Page 220 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
Wason P C, Johnson-Laird P N 1972 Psychology of Reason- ing: Structure and Content. Batsford, London
Zeevat H 1994 Questions and exhaustivity in update seman-
tics. In: Bunt H, Muskens R, Reiner G (eds.) In: Pro- ceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Semantics. ITK, Tilburg
The notion of truth plays a major role in our reflec- tions on language, thought, and action. We may be inclined to suppose, for example, that 'truth' is the proper aim of scientific inquiry, that true beliefs are conducive to getting what we want, that the meaning of a sentence is the condition for its truth, that reliable preservation of truth as one argues from premises to a conclusion is the mark of valid reasoning, that moral pronouncements should not be regarded as objectively true, and so on. In order to assess the plausibility of such theses, and in order to refine them and to explain why they hold, there is a need for some view of what truth is—a theory that would explain its relations to other matters. Thus there can be little prospect of understanding our most important intellectual
capacities in the absence of a good theory of truth. Such a thing, however, has been notoriously elusive. The ancient view that truth is some sort of 'cor- respondence with reality' has still never been articu- lated satisfactorily: the nature of the alleged 'correspondence' and the alleged 'reality' remain objectionably obscure. Yet the familiar alternative suggestions—that true beliefs are those that are 'mutu- ally coherent,' or 'pragmatically useful,' or 'verifiable in suitable conditions'—have each been confronted with persuasive counterexamples. A twentieth-century departure from these traditional analyses is the view that being true is not a property at all—that the syn- tactic form of the predicate, 'is true,' hides its real semantic character, which is not to describe prop- ositions but to endorse them. But this radical approach is also faced with difficulties and suggests, somewhat counterintuitively, that truth cannot have the vital theoretical role in semantics and elsewhere that we are naturally inclined to give it. Thus truth remains one of the most enigmatic of notions: an explicit account of it can appear to be essential yet beyond our reach. However, research in the late 1980s and early 1990s has provided some grounds for opti- mism.
1. Traditional Theories
The belief that snow is white owes its truth to a certain feature of the external world: namely, to the fact that
snow is white. Similarly, the belief that dogs bark is true because of the fact that dogs bark. This sort of trivial observation leads to what is perhaps the most natural and popular account of truth, the cor- respondence theory, according to which a belief (state- ment, sentence, proposition, etc.) is true just in case there exists a fact corresponding to it (Austin 1950). This thesis is unexceptionable in itself. However, if it is to provide a substantial and complete theory of truth—if it is to be more than merely a picturesque way of asserting all equivalences of the form:
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Truth P. G. Norwich
The proposition that p is true«-»p
(1)
—then it must be supplemented with accounts of what facts are, and what it is for a belief to correspond to a fact; and these are the problems on which the correspondence theory of truth has foundered. For one thing, it is far from clear that any significant gain in understanding is achieved by reducing 'the proposition that snow is white is true' to 'the fact that snow is white exists'; for these expressions seem equally resistant to analysis and too close in meaning for one to provide an illuminating account of the other. In addition, the general relationship that holds between the belief that snow is white and the fact that snow is white, between the belief that dogs bark and the fact that dogs bark, and so on, is very hard to identify. The best attempt to date is Wittgenstein's (1922) so-called 'picture theory', whereby a prop- osition is a logical configuration of terms, a fact is a logical configuration of objects, and a fact cor- responds to a proposition when their configurations are identical and when the terms in the proposition refer to the similarly placed objects in the fact. However, even if this account is correct as far as it goes, it would need to be completed with plausible
theories of 'logical configuration' and of 'reference,' neither of which is easy to come by.
A central characteristic of truth—one that any adequate theory must explain—is that when a prop- osition satisfies its so-called 'conditions of proof (or verification),' then it is regarded as true. To the extent that the property of corresponding with reality is mys- terious, it will be found impossible to see why what