Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought

Mood, Modality, and Propositional Attitudes

Anastasia Giannakidou, Alda Mari

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226763484
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs.

Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari's theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.

CHAPTER ONE

Truth, Veridicality, and the Problem of Grammatical Mood

This book is about how the concepts of truth, knowledge, and, broadly speaking, belief are reflected and codified in the grammar of natural languages. Does language directly access the world (what is true), or does it do so via semantic representations of the world categories?

The question of truth has a venerable historical pedigree, a long intellectual history that originates, in the Western world, in classical Greek thought. Aristotle pioneered what can be understood as the modern empiricist view, namely that we can apply the fundamental principles of logic, systematic observation, and analysis to identify the truth in natural things and explain causes, i.e., why things occur. Plato’s idealism holds that observation of the natural world might actually be misleading; only philosophical contemplation can lead to truth. They both agree that truth lies at the foundation of what it means to think and analyze. Contemporary formal semantics and philosophy of language are truth conditional, which means that they continue in this tradition.

1.1 What This Book Is About

Since analytical contemplation is mediated by language, an additional layer of issues arises about language, specifically about whether and how language mediates to express thinking about the world. Natural languages vary in the vocabulary, form, and grammatical categories they realize; yet in addressing the question of language and thought, most Continental philosophy overlooks this striking variation and almost exclusively focuses on English. This focus affects negatively the set of data deemed relevant for analysis, and in effect diminishes, not to say dismisses, the role of linguistic diversity in revealing aspects of the logic needed in order to handle accurately and successfully the central questions of truth and knowledge.

In this book, we will explore the interaction between truth, knowledge, and veridicality as they interact in the grammatical phenomenon of mood choice (subjunctive, indicative) in European languages. Our main illustrators will be Standard Modern Greek and the Romance language family, with specific emphasis on Italian and French. Mood choice is a multidimensional phenomenon, as we shall see, involving interactions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; and raises a number of issues that are literally invisible if we pay attention only to English simply because Modern English lacks the morphological category of mood in embedded clauses. Despite this absence, terms such as “subjunctive” and “indicative” continue to be routinely used by philosophers, e.g., in the discussion of English conditionals, often misleading us to think that we are dealing with a mood phenomenon. (We are not. Indicative and subjunctive conditionals are really about tense.)

On the other hand, mood has been studied by traditional grammarians as a mainly morphosyntactic phenomenon, and in this tradition very little attention is paid to the semantics of propositional attitude verbs which are responsible for regulating mood choice. Traditional analyses are mostly interested in taxonomies and labeling of the verbal classes, with reference to realis and irrealis to cover the semantics of modal verbs (must, may, can etc.) and propositional attitude verbs (such as know, believe, remember, want, persuade and the like). The intuition is that somehow the indicative signals that the sentence is true (realis), whereas the subjunctive signals that the sentence is untrue (irrealis), thus implying that language directly accesses reality. This, however, as we will show, is an unwarranted assumption. Language, it will turn out, mostly encodes subjective representations of truth and reality construed by linguistic agents, i.e., the speaker or the subject of the attitude verb. In forming these representations, linguistic agents build veridicality stances, i.e., subjective judgments toward the propositional content of sentences. Crucially, we will argue, it is veridicality stances that regulate, for the most part, mood choice. We must admit, then, that language accesses reality mostly indirectly via subjective veridicality, and not directly via objective truth.

The semantics of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs is a privileged landscape within which to observe how systematic the formation of the veridicality judgement is in the grammar of human language. Speakers rely on their own conceptualization of reality, through language, in the attempt to structure possibilities according to their knowledge, beliefs, memories, expectations, desires, and priorities. Across modal verbs, adverbs, and propositional attitude verbs, language reveals that humans anchor reality not only to truth but to their own subjective understanding of truth. Contrary to given wisdom, we will offer a unified perspective on linguistic modality and propositional attitude verbs by showing that they are quite similar. They differ in what kind of linguistic anchor they have—the speaker for modality expressions, but the attitude subject for propositional attitudes—but the logic of, and constraints in, reasoning with modals and attitudes are essentially the same.

An important aspect, often overlooked, is the interaction between the attitude and modal meaning with the tense of the embedded complement. Because of emphasis on English, research has tended to focus on the finiteness distinction, i.e., the that versus to contrast. We will see that studying only this contrast prevents us from understanding that the actual culprit of many apparent meaning shifts in propositional attitudes is the tense of the complement. We will distinguish between veridical tense (the past and present) and nonveridical tense which is what we will call nonpast. We will show that this simple dichotomy helps substantially in uncovering dimensions in the meaning of the embedding attitudes—and it determines fully the kinds of readings speakers extract with modal verbs and attitudes.

Let us start by laying out an intuitive understanding of the foundational ideas of truth and veridicality. This will allow us to ease into the phenomenon of mood, which will be our window into the study of how linguistic categories mediate in the construction of truth.¹

1.2 Truth and Veridicality

Since its central role in classical Greek thinking, truth has been essential in the study of linguistic meaning and has also been the foundation of axiomatization in modern scientific thought. Aristotle gives a well-known definition of truth in his Metaphysics (1011b25): “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” Very similar formulations can be found in Plato (Cratylus 385b2, Sophist 263b).

The Aristotelian truth serves as the foundation for the modern approach to truth—advocated by Russell, Moore, and Tarski in the...