Truth Author(s): Joseph S. Ullian Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 25, No.

1, Special Issue: More Ways of Worldmaking (Spring, 1991), pp. 57-65 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333091 Accessed: 06/01/2009 18:15
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Truth
JOSEPH S. ULLIAN

I have borrowed my title from John Austin. But my larger philosophical debts are to Quine, from whom I have derived my attitudes toward meaning, and to Goodman, whose influence should be apparent in what follows, especially regarding the relationship between practice and theory. To Goodman we all owe the vision of versions and associated worlds. My focus will be on just one version-or one family of versions-that (or those) associated with physical science and with the views of enlightened common sense. This is just the version (if there is only one) that Quine takes to be preeminent; roughly, it is the physicalist view. I shall not enter the debate of whether we should or should not see versions at variance with this one as on equal footing with it. I will try to develop some suggestions that I made about truth in a recent paper called "Learning and Meaning."l Though I come upon it in a rather different way, I think my view fits fairly well with the position defended in Reconceptions-the Goodmanian view, or, better, the Elginant Goodmanian view. As will be seen, I agree heartily that truth is in trouble. My own path to this conclusion stems largely from my attitude toward meaning. I conclude that truth deserves demotion from its position as the alleged prime goal of inquiry-in one way if not in another. "The faults of truth are many and grave," write Goodman and Elgin. "Truth needs help."2 The correspondence theory is seen not to offer us a clear conception of truth; for to what are our claims supposed to correspond? For Goodman, much as for Quine, truth is immanent. For Goodman this means that truth is relative to version; so truths can conflict, by belonging to conflicting right versions. For Quine the point was that a theoretical sentence, at least, is "meaningless except relative to its own theory."3 It is worth pausing to head off a misunderstanding. Goodman talks about truth as attaching to statements.Now what is to be emphasized is that S. Joseph Ullianis a professorin the Departmentof Philosophy,WashingtonUniveron sity. He has most recentlypublishedessays on Quine in Perspectives Quineand The and Philosophy W.V. Quineand an articlein Linguistics Philosophy. of
Journalof Aesthetic Education,Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 1991 ?1991 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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statements, for Goodman, are themselves simply declarative sentences, not obscure entities that such sentences express or name, nor (heaven forbid) their version-independent meanings. Statements may be taken to be declarative sentences that have been cleansed of indicator words and other ambiguities. So for Goodman the candidates for truth are sentences, just as they are for Quine. And this is well; for, as Quine says, "These we can get our teeth into."4 My attitude toward meaning plays an important role in what follows. Its cardinal principle is, it must be admitted, both vague and modal. It is this: what we can mean by our terms cannot go very much beyond what was, or might have been, involved in our learning of them. 'Mean' is to be taken preanalytically here. The principle pertains to everyday terms, but even more importantly to what Austin called "extraordinary" terms-terms like 'real', 'exists', 'physical object', 'meaning', 'cause', and 'true'. I will say a little about the attitude that mine opposes. It is the attitude according to which terms just have their meanings (perhaps as the legendary ladies of Beacon Hill just have their hats), independently of linguistic practice, independent of how we learn-or could learn-the terms' uses. Perhaps it is a residue of the doctrine that there are natures and that our language somehow connects with them, so bridging the chasm between words and world. This is the attitude from which one can consider as a serious possibility that there are no causes in the physical world, that-notwithstanding how we learn the use of 'cause'-the word may somehow have a meaning that is not manifested in the actual world. The view I am opposing is very rarely owned up to explicitly. But it has recently been my good fortune to find a magnificently bald example of it. In his recent book Blindspots5Roy Sorensen tries to defend the incredible view that for some number n, admittedly unknown to us all, n grains of sand do constitute a heap, while n-1 do not. (His goal is to discredit the induction step in what might be proposed as an argument to show that no collection of grains of sand can be a heap.) On this position 'heap' just has its meaning, and we get only a glimpse of it-if that-when we acquire and learn to use the word. For, the unraveling story goes, whether or not something is a heap depends on a meaning of which we are irremediably ignorant. With no hat on its head this view is marvelously exposed, I think, as a futile one. And so for truth. There is, on the view I support, no high or mystic road to our connecting with the concept. Truth is not some highfalutin' abstract entity resident in Platonic heaven and utterly aloof to our usage. To understand "what truth is" we must look to theory-theory whose main obligations are to cohere with linguistic practice and with the other portions of semantic and philosophic theory that we embrace. So we look first to see in what ways 'true' might have been learned. Briefly, there appear to be two main routes: the way of pegging the term to

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sentences whose assertibility is clear, and the way of theory; the one the direct, the other the indirect route. I take Quine to have argued convincingly that we enter language through observation sentences, learned by ostension. Here is where we have the clearest cases of unproblematic assertibility: here we have the sentences keyed to the very episodes by association with which we might have learned them and the terms within them. Accordingly, when we learn that 'the cat is on the bannister' is true if and only if the cat is on the bannister, where this observation sentence has clear conditions for its assertibility, we thereby learn clear conditions for the ascription of 'true' to that observation sentence. Indeed pegging truth to such conditions perhaps reflects a small germ of merit in the correspondence theory. (Well, I couldn't say "germ of truth.") Taking some sentences and terms as observational is of course itself open to many questions. As Goodman has noted, what appear to be manifest predicates (a term he prefers to 'observational') are often seen to be dispositional on deeper scrutiny.6 But here I will make do with the admittedly rough distinction between observation sentences and others. So we may say that 'true' marks some trait of observation sentences. We can learn to apply 'true' correctly to them exactly as we learn the occasions for assenting to the sentences themselves. Truth for observation sentences is thus no mystery. But we must lean more heavily on theory if we are to learn how to extend the application of 'true'. The first lesson, already applied in the special case of observation sentences, involves the principle of disquotation: where 'X' is the name of a sentence p formed by putting p in quotes, X is true if and only if p. As we know, Quine rests his own account of truth very heavily on the principle of disquotation. It does, for any sentence in our field, give us some handle on what ascription of truth to the sentence comes to. To anticipate where I am going, the handle we get in this way is not strong enough, in general, to let us lift the ascription of truth altogether intelligibly to the loftier sentences of the language. The principle of disquotation is just one part of our accepted theory about truth. There are the various logical principles: excluded middle (for most), noncontradiction, and others; there is the usual distinction between a sentence's being true and its being simply believed or adopted; there is acknowledgment that simplicity and strength may be marks of truth, or reasons for ascribing it, but that simplicity, for one, is not itself a constituent of truth. There is also, though less frequently rendered explicit, the conviction that truth of sentences-clear ones, at least-is fixed for once and for all and, as such, is independent of any choices or decisions that we might make. Where does all this theory come from? From consideration of linguistic practice, together with attention to prior theory and analysis, as furnished by philosophers and others. But ultimately this all harks back to linguistic practice. And rightness of such theory is mainly to be measured

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by fit with practice-much as, as Goodman has shown us, right deductive or inductive theory is theory that best fits with our inferential practice, granted the mutual adjustments that smooth things out. Our theory of truth, then, is to be derived from practice, not from any obscure (and bogus) sort of "transcendental logic" that purports somehow to put us in touch with underlying meanings or essences. Even on a very liberal account of observation sentences, these sentences comprise a very small portion of our language. There are highly theoretical sentences ('Light is corpuscular', 'There are quarks'), counterfactual sentences ('If I hadn't gone to last night's Gaucho game they would have lost it'), claims of necessity ('The number of planets is necessarily seven'), abstract judgments ('Patience is a virtue, procrastination a vice'-or even 'a tool of the Devil'), mathematical assertions (the continuum hypothesis), just everyday remarks ('The paper is boring'). To none of these can we attach truth values on the basis of observation sentences alone. Taking application of 'true' to observation sentences to be unproblematic, what can we say about application to sentences of these other kinds? Have we laid bare the concept? Evidently not yet. It will surely not do to say that ascription of truth to further sentences says of them the same thing that it does of observation sentences. What same thing? We have met no unique concept, have connected with no real essence, at the basic level of observation sentences. A standard way of trying to explain the meaning of 'true' is by simple of paraphrase its basic contexts. To say that 'p' is true is to say that it states a fact, that it is the case, that what it asserts is correct, or perhaps that it accords with reality. If we were clear enough on any of these further locutions, we might see our conception of truth as being thereby sharpened. But it is a cluster of expressions that illuminate one another very little. (Remember, while the word 'fact' is before us, Goodman's delicious dictum "Facts are factitious."7) This cluster of terms may remind us of another one. In his examination of 'analytic' in "Two Dogmas,"8 Quine found it to belong to a more or less interdefinable cluster of terms including 'necessary', 'synonymous', and 'semantical rule'. To understand one of these, as he had it, would be to understand all, but if you have no clear understanding of any to start with, then you have no access. Quine, of course, saw this as ground for indicting all the terms in the cluster as unclear. Call his cluster the "Old Circle"; call ours the "New Circle." Grice and Strawson, by the way, cited precisely our New Circle in their argument against Quine. It was to aid in a reductio; few, they thought, would question the credentials of the terms in this group, yet these terms stand in the same relation of interdefinability that Quine used to support his indictment. As for the New Circle, look at a local application for a moment. We have 'Light is corpuscular' is true if and only if light is corpuscular, if and only if it is the case (or a fact) that light is corpuscular, if and only if the assertion

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that light is corpuscular is correct... never mind the part about according with reality. While members of our New Circle are rather more welcome than those of the Old, we are surely deluding ourselves if we think that they suffice to bring "truth" into sharp focus. Even if we cannot sharpen the concept truth, perhaps we can still find a way to fix its extension. The obvious problem is that there are many ways of distributing truth values over the language's sentences, all consistent with whatever is settled for the observation sentences. This reflects the distance that many of our terms and other linguistic devices have from the soil of observation in which our basic meanings are planted. Elsewhere I explored the analogy between this "problem for truth" and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory,10 where (assuming its consistency) many sentences are independent of the axioms, permitting a multitude of alternative modelssome, for example, fulfilling the continuum hypothesis and some not. The analogy is between the set-theoretic axioms, as determining what sets there are, and the observation sentences, as determining the truths. Neither of these classes of sentences is strong enough to adjudicate all issues in its field. Even use of accepted general principles for moving beyond our observation sentences fails to settle many of our questions about truth. This is not to note just that we cannot in general tell which sentences are true. It is to say that we are at a loss to say how those further truth values get fixed at all. If these further truth values are not fixed by anything we are clear about, what is going to determine them? Or is the conviction that they are determined just an illusion that is forced upon us by a seductive word and a misleading theory about it-a theory that is tidy rather than right? For various ideal or formal languages the tidy theory is fruitful. Our explications of semantic terms-and most of what we call formal semanticsare bound up with such theory. But that doesn't mean that it must apply comfortably, or even intelligibly, to the real language of physical science and enlightened common sense. What serves in idealized conditions may not work in a more natural habitat; how wrong you can go in your calculations of speeds if you neglect air resistance and friction. Tarski showed how to define truth for formal languages, or languages meeting certain conditions. You define truth by way of satisfaction, which is specified outright for the atomic or basic sentences and recursively for the compounds. It is assumed that the compounds are all formed by the well-defined operations of truth-functional composition and quantification; that is one of the vital conditions that the language must meet. Now observation sentences might well be taken to answer to the basic sentences of the formal language; we have found truth unproblematic for them. But for our actual physicalist language it is simply not true that we form all sentences by truth-functional composition and quantification from the observational ones.11 If it were we would

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have no theoretical terms in the language, but only the observation terms that appeared in observation sentences. So we cannot, a la Tarski, bootstrap our way from our clear range of application of truth values to coverage of the entire language. We simply do not meet the main condition for the Tarski kind of account. And there is, by the way, another interesting rub as well. Consider the clause of the Tarskian recursion that deals with quantifications. It settles satisfaction of quantifications in terms, roughly, of satisfaction of their instances. But what instances there are depends on what there is, and what there is is a highly theoretical question-and so one dependent on what we take to be true.12 This is liable to introduce a serious circularity into the bootstrapping, even if nothing else prevents it. Tarski has given us an ideal version of truth, an explication for ideal linguistic circumstances. But we are not in such circumstances. Thus even fixing the extension of 'true' remains a problem. Quine defends truth, writing, "One who puzzles over the adjective 'true' should puzzle rather over the sentences to which he ascribes it."13Granted disquotation, one can normally pass the burden to those sentences. There is really no substantive issue as to whether it is 'true' or the sentences to which we do not know how to apply it that deserve the blame. But either way, many of our sentences resist hard and fast truth values. There is no doubt that our standard view of truth, our standard theory, has it that all the clear sentences of the language have truth values that are permanently fixed. I recognize that the qualifier 'clear' offers a way out to anyone who wants to defend this doctrine. But taken at face value, I think the doctrine cannot be sustained. It seems to me that the best course is to give up the claim that all clear sentences have truth value. As I put it in "Learning and Meaning," "I am persuaded that we can bring into focus no clear conception of truth that applies throughout our significant discourse."14 Many of our sentences, including such singularly useful ones as those of theoretical science, are embraced or rejected on complex criteria that do not even pretend to concern truth. In addition to considering the logical connections of such sentences, we consider the simplicity they would afford us, their strength, safety, and prospective use.15 We worry about how they fit with the rest of what we have accepted or adopted. In Languages of Art Goodman wrote, "Truth of a hypothesis is . . . a matter of fit ... fit of hypothesis and theory to the data at hand and the facts to be encountered."16 Perhaps it is for want of clear applicability of 'true' to such hypotheses that we offer them that honorific term for other services rendered. What I am emphasizing is that it is difficult to understand what bare ascription of truth amounts to-evident grammaticality notwithstanding. So my favored position simply takes sentences that are too far from the

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observational and are not clearly settled by other means, like deductive relationships, as standing outside the range of applicability of the truth predicate-at least as the truth predicate is standardly conceived. There would be truth-value gaps, as in Kripke's theory. But while his gaps reflect ungroundedness, mine reflect distance from the clear realm of observation sentences; I would be withholding truth values from sentences unmoored by meanings. By the way, this allows appropriateness of ascribing truth values, unlike the truth values themselves, to be a matter of degree. Where truth lapses, I have inclined toward some notion of long-run acceptability. In Ways of Worldmaking(pp. 123f) Goodman considered a comparable criterion; in Reconceptions(pp. 154-59) he has moved away from it. Notice that giving up global applicability of truth affords us a plausible account of how relativism can avoid an "anything goes" anarchy. When two people have an ultimate disagreement about P, and P has no truth value, the problem is defused. P may reasonably be said to be acceptable for one and not the other; but we would not have wanted to say that P was true for just one of the two. Now let us look at a somewhat different picture, a picture that may lend itself to a sweetly Goodmanian interpretation. Let us consider a very sketchy model of what goes on when we attempt to rectify or enlarge our body of beliefs-either as individuals or as a community. As our model think of a puzzle, along the lines of a crossword puzzle, already very large but with new squares constantly being added in all directions. Some of the squares-both old ones and new ones-have markings on them. Some of the markings are in inks, inks that range from nearly indelible to easily eradicable, while still others are in pencil. There are no "definitions" for the puzzle, but there are some principles and guidelines about how the squares are to interlock. Evidently the idea is that the markings reflect our various beliefs and our preparedness to change them, and the principles and guidelines reflect the logical and other relationships that we are concerned to maintain. So some combinations of markings are forbidden, some less than wholly satisfactory, others quite permissible. A solution for a region is a permissible combination of markings for it. Our normal task is to extend the area over which we have a solution. There may be areas already filled in in which we no longer have interest, and there may be other areas whose local solution has now taken on particular importance. We proceed by a combination of strategies. We fill in fresh squares at times-perhaps with confidence, perhaps very tentatively. Choice of ink or pencil will reflect that. When we are stymied or see some better way of gaining the desired coverage, we take out eraser or eradicator and make deletions or changes in what is inscribed. Back and forth we go. Sometimes progress is rapid; sometimes we are at a standstill. The way I conceive this-and the way I think of belief revision and ex-

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pansion-there is no good reason to suppose that there is a unique way of solving the puzzle, or even any extensive part of it. There is no call to invoke a Margaret Farrar above in whose mind it is all worked out. There may well be multiple solutions meeting our requirements equally; or, at the other extreme, there may be none. The standard theory of truth-which I have found unsatisfactory-has us look at our revisions of belief as if they were modeled by a puzzle with a unique solution. On that view we seek truth values that are fixed for once and for all; and our changes in belief are just changes in our estimates of where the truth lies. Now returning to our puzzle: squares in solved regions may become filled with permanent markings. While those markings may have been little more than guesses when they were entered, they may turn out to stand up. Yet granted the idea of multiple solutions, alternative markings might have stood up as well had they been made. Perhaps we can think of the puzzle-in-progress as representing a world version, either of some individual or some community. The more nearly indelibly a square is marked, the more firmly supported is the corresponding belief according to the version. We may consider saying that those squares that become permanently marked reveal what is true on the version, even through they could have had different permanent markings had a different solution been constructed. On this model and this reading, to mark the squares may in effect be to dub sentences true. If there are no repercussions that lead us to change a marking, a sentence has been permanently beknighted. If so, we may be said to maketruth sometimes, not just discover it. That strikes my palate as having the right Goodmanian flavor. On this reading it also appears that when simplicity guides us in our marking, or dubbing, it becomes a constituent of what makes for truth, not just evidence of it. But would such a notion be truth? It closely resembles what Peirce identified with truth-the limit to which human opinion would converge in the fullness of time. It also resembles ultimate acceptability, which Goodman once considered a sufficient condition for truth.17Is it worth trying to inject new life into an old word, and one, moreover, that may have been guilty of seducing us? Whatever the answer to that, our puzzle sketch offers support to the position that the search for knowledge or understanding need not be seen as a search for something fixed independently of us. Whether or not we should propose identification of permanent acceptance-or some variant of it-with truth is not a substantive issue. As the vernacular has it, it is just a question of semantics. But isn't that what we should expect when the topic is truth?

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1. Joseph S. Ullian, "Learningand Meaning," in Perspectives Quine, ed. on Barrett Gibson(New York: and BasilBlackwell,1990). 2. Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions Philosophy(Inin dianapolis:Hackett,1988),p. 154. 3. W. V. Quine, Wordand Object(New York:Wiley and Sons and Technology Press,1960),p. 24. 4. W. V. Quine, Pursuitof Truth(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1990),p. 78. 5. Roy A. Sorensen,Blindspots (New York:OxfordUniversityPress,1988). 4th 6. Nelson Goodman,Fact,Fiction,and Forecast, ed. (1955;Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversityPress,1983),pp. 40f. 7. Nelson Goodman,Waysof Worldmaking Hackett,1978),p. 93. (Indianapolis: in Pointof View a 8. W. V. Quine, "TwoDogmas of Empiricism," his From Logical Mass.:Harvard (Cambridge, UniversityPress,1953). Review 9. H. P. Griceand P. F. Strawson,"InDefense of a Dogma,"Philosophical 65, no. 2 (1956):141-58. 10. Ullian,in "Learning Meaning." and 11. For example, since 'quark'is not an observationterm, no sentence containing 'quark'is formedby applyingthese logicaloperationsto observationsentences. in 12. Forrelateddiscussion,see W. V. Quine,"Thingsand TheirPlacein Theories," Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress,1981),esp. his Theories Things(Cambridge, and p. 20. 13. Quine,Pursuit Truth, 82. of p. 14. Ullian,"Learning Meaning," 345. and p. 15. This is not to mention-as Goodmanhas-that we invoke criteriaof relevance, appropriateness,and "well-madeness."Along these lines, see Goodman and pp. Elgin,Reconceptions, 156f,and Goodman,Waysof Worldmaking, 121f. pp. 16. Nelson Goodman,Languages Art,2d ed. (1968;Indianapolis: Hackett,1976),p. of 264. 17. Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and OtherMatters(Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress,1984),p. 38.