other people take a much more permissive view. They are impressed by the idea that it is somehow improper to call what someone else believes very deeply untrue. On this view, whatever anyone believes is true. While the first view denies that anything is true, the second allows that everything is true, so long as someone believes it.

Both views are mistaken in a variety of ways. They have more sophisticated and plausible cousins that will be discussed in Chapter 2. But it is worth pausing here long enough to note a mistake the two views have in common. Each equates being true with being treated as true. According to the first view, we are rarely or never entitled to treat anything as true, and so nothing is true. According to the second view, we are rarely or never entitled to treat what someone believes as untrue, and so whatever anyone believes is true.

Of course, there is a great deal of difference between being true and being treated as true, just as there is a great deal of difference between being a criminal and being treated as a criminal. For a very long time, it was not at all certain that the earth was shaped more like a sphere than a pancake. Nevertheless, during that time, the earth was shaped more like a sphere than a pancake – it was true that the earth was shaped more like a sphere than a pancake. And no matter how deeply or sincerely I believe that there is another beer in the refrigerator, my believing does not make it true that one is there.

There are two important methodological points we can extract from the difference between being true and being taken to be true. First, we cannot hope to study truth the way we might study butterflies, by amassing a large collection of specimens and examining their similarities and differences. We might be able to make some progress in that way, but we could not make very much, because we do not have a guarantee that our specimens of truth are the genuine article. I might think something is true, but I could be mistaken. To study truth, then, we need to proceed more philosophically. We need to consider some plausible accounts of what truth might be, and we need to be clear about what we want a theory of truth to explain. Then we must proceed cautiously and tentatively, in hopes of finding a theory that does the work we need it to do.

Second, the failure of the idea that being true is being taken to be true can be used to illustrate an important philosophical tool for evaluating theories of truth. The following two claims might strike you as obviously correct:

(1) If there is another beer in the refrigerator, then it is true that there is another beer in the refrigerator.

(2) If the earth is shaped more like a sphere than a pancake, then it is true that the earth is shaped more like a sphere than a pancake.

In fact, almost any instance of the pattern ‘If _, then it is true that _.’ is correct when we fill both blanks with the same statement in English. If truth were the same as certainty, however, those same instances of the pattern ‘If _, then it is certain that _.’ would be correct as well. But they are not:

(3) If there is another beer in the refrigerator, then it is certain that there is another beer in the refrigerator.

(4) If the earth is shaped more like a sphere than a pancake, then it is certain that the earth is shaped more like a sphere than a pancake.

Both those claims could easily be false, even though the similar claims involving truth are true.

Another pattern whose instances are almost always correct is ‘If it is true that _, then _’ (assuming we fill in the blanks with the same statement in English, of course!). Two examples are:

(5) If it is true that there is another beer in the refrigerator, then there is another beer in the refrigerator.

(6) If it is true that the earth is shaped more like a pancake than a sphere, then the earth is shaped more like a pancake than a sphere.

And if truth were the same as being believed, then the corresponding instances of ‘If it is believed that _, then _’ would have to be correct as well:

(7) If it is believed that there is another beer in the refrigerator, then there is another beer in the refrigerator.

(8) If it is believed that the earth is shaped more like a pancake than a sphere, then the earth is shaped more like a pancake than a sphere.

Those two claims are obviously wrong, though.

The patterns ‘If _, then _ is tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Key Concepts in Philosophy Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1: What is Truth?
• 2: Objectivity
• 3: Truth and Value
• 4: Epistemic Theories of Truth
• 5: Correspondence Theories of Truth
• 6: Deflationary Theories of Truth
• 7: Pluralist Theories of Truth
• 8: Deflationism Revisited
• References
• Index