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Disquotationalism, Truth and Justification: The Pragmatist's Wrong Turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Karyn L. Freedman
Karyn L. Freedman*
Affiliation:
University of Guelph, Guelph, ONN1G2W1, Canada
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Extract

A view of truth that gained prominence among early logical positivists, what A.J. Ayer called the ‘redundancy theory of truth,’ has had a renaissance over the last few decades. The fundamental thought behind this theory is that the truth predicate is a device of disquotation. Redundancy, or disquotationalism, is seen by its advocates as providing a definitive answer to the perennial question ‘what is the nature of truth?’ The answer, says the disquotationalist, is to reject the idea that truth has some underlying nature. The terms true and false, as Ayer put it, connote nothing (Ayer, 1936/1946,88). They do not correspond or refer to some elusive ingredient of reality. Truth, he argued, must be deflated from its exalted metaphysical Status — but the notion should not be dispensed with altogether. Disquotationalists like Ayer think that the truth predicate has an essential role to play in logic. Indeed, disquotationalism, in its purest form, sees the sole function of the truth predicate as fulfilling this logical need, that is, as a device that aids generalization by permitting infinite conjunction and disjunction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , September 2006 , pp. 371 - 386
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2006

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References

1 The inspiration for this paper is entirely due to Cheryl Misak's terrific graduate course on truth that I took at the University of Toronto in 1997. Misak's insight into these issues coupled with her careful and rigorous approach has helped me to understand what is at stake in contemporary debates about truth, and I thank her for that. I also want to thank the two reviewers for CJP who read an earlier draft of this paper and offered detailed comments on it; I appreciate their input and the final version of this paper is much better for it.

2 A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover 1936/1946).

3 There are, as Horwich notes, other logical uses for the truth predicate, e.g. wanting to affirm that a sentence is true but not knowing what exactly it is that sentence says (Paul Horwich, Truth [London: Blackwell 1990], 2-3).

4 In this paper I shall follow Misak and use the term ‘disquotationalism’ (instead of the more trendy ‘deflationism’) to refer to the view that the truth predicate exists only for the sake of this logical need, and that all we can say about truth is captured by the equivalence schema. This idea is in line with what Horwich calls his ‘minimalist conception’ of truth, ‘i.e. the thesis that our theory of truth should contain nothing more than instances of the equivalence schema’ (Horwich, 1990,8). Field agrees with this thesis but (somewhat confusingly) he uses the term ‘pure disquotationalism’ to distinguish a version of disquotationalism wherein the truth predicate is restricted to sentences that one understands, so to avoid typical problems regarding sameness of meaning. See Hartry Field, ‘Disquotational Truth and Factually Defective Discourse,’ The Philosophical Review 103 (1994): 405-8, and Hartry Field, ‘Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content,’ Mind 103 (1994b): 249-52.

5 Cheryl Misak, ‘Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism,’ The Monist, 81,3 (1998): 407-25. As a secondary target, Misak also contrasts her pragmatism with Crispin Wright's pluralism about truth; Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1992). Both Wright and the disquotationalist remain a concern for Misak in her Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge 2000), 56-73.

6 There is a disagreement between Field and Horwich over whether instances of the ES offer an account of truth for propositions or for sentences. Horwich develops his disquotationalism for propositions, but Field is wary of proposition talk, which is at least partly why he restricts talk of disquotational truth to sentences which one understands; see n. 4 above and also see Hartry Field, ‘Critical Notice: Paul Horwich's Truth,’ Philosophy of Science 59 (1992): 321-30.

7 W.V.O. Quine, Philosophy of Logic, (Prentice Hall, 1970), 12.

8 As Horwich points out, if the ES is relied on indiscriminately, as disquotationalism demands, the infamous liar’ paradox will result, hence, he claims, ‘permissible instantiations of the equivalence schema are restricted in some way so as to avoid paradoxical results’ (Horwich, 1990,41).

9 I owe the handy expression ‘permissive disquotationalist’ to one of the reviewers of this paper.

10 Paul Horwich, ‘Gibbard's Theory of Norms,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1994), 73. This view is in stark contrast with at least one form non-cognitivism, i.e. emotivism. The emotivist could agree with Horwich, for instance, that all sentences which have assertoric content are truth apt but argue that normative sentences are merely expressions of desire, hence devoid of assertoric content despite their overt syntactical features. For this kind of response to Horwich see Michael Smith, ‘Why Expressivists about Value should Love Minimalism about Truth,’ Analysis 54.1 (1994): 1-12.

11 See Misak, 1998, for a bibliography of her Peirce sources.

12 Misak nicely distinguishes her refined Peircean notion of ‘truth as the aim of inquiry’ from Peirce's clunkier one throughout her (2000), particularly 2-5 and 49-63.

13 Here Misak explicitly draws on Brandom's idea that propositionally contentful beliefs come bundled with a complex hybrid of commitments and entitlements; Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons (An Introduction to Inferentialism) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2000), ch. 1.

14 As Misak notes, this route is taken by Nicholas Jardine in his Fortunes of Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986). Jardine suggests that in cases where bivalence seems to fail, for example with questions about the remote past, we should rely on what he calls ‘counterfactual bravado’ — a counterfactual thought experiment relying on time travel. Then, inquirers could go back to the remote past and get determinate answers for these sorts of questions. Misak notes the irony of this move coming from the pragmatist, whose aim is to connect truth up to inquiry, since the counterfactual bravado effectively divorces truth from inquiry. See Cheryl Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991), 142-59.

15 As one reviewer of this paper rightly pointed out, one could be a disquotationalist about truth but continue to argue about other aspects of moral inquiry, e.g. whether or not there are moral properties.

16 This claim might appear to conflict with a passage in Horwich's Truth where he suggests that the emotivist can depict the ‘unusual’ nature of ethical propositions by supposing that ‘the meaning of “X is good” is sometimes given by the rule that a person is in a position to assert it when he is aware that he values X (which is not to say that “X is good” means “I value X“)’ (Horwich, 1990, 88). Horwich's parenthetical comment here suggests that, at least in his view, this analysis of moral judgments does not collapse into a kind of subjectivism. But then what is he claiming? It might be that he is offering an explanation of the origin of moral beliefs, i.e. that they spring from our propositional attitudes. This interpretation is corroborated by another passage of Horwich's, where he claims that ‘Just as “x is white” is the standard expression of a belief that stems from a certain experience, so “x is rational” is the standard expression of a belief that stems from certain pro-attitudes’ (Horwich, 1994, 75). If this is right, then this passage does not conflict with his minimalism about truth, since the origin of a moral belief need not have any bearing on its truth conditions, any more than the origin of a belief about snow being white has bearing on the truth conditions of ‘snow is white.'

17 Field argues that moral judgments incorporate an implicit reference to a relativized set of norms, and he suggests that we make this implicit relativization explicit within particular instantiations of the ES. In this way, the disquotationalist can capture what is peculiar about moral judgments without going beyond the ES: fully factual utterances will be straightforwardly true or false, whereas moral utterances will be true or false only relative to a set of norms. See Field, 1994, 427-43.

18 This remains one of the key features of Misak's pragmatism in her (2000).

19 Since moral non-cognitivism is not my concern here my answers to these questions will be restricted to the pragmatisf s worries (likely to the frustration of the non-cognitivist).

20 http://www.theartisan.net/faux_pas_the_seventh.htm