Languages & Linguistics
Half Truth
A half truth is a statement that contains some truth but also leaves out important information that would change the overall meaning of the statement. It is a form of deception that can be used intentionally or unintentionally. In linguistics, half truths can be used to manipulate language and communication.
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eBook - PDFLanguage in Time and Space
A Festschrift for Werner Winter on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday
- Brigitte L.M. Bauer, Georges-Jean Pinault, Brigitte L.M. Bauer, Georges-Jean Pinault, Brigitte L. M. Bauer, Georges-Jean Pinault(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
A concept of truth for linguistic semantics* Jerzy Banczerowski Truth — most obtrusive and most elusive 1. Introductory remarks Inquiry into the concept of truth and falsity dates back to antiquity and has inflamed the minds of many generations of scholars. Already Aristotle in his Metaphysica addressed some essential aspects of the theory of truth and his ideas later served as a starting point for fertile philosophical dis-putes. Language is used to talk about extra-lingual reality as well as about itself. The latter is a case of metalanguage in which linguistic theories are formulated. Both lingual and metalingual sentences as particular kinds of signs refer to something outside themselves. And, what they say about this something may be true or false. Hence any theory of linguistic semantics, which aspires to completeness, cannot neglect the epistemic duality of ver-ity/falsity. Semantic knowledge or competence allows linguators to communicate effectively about the world outside language. An indispensable component of this knowledge is certainly the knowledge of the semantic code which, roughly speaking, consists of the ability to perform mappings of two kinds, namely: (i) the mapping of lingual expressions onto extra-lingual reality, and, conversely, (ii) the mapping of extra-lingual reality onto lingual expressions. The effectiveness of communication presupposes not only the identifica-tion by the linguators of the entities in the world outside language but also judging or deciding whether or not sentences uttered on particular occasions adequately correspond to the situations or states-of-affairs oc-curring on those occasions, that is, whether these sentences are true or false. However, what does it mean that a sentence or the proposition ex-pressed by this sentence corresponds to some state-of-affairs? The prop- 36 Jerzy Banczerowski erty of verity/falsity pertains, as is known, solely to sentences, in particu-lar, to declarative sentences.
- (Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cuvillier Verlag(Publisher)
A further point worth noting is how the entry offers a useful link to half-truth ( a statement that gives only part of the truth, especially when it is intended to cheat Dieses Werk ist copyrightgeschützt und darf in keiner Form vervielfältigt werden noch an Dritte weitergegeben werden. Es gilt nur für den persönlichen Gebrauch. 4 Schmied somebody with the telling example The newspaper reports are a mixture of gossip, lies and half-truths ) and a less useful link (see below) to untruth ( [countable] (formal) a lie. People often say ‘untruth’ to avoid saying ‘lie’ ). The much more modern WordNet (s.v., n.d.), which applies computational linguistics and natural language processing, also distinguishes five senses: x S: (n) truth (a fact that has been verified) “at last he knew the truth”; “the truth is that he didn't want to do it ” x S: (n) truth , the true , verity , trueness (conformity to reality or actuality) “they debated the truth of the proposition”; “the situation brought home to us the blunt truth of the military threat”; “he was famous for the truth of his portraits”; “he turned to religion in his search for eternal verities” x S: (n) truth , true statement (a true statement) “he told the truth”; “he thought of answering with the truth but he knew they wouldn’t believe it” x S: (n) accuracy , truth (the quality of being near to the true value) he was beginning to doubt the accuracy of his compass”; “the lawyer questioned the truth of my account” x S: (n) Truth , Sojourner Truth (United States abolitionist and feminist who was freed from slavery and became a leading advocate of the abolition of slavery and for the rights of women (1797-1883)) If we leave out the last capitalised, special case, we can compare the two on-line dictionaries and see that WordNet has an additional, third sense: true statement , which corresponds to the traditional correspondence theory (above).
eBook - PDF- Richard Schantz(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
By 'everyday discourse' I mean remarks like 'She would not have said it if it were not true' and 'Very little of his testimony was true': I exclude statements such as 'To know what a statement means you must know what is required for it to be true' or 'An inference is deductively valid if it is guaranteed to preserve truth from premisses to conclusion'. We do not, of course, maintain any formal boundary marking off the object-language which we speak from a metalanguage in which we formulate principles governing how that object-language functions. But we do reflect, sometimes very informally, sometimes with a high degree of formality, on how our language works; and, when we engage in such theorising, we must necessarily regard the theoretical terms we employ in our inchoate or precisely delineated theories as standing outside the language the principles governing whose working we are seeking to frame: we maintain a notional distinction between object-language and metalanguage. The concept of truth has two faces. On the one side, the word 'true' belongs to our everyday language: it is part of the object-language whose operation a theory of meaning seeks to describe. It is the role of the word 'true' within the language which a level theory seeks to explain. For this purpose we need a level theory that is neither circular nor lame: it is lame if it fails to provide an adequate so-lution to the problem of the shift in levels. From what has gone before, it is clear that our best hope must lie in a piecemeal s-level theory that allows the predicate 'is true' to belong to the language to whose sentences or statements it applies. It is not to my purpose here to review the candidate theories. But the concept of truth has another, different face: it is an indispensable theoretical term in any conceivable theory of meaning aiming to describe how a language func-tions and how its sentences and other expressions are thereby determined as having the meanings that they have.
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