The Routledge Companion to Epistemology

Sven Bernecker, Duncan Pritchard, Sven Bernecker, Duncan Pritchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136882005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Epistemologia in filosofia

Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, is at the core of many of the central debates and issues in philosophy, interrogating the notions of truth, objectivity, trust, belief and perception. The Routledge Companion to Epistemology provides a comprehensive and the up-to-date survey of epistemology, charting its history, providing a thorough account of its key thinkers and movements, and addressing enduring questions and contemporary research in the field. Organized thematically, the Companion is divided into ten sections: Foundational Issues, The Analysis of Knowledge, The Structure of Knowledge, Kinds of Knowledge, Skepticism, Responses to Skepticism, Knowledge and Knowledge Attributions, Formal Epistemology, The History of Epistemology, and Metaepistemological Issues. Seventy-eight chapters, each between 5000 and 7000 words and written by the world's leading epistemologists, provide students with an outstanding and accessible guide to the field. Designed to fit the most comprehensive syllabus in the discipline, this text will be an indispensible resource for anyone interested in this central area of philosophy.

The Routledge Companion to Epistemology is essential reading for students of philosophy.

Part I FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS

DOI: 10.4324/9780203839065-1

1 TRUTH

Michael P. Lynch

DOI: 10.4324/9780203839065-2

Philosophical work on truth tends to cluster around three broad and interrelated questions: Does truth have a nature? What sort of nature does it have? And, how—in the harsh light of the semantic paradoxes—can we formally account for the logical behavior of truth?

This essay will be concerned with the metaphysics of truth—in short, the first two questions. It will survey some traditional theories that think truth is worthy of deep metaphysical investigation, some deflationary accounts that disagree, and some more recent accounts which offer a more pluralist perspective.

Correspondence and Representation

Truth is a famously perplexing idea, but most of us share some common assumptions about it. One such truth about truth is that it is objective. To speak truly is to “say of what is, that it is,” as Aristotle put it (1993). Alternatively:

Objectivity: The belief that p is true if, and only if, with respect to the belief that p, things are as they are believed to be.

The most venerable theory of truth, the correspondence theory, uses the Objectivity intuition as a starting point. But like the other traditional theories we’ll discuss, it isn’t content to end there. It aims to explain the Objectivity truism by giving a general account of the nature of truth. According to that account, beliefs are true just when they correspond to reality. In the early twentieth century, for example, Wittgenstein (1922) and Russell (1966) developed a version of the correspondence theory of truth according to which beliefs (or their propositional contents) were true in virtue of sharing a common structure with the facts. According to this view, beliefs such as the cat is on the mat exhibit a certain form; and objects (cats, mats) and relations (being on) compose basic facts that also exhibit a logical form or configuration. Thus a belief corresponds as a whole to a fact just when they share the same form or structure.

While this sort of view seems to explain the truth of simple beliefs about cats and mats well enough, it faces problems with other sorts of facts. Consider the truth that there are no unicorns. Is there a negative fact that makes this true? It is unclear whether there are any such facts. Moreover, many philosophers have wondered about the nature of facts themselves. It seems that facts are either constituted by objects and properties (and relations) or they are not. If they are, then for reasons of ontological parsimony, we must be given a serious motivation for taking them to be distinct entities over and above that which composes them. It is difficult to see what really compelling motivation could be supplied. If they are not constituted by objects and their properties, then what is their nature exactly? As Strawson (1950) pointed out, they begin to look suspiciously like the mere shadows of statements.

Partly because of these worries, contemporary theoretical descendents of the traditional correspondence idea express its central truism slightly differently. First, the truth of a belief is defined in terms of the representational features of its component concepts (what I will here call “denotation”). Thus in the case of a belief whose content has the simple predicational structure a is F, we get:

REPRESENT: The belief that a is F is true if and only if the object denoted by <a> has the property denoted by <F>.

The basic thought is that beliefs are true because their components stand in certain representational relations to reality and that reality is a certain way (Devitt, 1997). Adopting machinery made familiar with Tarski (1944; see also Field, 1972) the representationalist then applies this insight to beliefs with more complicated structures. The result is a view according to which the truth of complex beliefs is recursively defined in terms of the truth of simpler beliefs and the rules for logical connectives, while less complex beliefs “correspond to reality” in the sense that their component parts—concepts—themselves represent objects and properties.

The second part of any representational view of truth is a theory of how concepts denote objects and properties. A toy example would be:

CAUSAL: <cat> denotes cats = cats, cause, under appropriate conditions, mental tokenings of <cat>.

In short, truth is defined in terms of representation, representation is defined in terms of denotation, and denotation is defined as a property that either is, or supervenes on natural relations like those specified in CAUSAL. Thus, if we say that an object or property, which, under appropriate conditions, causes (or its instances cause) mental tokenings of some concept “causally maps” that concept:

CC (Causal-correspondence): The belief that a is F is true if and only if the object causally mapped by <a> has the property causally mapped by <F>.

There are various objections and challenges one might raise against any particular representational theory of truth. But over and above these theory-specific problems, representational theories all face a problem of scope. This is because such theories have metaphysical implications. Take (CC). It is committed to the idea that the object and properties represented are capable of entering into at least indirect causal interaction with our minds. This sounds reasonable when we concentrate on examples involving ordinary objects like cats and cars. But it is highly implausible as a global principle. Consider propositions such as two and two are four or torture is wrong. Under the assumption that truth is always and everywhere causal correspondence, it is a vexing question how these true thoughts can be true. That two and two are four is unimpeachable, but even granting that numbers are objects, how can any thought of mine be in causal contact with something like a number? Numbers, whatever else they turn out to be, are presumably not objects with which we can causally interact. Moral propositions represent a slightly different puzzle: torture is certainly wrong, but it is difficult to know how wrongness—even if we grant that it is a property—can be a natural property with which we can causally interact.

A representationalist can try to avoid the scope problem by watering down his theory of course: “a belief corresponds to reality just when things are as they are believed to be” would be one example. But that just restates Objectivity, it doesn’t explain it. The more substantive the correspondence theory becomes—as when it is seen as part of a larger theory of representation—the more it is vulnerable to the scope problem, and the less plausible it is as a universal theory of the underlying nature of truth.

Pragmatism and Superwarrant

A second familiar truth about truth is that it is the aim, or end, of inquiry. By “inquiry” I mean simply the process of asking and answering questions. Truth—in the sense of true beliefs and judgments—is clearly a goal of this process: unless the situation is highly atypical, when I ask you where my car keys are I want to know where they are—I want the truth. In pursuing inquiry of course, we pursue truth only indirectly by explicitly pursuing reasons and evidence. But we care about giving reasons, supplying justification for our beliefs, because beliefs which are so justified are more likely to be true, even if they aren’t guaranteed to be such. And this fact explains why, when we don’t know what is true, we steer by the evidence, even if evidence sometimes steers us wrong. That is,

End of Inquiry: Other things being equal, true beliefs are a goal of inquiry.

Where correspondence theories give pride of place to Objectivity, their historical rivals, the coherence and pragmatist accounts of truth, privilege End of Inquiry. Indeed, one of the most well-known versions of the theory, Peirce’s pragmatist view of truth, simply identifies truth with that end: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by truth” (Peirce, 1878/2001: 206). Rather than saying that we agree on what is true because it is true, Peirce’s thought is that what is true is so because we agree on it. No mention is made of our thought’s having to represent or correspond to some independent world of objects. There may be such a world, but if so, truth is shorn free of it on this account.

One obvious problem with Peirce’s view is that it holds truth hostage to the existence of an actual end of inquiry—a time when all questions are presumably settled. It seems highly unlikely, to put it mildly, that there will be such a time. Hilary Putnam (1981 and 1990) modified the account to avoid this point:

(PT): The proposition that p is true if and only if the proposition that p would be warranted to believe in ideal epistemic circumstances for assessing the proposition that p.

This is a significant improvement over Peirce’s view. It isn’t committed to the actuality of ideal epistemic circumstances; and it treats such circumstances as tailor-made for each individual belief. But Putnam’s view notoriously faces its own problems. One such problem is that the view founders on the so-called conditional fallacy (Plantinga, 1982; Wright, 2001). This is a problem that can plague attempts to define a categorical statement in terms of a subjunctive conditional. How the problem applies here can be brought out if we take the proposition in question in (PT) to be

(not-I): Ideal epistemic circumstances for assessing this proposition will never obtain.

Substituting (not-I) in for “p” in (PT), we arrive at the conclusion that (not-I) is true if and only if it would be warranted in ideal circumstances for assessing (not-I). But if it were warranted in such circumstances it would be false. So, intuitively, (not-I) can only be true if it is false, if (PT) is our theory of truth.

How might such problems be avoided? One reasonable idea, developed by Crispin Wright (1992) is to define a true proposition not as one that would be warranted to believe in ideal conditions, but as one that is warranted to believe in the ordinary sense and remains warranted no matter how our information is expanded or improved. Call this superwarrant. To be superwarranted is to be continually warranted without defeat. Note that the idea of superwarrant does not require an idealized “end of inquiry.” A superwarranted belief is one that is warranted by some state of information available to ordinary inquirers, which, in fact, would never be defeated or undermined by subsequent increases of information also available to ordinary inquirers. Moreover, superwarrant is a stable property: if a belief is superwarranted, then it is superwarranted at any stage of inquiry. Thus, a friend of the original pragmatist insight might suggest:

(SW): A belief is true if and only if it is superwarranted.

Like its rival the correspondence theory, (SW) faces a problem of scope. (SW) implies that it must be feasible to have warrant for any true proposition. If we were to focus on only some kinds of truths, this consequence may not seem too bad. Consider, truths about what is or isn’t funny. It is odd to think that a joke is funny even if no one will ever have warrant in believing that it is—in other words, even if nobody ever laughs. Likewise for legal truths. It is difficult to see how a proposition of law might be true even if no evidence is ever available for (or against) it—even in principle. For otherwise, it would be possible for there to be a true proposition of the form “x is illegal” even if no one would ever be warranted in believing that it is, or is not legal. And that in turn means that there could be unknowably illegal actions—actions I might even be doing right now. But that seems absurd.

So an epistemic constraint seems plausible in the case of some normative truths at least. But it seems false when applied across the board. Consider propositions such as the number of stars in the universe right now is even; or it rained 15,000 years ago on this spot. Surely there could not be evidence for or against such propositions. Yet they might be true. Humility in the face of the size of the universe seems to demand that. And yet (SW) would seem to require us to deny that such propositions can be true.

The basic problem can again be put in terms of a dilemma: Either the pragmatist admits that her theory has an absurd consequence—in this case, the consequence that all truths are at some point warranted—or admits that her view has limited scope.

Deflationary Theories

Traditional accounts such as the correspondence and pragmatist theories take very different truisms about truth as their starting point. But they share a methodology. Both assume that truth’s real essence underlies these truisms and explains them. They both try to reduce truth to some other property—such as causal mapping, or superwarrant— thought to constitute truth’s real essence.

Many philosophers have come to think that the idea that truth has a real essence is misguided. Deflationary views are so-called because they deflate the pretensions of the more traditional theories. They differ widely in their details, but most share at least two key tenets. First, deflationists hold that the concept of truth is merely a logical device. They generally base this claim on the fact that we are inclined to a priori infer the proposition that ...