Truth
Correspondence theory of truth
What is it to 'correspond'?
Picturing
Fodor's version
Alternatives
Coherence theory
Pragmatic theory
Summary
We have discussed what a belief is, and what language is, and we have always been bumping into meaning.
Now we need to look at truth.
We have been assuming a view of truth, of what truth is. We have been assuming what is called the correspondence theory of truth. It is I think a very intuitive account of what truth is.
It is the theory that truth is a property of propositions, and that a proposition has this property when it corresponds to a state of affairs in the world.
So on this view first a proposition that is true purports to represent a state of affairs. We are familiar with this. But second the proposition is true if and only if the state of affairs it purports to represent really obtains.
I haven't said anything careful about what a proposition is. We seem to need the notion if only because different natural languages seem capable of expressing in many circumstances the same thing.
La plume de mon frere
and
My brother's pen
seem to be saying the same thing. We express this fact by saying they are both expressing the same 'proposition'.
Are there any difficulties with the correspondence view of truth?
BUZZ
The general problem is this: what can be meant by 'corresponds with'?
One approach has been to try and make use of the notion of a picture A proposition corresponds with a state of affairs when it pictures it.
So it might be held that 'the desk is in front of the seats' pictures through words and grammatical structure the possible location of a desk in the room. (MMT p.66)
But it is difficult to see how to understand a 'picture' theory in other cases.
Eg
1. 'If my brother were here, we could eat at the new cafe'.
(A counterfactual statement)
2. 'You should wash the cat at least twice a day'
(A normative statement.)
In both cases it's not just the picture version of the correspondence theory that seems unable to cope. The idea that in these cases the proposition 'corresponds' to something is not at all clear.
Just to drop a reference you may find useful: Tarski's theory of truth is sometimes seen as a correspondence theory of truth. It doesn't say anything about what correspondence consists in. Just that a thing is true iff what is stated to be the case in fact obtains. Difficult to understand the point of this on its own - needs a much bigger context.
Fodor uses the correspondence theory of truth in his paper Psychosemantics, which I return to in a spirit of masochism.
Fodor's picture is that we are organisms, produced by evolution. The main business of our sense organs and brain processing power - our 'cognitive system' is to keep our behaviour well-adapted to our surroundings.
For example, if a lion is approaching fast, it is the job of our sensory apparatus and our cognitive system to pick this up and instruct our musculature to take evasive action.
He suggests we go along with the idea broadly that it does this by setting up inside us symbols, symbols which represent states of affairs outside us.
If that approach is right, when a lion is approaching, somehow our cognitive system will set up in our brains a representation of that. Not only will such a reprt anyone to catch John.
Compare this with:
John is too clever to meet anyone who caught.
This, Chomsky says, is gibberish.
Notice in particular how hopeless an appeal to analogy is in understanding the rules that we are encountering here.
By analogy with
John ate
=
John ate something or other
John is too clever to catch
should mean
John is too clever to catch someone or other
but it doesn't.
Innumerable facts of this general kind, he says, are known without training, or even experience.
'These facts are known without training, without correction of error, without relevant experience, and are known the same way by every speaker of English - and, in analogous constructions, other languages.'
Chomsky, p.640.
Considerations of this kind, says Chomsky, show the inadequacy of the conception of knowledge of language as a skill or ability. It is not the exercise of a skill when we interpret a sentence corrrectly. 'Rather, the computational system of the mind/brain is designed to force certain interpretations for linguistic expressions.'
The conception of language which held sway prior to the cognitive revolution, says Chomsky, the one which he says persists among philosophers under the influence of Wittgenstein, was 'entirely unproductive and without empirical consequences' (Chomsky in Lycan, p.640).
'One can hardly point to a single empirical result of the slightest significance that derived from these conceptions. The psychology of language of the time was almost completely barren.' (Chomsky in Lycan, p.640.)
So much for Chomsky's criticism of the approach to language that held sway before 'the cognitive revolution
What approach to language is to be put in its place?
Chomsky says that the first alternative came as part of the 'cognitive revolution', when behaviourism came to be rejected in psychology. It is not the approach that Chomsky would take today, but it sets the scene anyway for later developments.
The answers given by that reaction against behaviourism were these:
Answer: Language is a computational system, a rule system of some sort. Knowledge of language is knowledge of this rule system.
Answer: the initial stage of the language faculty determines possible rules and modes of interaction. Language is acquired by a process of selection of a rule system of an appropriate sort on the basis of direct evidence. Experience yields an inventory of rules, through the language acquisition device of the language faculty.
Answer: the use of language is rule-governed behaviour. Rules form mental representations, which enter into our speaking and understanding. A sentence is parsed and understood by a systematic search through the rule system of the language in question.
The change was away from behaviour towards seeing behaviour as evidence of what was going on inside the brain which might cause behaviour.
The difficulty with this picture was that 'there are too many possible rule systems', and it is hard to explain why children choose one such system rather than another.
Chomsky's observation is that children learn a vast amount in learning a language; and that in fact they learn much more than can be acquired through the teaching they appear to receive!
He is thinking of the speed with which children master their first language, which he thinks cannot be accounted for in terms of any learning theory.
This is sometimes known as the 'poverty of stimulus' argument.
His conclusion is that much of the language one comes to speak is 'hard-wired'. We are born with a language chip, so to speak.
Examples of speech which the child encoonds with something?
One view is: formulae in algebra are true sometimes, but when they are it is because of the laws of algebra.
Or: equations in arithmetic are true because of the laws of arithmetic.
Or: well-formed forulae in propositional logic are true sometimes, but when they are it is because of the rules of that artificial system.
In none of these cases is correspondence an issue.
You could say the coherence theory of truth takes as its paradigm languages of this kind - formal languages. Truth in those languages seems to flow from the relationship of a given proposition to the rules of the system. It tries to say: this tells us what truth is in general.
Whereas the correspondence theory takes as its paradigm propositions which seem to be simple reports of direct experience: the cat is on the mat.
It is said that Hegel defended a version of the coherence theory of truth.
Pragmatism was a distinctive perspective within philosophy developed principally by a couple of American philosophers around the beginning of the twentieth century - William James (1842-1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952).
The view of truth offered by pragmatism was that a proposition was true insofar as it was useful in a certain way.
The most helpful interpretation is to take useful to mean something other than its everyday sense. They are not saying that a proposition is true in virtue of its being useful around the kitchen, or in digging the garden. They are best thought of as saying that propositions are true insofar as they are cognitively useful. By this is meant: useful in 'unifying' our experience, as one gloss has it (M p.72).
END