Truth Without Objectivity

Max Kölbel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135199449
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Truth without Objectivity provides a critique of the mainstream view of 'meaning'. Kölbel examines the standard solutions to the conflict implicit in this view, demonstrating their inadequacy and developing instead his own relativist theory of truth.
The mainstream view of meaning assumes that understanding a sentence's meaning implies knowledge of the conditions required for it to be true. This view is challenged by taste judgements, which have meaning, but seem to be neither true nor false.

Chapter 1

Truth-Conditional Semantics

Humans use language to communicate. They utter certain sounds and respond to others uttering sounds in ways that constitute communication. What exactly is going on? How is this possible? We all know that it is because the expressions of a language are meaningful that we can use them for communication. Philosophers of language try to expand on this tautological and uninformative answer by constructing a more detailed theory of meaning. Such a theory may answer questions such as ‘What is it for an utterance to be meaningful?’, ‘Why does a particular sound have the meaning it has?’, ‘How do people know what an utterance means?’ and so on. By answering such questions, and by introducing new concepts and principles governing these concepts as well as linking them with other, familiar concepts, a theory of meaning will provide a more detailed explanation of what is going on when humans use language to communicate.

Evidently this description of the task of the philosophy of language leaves room for a very wide variety of theoretical activity, according to the different aspects of language use a theorist might be interested in. Nevertheless, one broad style of theorizing about linguistic meaning currently dominates the philosophy of language (and other disciplines that theorize about linguistic meaning, such as theoretical linguistics and artificial intelligence). I would like to call this common approach ‘truth-conditional semantics’. Theorists working within the truth-conditional paradigm are united by the role their theories assign to a notion of truth or truth condition. Very roughly, these theorists believe that it is advantageous to characterize the meaning of a sentence (or at least the central element of its meaning) by giving the condition under which the sentence would be true. The meaning of a subsentential expression then consists just in the contribution it makes to the meaning of sentences in which it occurs. As I shall explain in more detail below, one great advantage and original motivation for this approach is that it provides a way of describing systematically how the meaning of complex expressions depends on the meanings of their simpler constituents.

Any theory of meaning within the truth-conditional paradigm faces a problem: it makes the contentious assumption that every meaningful sentence (or its content) is a candidate for truth or falsehood. There is, of course, an obvious reason why not every sentence is truth-evaluable: some sentences are there to enable us to ask questions or to issue commands, such as ‘Is he in?’ or ‘Leave me alone!’. One would not normally describe such sentences (or utterances of them) as true or false. This is not the problem I have in mind, nor is it an irresolvable problem for a truth-conditional theorist. Typically the theorist will restrict his or her thesis that sentences have truth conditions to declarative sentences only and characterize the meaning of non-declaratives indirectly, e.g. by recourse to corresponding declaratives. Alternatively, the theorist can reformulate the thesis as one about sentence contents, so that declaratives and interrogatives alike have truth-evaluable contents. Declarative and interrogative sentences (as opposed to their contents) are then viewed as truth-evaluable only in a derivative sense, if at all. I shall discuss one way of doing this shortly.

But once interrogatives, imperatives etc. are taken care of there is another, more difficult problem with the assumption that all sentences (or their contents) are truth-evaluable. I have in mind declarative sentences that concern matters that are not objective, or for which it is at least debatable whether they are objective. One example are sentences about matters of taste such as ‘Johnny Depp is more handsome than Brad Pitt.’.¹ Assuming that such a sentence, or what it says, can be true or false arguably amounts to saying that it is an objective matter whether Depp is more handsome or not. Can the truth-conditional theorist avoid this metaphysical consequence of his or her theory?

This book is an extended attempt to answer the question of how these and similarly problematic sentences should be treated in a truth-conditional theory of meaning. Competently answering it requires a theoretically more sophisticated formulation of the problem. Thus I shall begin my investigation by expounding a truth-conditional account of meaning in this chapter, and continue in the next chapter by setting up the problem in a theoretically tractable manner.

1 One version of truth-conditional semantics

Accounts of meaning within the truth-conditional paradigm vary considerably. Some differences reflect substantial disagreements, others reflect merely a difference in emphasis—after all, different theories often address different problems. Yet other differences are merely terminological. Consequently, the account I shall expound is just one truth-conditional account among many, and not all truth-conditional theorists will agree with every detail. However, one particular elaboration of a truth-conditional theory of meaning is needed as a concrete theoretical and terminological framework within which to address the problem of sentences about non-objective matters. My elaboration will be sufficiently broadminded to allow most truth-conditionalists to follow the discussion without excessive interpretative charity. More importantly, I believe that my considerations on the problem of non-objective contents apply to my own account of meaning as much as to any other account within the truth-conditional paradigm.

My account will integrate a truth-conditional theory of content within an overall theory of use. A theory of linguistic meaning ought to explain how it is possible to use expressions of a language to communicate. In order to arrive at such a very general explanation, it is useful to consider what would be required to describe the meaning properties of all the expressions of just one particular language, i.e. to construct a theory of meaning for a particular language. Such a theory would explain how it is possible for the users of the language in question to use their language for communication, because such a theory would provide a formal model of the knowledge of language users that enables them to use language (whether or not that model is psychologically accurate). But, more importantly, if we knew how in principle such a theory of meaning for a particular language can be constructed, then we would be in a position to explain generally how it is possible to communicate through language (whichever particular language). Later on in this chapter, I shall formulate a theory of meaning for one particular simple language, and this theory shall serve as a simplified model for theories of meaning for natural languages in general.

2 Compositionality

One feature of language is a key motivation for the truth-conditional paradigm: compositionality. Natural languages are compositional in the sense that they allow the composition of compound expressions out of simpler ones in such a way that the meaning of the compound is determined by the meanings of the simpler expressions and their manner of composition. Compositionality seems to be one of the most obvious features of language and can be illustrated by countless examples. What ‘wooden box’ means obviously depends on what ‘wooden’ means, on what ‘box’ means and on how the two words are combined. If ‘box’ didn’t mean what it does, ‘wooden box’ wouldn’t mean what it does. To deny this would be crazy. Could the meaning of any complex expression depend on anything apart from its components and the way they are compounded? Strictly speaking, there could be syntactically complex expressions that are nevertheless not semantically complex. There could be a syntax that provides numerous ways of constructing new expressions without it yet being settled what these new expressions are to mean. Then the meaning of the (syntactic) components (if they have any) would not determine the meaning of the (syntactic) compound.² All this shows is that there may in some cases be syntactic complexity that is semantically inert. But this cannot hide the fact that in countless cases the meaning of compounds is compositionally determined.

Considerations about language understanding and language learning also confirm that compositionality is a pervasive feature of natural languages. Language users can understand and construct expressions they have never used or even heard before. For example, the vast majority of the readers of this book will never before have encountered the following sentence: ‘My niece collects snails in a wooden box.’. Nevertheless, all moderately competent users of English (including, presumably, all my readers) know the meaning of this sentence. It doesn’t take much ingenuity to explain this. The sentence is constructed from words, and in ways, with which competent speakers are familiar. The meaning of the sentence is determined by the meaning of its constituent words and the way in which these constituents are put together. Competent users know (at least implicitly) what the the words mean and how they influence the meaning of the whole sentence, given that they are put together in that particular way.³

This observation puts a constraint on theories of meaning for natural languages. Any such theory should explain how exactly the meaning of complex expressions is determined by the meanings of their simpler constituents and the manner of composition. In one word, a theory of meaning for such a language should be compositional in order to do justice to the fact of linguistic productivity.

Given the compositionality constraint, we know that a theory of meaning for a natural language cannot just list all the expressions of the language and specify their meaning one by one. Rather, it must first systematically outline all the ways in which expressions can be compounded from a number of primitive elements in a number of admissible ways (syntax). Then it must show how the meaning of compound expressions depends on their compositional make-up by specifying for each mode of composition, and for each primitive element, how they determine the meaning of the expression compounded. As a result, the theory should allow one to derive for every expression of the language what it means. In other words, the theory should have axiomatic structure.

3 Force indicators and content indicators

But what sort of information is it that we should expect to be derivable about each expression? How does one state what an expression means? At this point it is useful to introduce the notion of a communicative act (or traditionally ‘illocutionary act’). By uttering certain expressions or, more accurately, by uttering sentences, language users perform linguistic acts, such as acts of assertion and question. I can assert that Sam smokes by uttering the sentence ‘Sam smokes.’, or I can ask whether Sam smokes by uttering the sentence ‘Does Sam smoke?’. This is not a coincidence. Rather, it is the proper function of these sentences to allow one to do just this. One way, then, of specifying what an expression means is to state what its proper communicative function is. For example, one way of saying what the sentence ‘Sam smokes.’ means is to say that it can be properly used to assert that Sam smokes. The theory of meaning I am going to outline for a sample language will aim to generate meaning specifications of roughly this form. (I shall say more about communicative acts, my notion of proper use, and about the possibility of improper uses in §6 and §7.)

Not every expression, not even every complex expression, of a natural language can be properly used to perform a communicative act. The expression ‘does not smoke’, for instance, is not a complete sentence, and therefore cannot be properly used to perform any communicative act.⁴ I shall call expressions that can be properly used to perform a communicative act ‘sentences’

The communicative function of a given sentence will depend on recognizable features of the sentence: its semantically significant features. For example, ‘Sam smokes.’ can be properly used to assert that Sam smokes, because it is made up of certain words in a certain order, and features a certain kind of punctuation (in spoken language: inflection). Among the semantically significant syntactic features of a natural language sentence are therefore features such as (a) its constituent words, (b) its word order, (c) its punctuation, and for spoken language (d) its inflection (i.e. changes in intonation).

A theory of meaning for a language needs to correlate these syntactic features of a sentence with the sentence’s semantic features, i.e. its meaning. To do so, it is useful to distinguish between two different elements in the meaning of a sentence. One element is the sentence’s illocutionary force: a sentence can, for example, be assertoric or interrogative. If it is assertoric, then it is properly usable for asserting something; if it is interrogative, then it is properly usable for asking a question. The other element is the sentence’s content: for example the sentence ‘Sam smokes.’ has the content that Sam smokes. Two sentences can have the same content and different force, as for example the two sentences ‘The door is shut.’ and ‘Is the door shut?’. The first can be properly used to assert that the door is shut, while the second can be properly used to ask whether the door is shut. Similarly, two sentences can have the same force and different contents.

The task of a theory of meaning (of specifying the communicative function of each sentence) can be divided into two subtasks. The first subtask is to identify those syntactic features that indicate a sentence’s illocutionary force (call these its ‘force indicators’) and to formulate a rule that states how these force indicators determine a sentence’s force. The second subtask is to identify the syntactic features that indicate a sentence’s content (call these its ‘content indicators’) and to formulate rules that state how a sentence’s content depends on these content indicators.

The first subtask is comparatively easy. Each sentence has just one illocutionary force, so all one needs to do is find the force indicators of the language in question and define a function that assigns forces to sentences depending on the force indicator they feature. In English, for instance, assertoric force is indicated by a full stop (or the corresponding inflection) and a certain word order. It is the task of applied linguistics to discover the exact way in which assertoricity is indicated. In my sample language, there are only two force-indicating prefixes, ‘˫’ (assertoric force) and ‘?’ (interrogative force). Natural languages allow more than these two illocutionary forces, but I shall not here enter the discussion on which these are.

The subtask of assigning forces to sentences is comparatively easy, because force indicators do not, arguably, have semantic structure. Each complete sentence is marked to have one illocutionary force.⁵ Content indication, however, is mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Truth-Conditional Semantics
• 2. Excess Objectivity
• 3. Revisionism
• 4. Expressivism
• 5. Soft Truth
• 6. Relative Truth and Linguistic Communication
• 7. Defence of Relativism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index