TRUTH
On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe 2
John Donne's claim applies most forcefully to our halting attempts to reveal the truth, to seek after knowledge; but it applies also to my procedure in this chapter. Before we can say clearly what truth is, we must make several preliminary points.
The Links Between Truth and Knowledge
In the previous chapter I continually joined truth and knowledge together in a way that should hardly have caused any surprise. They are different concepts but in the context of educational debate they point us in the same direction. On the one hand, any truths that education is concerned with will be items that don't just turn out to be true by good fortune, but rather items for which teachers or others can produce some defensible reasons to accept as true, which is to say items that are more or less certainly known to be true, though perhaps only to a small group. The truths education deals with are then items of knowledge. On the other hand, anything that really is an item of knowledge is ipso facto true. If it is false that Walter Rodney was murdered then no one can know that he was murdered, however vehemently they may believe it. So if anyone says he knows that Rodney was murdered then he is committed to its being true that Rodney was murdered; and if you say of John that he knows Rodney was murdered then you also are committed to its being true that he was.
One problem with these last remarks is that strictly speaking they are not true! You can find competent English speakers saying things like 'The ancient Greeks knew that Zeus lived on Mount Olympus' without themselves endorsing any beliefs about Zeus. If philosophy were simply reduced to recording what people do with their language we would have a very hard time of it. While we need not trouble ourselves with an exact account of what is going on here, I hope it is clear to you that this kind of usage, often called an inverted commas usage from the way it would normally be written, and indeed was written by me in the previous chapter, is secondary or parasitic. It is a way of making a point that could be more straightforwardly made by saying that the ancient Greeks thought they knew that Zeus lived on Olympus, but they were wrong. There is a clear sense in which it is false to say they knew; they only believed. It is false to say they knew because it is false that Zeus lives or lived on Mount Olympus.
We have already seen in the last chapter this distinction between what someone really knows and what they only think they know. It might be worth noting now that it does not just apply to other people. In general we do not in fact know all that we claim to know. And this is one of the facts about ourselves that we can come to know. But there is nothing paradoxical in this - there is no fact that we know and that we don't know at the same time - since in knowing that there are some things we falsely claim to know we do not know which things they may be.
Abbreviations
Before moving on to our next preliminary point, I want to introduce some abbreviations. So far I have been talking about someone knowing something, but this sort of idiom is not very convenient if one wants to talk about the somethings that are known. I shall therefore make a few borrowings from logic and linguistics to let the discussion flow more freely. First of all I want something that can stand for any indicative sentence (we shall look more closely at what an indicative sentence might be in a short time) and I shall use little italic letters starting with p. So if I write 'John knows that p' you can replace the p with something like '2 + 3 = 5' or 'Mary loves Tom' or any indicative sentence you like. Such ps and qs function in fact just like the names 'John' or 'Mary' in those examples, since I am not thinking of any particular people; I could equally well have replaced the names with letters and said 'A loves B'; but Mary and Tom make it sound more homely and make it look less like algebra. But if you can see that in saying 'If John knows that p, then p' I am not making a special point about someone called John, but a general claim about knowing something, then I think you should see the point of the ps and qs. If I shall ever want to abbreviate names of people, places, or things I shall do as I have just done and use italic capital letters. Besides whole sentences and simple names it will also prove useful to be able to abbreviate two types of phrase, noun phrases (the Queen of England; the way to boil an egg;...) and verbal phrases (boil an egg; sing sweetly;...). I shall use 'NP' for noun phrases, 'VP' for verb phrases.
Truth and Being True
We can now move on to our second preliminary point about truth. Philosophical questions are often framed in terms of abstract nouns such as 'truth' or 'justice'. Such abstract nouns give us a way of raising general questions about properties or relations. If someone says that this is a spaniel but that isn't, and we want to ask what is involved in being a spaniel, we are not likely to enquire 'What is spanielhood?', rather we would ask 'What are spaniels like?'; but if someone says that this social set-up is just but that isn't, and we want to ask what is involved in being just, the obvious question the language offers us is 'What is justice?' This would not be a problem but for the fact that people are easily misled into thinking that nouns, even abstract ones, must somehow stand for things. And since justice or truth are not concrete things of the sort we meet with in everyday life, there is a tendency to suppose that they must be things we meet with in some extraordinary sphere. Put baldly like that, such an error might seem unlikely but it is safer not to let the danger arise. So we should ask, not 'What is truth?', but 'What is it for something to be true?'
Putting it grammatically, we transform the nominalization, 'truth', back into the simple verbal phrase, 'is true'. The philosophical claim underlying this move is that the nominalization is simply a way of talking generally about whatever is conveyed by the simple verbal phrase; there are no other weird entities to be considered.
What Things Are True?
There is yet a third preliminary point before we try to say what is involved in being true. That is to decide which uses of the word we are really interested in. The word 'true' is used in a variety of ways. What someone says can be true, or false, but so can a friend or a horizon. The use I am interested in is, however, the first of those mentioned rather than the others. When we are able to specify what someone has said or believes or hopes or imagines or whatever, we can paraphrase our talk of truth by saying 'It is true that p.' It is this use of 'is true' that I am concentrating on.
We need a way of talking about the things that people could say or imagine, about possible contents of thought. I shall use the word 'proposition' to talk about such possible contents of what is said, thought or believed. One very important thing to notice about thinking or believing or the other activities I have alluded to is that if we want to report what is going on we have to use sentences (our ps and qs) to do it. While you can say things like 'Green!' or 'How ghastly!', if we want to report what you are thinking we would have to say something like 'You think that the green wallpaper clashes horribly with the sofa.' And notice that what comes after the 'think that' could stand on its own as a sentence. My claim is that the same goes for every case in which people think or believe something: thinking or believing is always thinking or believing that p, to use the abbreviation we introduced a while ago.
I have said that propositions are always going to require sentences to express them. But only some kinds of sentence can do the job. 'How ghastly the wallpaper is!' is a perfectly good English sentence, as is 'Will you please pass a cucumber sandwich?', but neither of them could report the content of a person's belief. To do that, we need what are often called 'indicative' sentences, not exclamations or questions or imperatives or optatives. The test or criterion I would offer you for indicative sentences (from Hodges, 1977) emphasizes the link between propositions and truth. The test is: can you grammatically enclose your sentence with 'Is it true that... ?'? If you can, it is an indicative sentence; if you can't, it isn't. (If it isn't, there are often ways of converting it into indicative form - 'The wallpaper is ghastly'; 'You are requested to pass a cucumber sandwich' - but we need not worry about this now.)
I have used both sentences and propositions because there are many occasions when we find that the same sentence can be used, sometimes to say something true, sometimes to say something false; but I want propositions to be true once and for all. If we count sentences in an obvious way, the sentence 'It is raining' can be used one day to say something true (that at 1.30 p.m. on 3rd March, 1984, it was raining at Mona, Jamaica) and another day (such as 31st January, 1985, at 3.30 p.m. at Mona) to say something false. One way to deal with this familiar situation is to say that 'It is raining' is one sentence type which has very many instances or tokens; each time the sentence is used someone produces a sentence token of that type; and each token could be used to make a different statement or, in the terms I am using, to express a different proposition. To talk both of sentences and propositions allows us to count sentences by types and propositions by tokens. This may sound somewhat confusing, but it is really something we all know in our bones; anyway I shall rely on your mastery of the language to allow you to make any similar adjustments to the sentences used to express propositions.
Some Things That Are Not True
More important for our own purposes than the intricacies of propositions and sentences is to get clear on the simple fact that propositions are expressed by complete sentences not just by bits of sentences. When people talk of concepts they are usually thinking of items that would be reflected in language by words or phrases, not by whole sentences. A person may be said to have a concept of a horse, or of equality, but not so felicitously a concept that all men are created equal. A person's use of a concept will be reflected in large part by how he uses 'horse', 'unicorn', 'fraternity', and kindred words. Very roughly, then, we can tie concepts to parts of a sentence, propositions to the whole sentence. What my earlier claim now amounts to is that there is no sense in which concepts can be true or false, since concepts are not themselves propositions.
It is important to see that concepts cannot be true or false. But we should explain why many people have mistakenly thought that they are. In the first place they may have been confusing a proposition's being true with a concept's applying to something. The concept, horse, applies to something, the concept, unicorn, does not; which is to say, there are horses but there are no unicorns. Take any concept, F, when the proposition that there are Fs is true the concept, F, applies to something; so there is a close link between truth here and the applicability of a concept; but they are not quite the same notions, and it is better to keep them distinct. In the second place, we have to admit that language is very flexible and that what is said in one way can often be said in what is logically a very different way. In the present case, a concept can subsume a proposition or a set of propositions: to talk of the concept of human equality may not be very different from talking of the proposition that all men are created equal, and the concept of evolution usually subsumes for us a complex theory. While this is so, clarity is served by attending to logical niceties, and so we shall continue to insist that concepts are not the sort of thing to be true or false.
In this book we must leave aside most of the complex problems that arise in the theory of meaning, but it might be worth making one remark here. People often think of the meaning of their words as fairly precise and specific - the sort of thing they could produce as a 'definition' if requested. Such accounts will often make explicit mention of currently accepted theory - educators, for instance, have a penchant for talking of learning in terms of behaviourist psychology. Now if the meaning of such terms were tied to theories in this way, the meaning of words would change as theories change, and it might be difficult to see how people using different theories were still talking about the 'same things'. One plausible response to this problem is to suggest that many of our concepts are not so specific; putting it in terms of words, one might say that the word 'gold' means whatever it is that underlies features such as the malleability, colour, chemical behaviour, and so on that we associate with the substance we call 'gold'. Such an agnostic rendering of the meaning of a term leaves plenty of room for alternative theories and for alternative ways of putting features together (so some observable features might end up being attributed to impurities in actual specimens rather than to the substance itself) while allowing us to say that these different views are all attempts to delineate the same objective reality. Such less specific accounts of the meaning of terms also square rather better with the diversity of the existing usage of the words associated with particular concepts - it is all too easy to offer an account of a concept while thinking only of a very restricted range of linguistic usage.
Just as I have been insistent that constituents of sentences cannot be true or false, so I want to insist that one kind of structure made up of sentences cannot be true or false either. And that is an argument. An argument is a sequence of sentences (or propositions), some of them making up the premises of the argument, some of them (usually just one) being the conclusion. For a sequence to be an argument, the premises must be intended to support the conclusion in some way. We can regiment an argument into a structure like this: p, q, ... so r. (Here p and q stand for premises, and r for the conclusion.) The kind or degree of support given by the premises to the conclusion can vary. The strongest kind, found in deductive arguments, gives a guarantee that if the premises are true, the conclusion will be true as well. When an argument actually gives the kind of support its user claims to provide, I shall say that it is a valid argument. (Many people restrict this term to deductive arguments.)
One of the first things a student of logic has to learn is that there is a difference between the validity of an argument and the truth or falsehood of its constituent statements, i.e. its premises and conclusion, even though one explains validity in terms of the truth, or likely truth, of the conclusion being conditional upon that of the premises. There may be valid deductive arguments with false premises and false conclusions; there may be invalid deductive arguments with true premises and true conclusions. The actual truth or falsehood of the constituents of a deductive argument is in general irrelevant to its validity; what matters is the possibility of certain combinations of truth and falsehood. Of course, if the premises are known to be true and the conclusion to be false, that suffices to show the argument to be deductively invalid; but in most cases we do not have this knowledge. So in these cases we must be sensitive to the difference between truth and deductive validity. At the moment my only concern is to stress that difference, and the linguistic stipulation that goes along with it, to the effect that we cannot give a sense to arguments being true or false (arguments can be valid or invalid) nor can we interpret the claim that a statement or proposition is valid or invalid (they are true or false).
Simple Truth
Having gone about and about through these various preliminary matters, we are now in a position to say what it is for a proposition to be true, to offer an analysis of truth. Philosophical analyses can include several different things, so I shall indicate what I think I am offering you at the moment. It is intended to be an account of what we are trying to convey when we say that a proposition (or more colloquially, what someone said, or someone's belief) is true. It should be another, rather longer and more explicit, way of saying the same thing. It is not an attempt to explain how we can legitimately mean what we mean, nor is it an account of what we should be trying to say, nor does it tell us how we can know that what we mean is so. It does not try to raise or answer doubts about what we mean; it simply sets out to report what we do mean.
To adapt one of Mackie's formulations (1973, p. 50), the view I am endorsing is that to say that a proposition is true is to say that things are as they are stated to be in the proposition. If I say that Parkinson's Law is true I am saying that things are as Parkinson's Law says they are. If I say that Nixon's public statements were false I am saying that things were not as Nixon's public statements said they were. If I say that 'Roseau is the capital of Dominica' is true I am saying that things are as 'Roseau is the capital of Dominica' says they are, viz. Roseau is the capital of Dominica. For accuracy's sake, it is worth noting that I am not, however, directly saying that Roseau is the capital of Dominica; my remark is saying something directly about a statement or proposition, that it is true, not about Roseau or Dominica; but given what I do say about that statement you can infer my commitment to the simple claim about Roseau as well.
Mackie called his account a 'simple' theory of truth, and I hope you can agree with him. It may well seem a startlingly unsurprising account to be given after so many pages of preparation. It is simple, but as we proceed I hope you will see that it isn't trivial. Mackie's other label for his account is a 'comparison' theory, since the fundamental point about truth is that it involves a comparison between how things are and how they are said, or believed, or imagined, etc., to be.
One Truth
The word 'truth' is potentially ambiguous (this is another reason for our preference for looking at 'is true'). It can refer to things that are true, propositions as we have decided to call them. So we can say that there are only four truths in the whole of a book, or we can distinguish the truths of chemistry from those of history. On the other hand, 'truth' can be used as we have been using it to talk of the relation between how things are and how they are said to be. I have just given the account I accept of what that relation is like. And in this sense, I think there is only one relation to be accounted for. But people sometimes talk about different kinds of truth in ways that suggest that they might be thinking that there are different kinds of relation, not just different sorts of true proposition. (For a few writers who can reasonably be interpreted in this way, see Waismann, 1953, Hirst, 1974, ch. 6, or for a non-philosopher, Hillery, 1984.)
It is logically possible that a word like 'true' could cover two or more distinct relations. The term 'sibling' could be said to cover biologically distinct relations such as identical twins, 'ordinary' brothers or sisters, half-brothers or sisters, and possibly others. So it is possible that what is involved in p being true is different from what is involved in q being true. It is possible; but I do not think it is actual, at least in unpremeditated language use. I think that when people use language unselfconsciously 'true' means what I have set out above. But sometimes people tell us that what they mean by truth in mathematics or in religion or in literature is different from what it means elsewhere; and perhaps they consistently use the word in their idiosyncratic way. But if they do, I think we can say that they are in danger of confusing themselves and the rest of us, because they are in each case talking about a distinct property or relation which should be given its own name. This is especially so when the other relation lacks the essential comparative content of simple truth. Thus in mathematics, some people will say that truth is a matter simply of being deducible from a set of axioms (e.g., Hirst and Peters, 1970, p. 63). That is an important property, but it is clearly distinct from truth (and can be shown to be distinct even in mathematics by Gödel's theorems) and no good purpose is served by conflating the two
Simple Truth and Complex Meaning
We can, however, see why some people are inclined to think there are different sorts of truth. (While I shall look at some reasons for making an honest mistake here it is possible that in some educational debate the confusion is more a matter of evading difficult issues such as the nature of mathematical truth or the justification for teaching certain subjects such as literature or religion.) When we say that p is true, we are saying that things are as p says they are. But what this amounts to depends, of course, on exactly what p is saying, on what it means. When, as often happens, that is complex, it may not be a simple matter to answer the question 'Is p true?' A good deal of this complexity is pretty obvious: 'Clive Lloyd is standing still' is a lot simpler than 'Clive Lloyd is l.b.w.,' which involves an appeal to a set of rules; 'The Jones family has three children' is simpler than 'The average family has two point two children.' But there are cases in which the complexity may not be so apparent, and in which philosophical doubts can lead to a 'Yes and No' type answer to the question of truth.
Consider two plausible claims: 'Daffodils are yellow' and 'Socrates died courageously.' In the case of the daffodils, I think it is also plausible to claim that what we intend to convey is that daffodils are intrinsically yellow; the property as we see it in normal light is an inherent feature of them. If this is part of what we usually mean, then we are mistaken; there is no such intrinsic property (though there are, of course, various complex intrinsic properties that bear some relation to what is seen in normal light). But in that case, is the original claim true? At one level, it obviously is; daffodils are not red or purple; but in so far as part of what is being said is that they have an intrinsic yellow-as-it- is-perceived, then the claim is in error, as in this pervasive way are most claims about the colours of things. In the case of Socrates, to do something courageously requires certain things to be true of the action (if he had simply died in his sleep it would hardly have been a courageous death), and we can agree that those things did hold of Socrates. But I think we intend rather more than this in talking of courage; the action is held up for admiration, we should take this attitude rather than that towards it. But its being admirable is something over and above its having the required properties and relations for a courageous death; is it also a fact about Socrates' death? If, as I shall later argue that one should, one says that it isn't, one has the same two-part reply to the question of truth. And even if one says that it is a fact, one has still to acknowledge the complexity hidden within the simple term 'courageously'.
Both these examples are controversial, as almost any example in philosophy will be, but if they are allowed they may suggest that our ordinary statements of the truth may not be 'nothing but the truth'. They may on the contrary involve claims, or at least a set of assumptions, that are to be rejected. Our language has not been fashioned for the purpose of telling the plain unvarnished truth, but it is the only language we have, and in judging some of the things we say by using it we have to make allowances for its inaccuracies. To put the matter another way, I think we can say that every indicative sentence offers itself as making a true or false claim (that is the meaning of the linguistic structure, indicative sentence) but that philosophical analysis often reveals that what is really going on is either something different from making true or false claims or, as in the two cases cited above, a conflation of different claims, some of which are acceptable while others may not be. Here, of course, philosophical analysis is not only reporting what we intend to convey; it is describing what is really going on when we use the language.
As a matter of simple logic, if you conjoin two claims, one of which is false, your combined claim is false. So strictly speaking, in the cases cited all such claims are false. But we normally treat them rather as we do claims about mythological beings: Zeus lived on Olympus, not Mount Ararat, though we know that strictly speaking both claims are false because there is no such being as Zeus to live anywhere.
(The other possibility I have just mentioned, where we are not really making true or false claims although we are using indicative sentences, is also controversial, but to see the sort of analyses that have been offered, consider the two indicative sentences: 'I promise to pay you five dollars' and 'If Mabel is a peeress, she is not allowed to vote.' In the first example, some philosophers have wanted to say that the sentence does not make a true or false statement; it is simply the performance of an action. In the second example, other philosophers have wanted to say that what is really going on in 'if p then q' sentences is 'suppose p, then q', which is a rather more involved matter of asserting q within the supposition that p. We cannot go into the merits of these proposals here, but they perhaps serve to indicate further possibilities in which questions of whether a claim is true or false become rather involved, although truth itself remains as simple as ever.)
Before we move on from the explanation of why people have thought there are different kinds of truth, one last set of points should be made. I have said what it is for a proposition to be true. I have not said what is involved in a proposition being verified, i.e., being shown to be true, nor in its being proved, nor in its being certain. These are all somewhat more complex notions than the notion of truth that I have described, and it is clear that what is involved in verifying or proving one sort of proposition may be very different from what is involved in verifying or proving some other proposition. Truth is too simple for some people; they are more interested in questions of verification, or degrees of certainty, but they are inclined to stretch the notion of truth to include these more complex concerns. If they do so, and if these other matters do differ among different kinds of proposition, then they will find it natural to think in terms of different kinds of truth. But my point now is that truth is distinct from these other notions and that we should not confuse them. It may be true that I drank Ch. d'Yquem on New Year's Day, 1978, although there is no way now of verifying or falsifying that claim, nor any way, indeed any clear sense, in which it could be proved; and obviously no one need be at all sure of it for it still to be true. However important these other notions are, they are not the same notion as truth; and it is truth we are currently dealing with.
Perhaps in passing we should also note that truth is not the same as universal agreement. People may all agree on something, even in the truth of some proposition, without that proposition being true. Of course if you did decide to let 'true' mean what a group of people agree upon then your kinds of truth multiply and conflict with one another. But there is no reason to choose that meaning.
Absolute Truth
I have been trying to say what we mean by the notion of truth. Truth is a matter of comparison between how things are and how they are said or imagined to be. I have suggested that this is the only notion of truth that we have. It is not, however, a notion that some people find it easy to accept. It is an ambitious notion. It claims an external standpoint from which to judge our thinking. Here we are, with various thoughts or beliefs; there the world is; and the notion of truth seeks to say how it is between these two, either our thinking has captured something of how the world is or it hasn't. Truth goes beyond our thinking and judges it. Judgments that something is or is not true are not judgments from one perspective that might be countered by different judgments from some other perspective; they are absolute claims. Things are as we say they are, or they are not.
But once we begin to reflect about truth in these ways, it can seem an impossibly ambitious notion. Our judgments that propositions are true are, after all, our judgments; they involve our thinking; they are not the verdict of some omniscient god who has direct access both to what we think and to how things are and can weigh them up. How could our thinking arrive at a standpoint beyond our thinking, from which to judge? And so we are immediately thrust into some of the deepest problems of the theory of knowledge.
If one assumes that these problems are insoluble, one is likely to conclude that whatever its pretensions to absolute status the notion of truth has to be relativized in some way or other. As we shall see in a moment, it would be better to give up any talk about truth at all, since relativized notions cannot deliver the goods we want the notion of truth to provide. But before we look at some alternatives, the point to grasp at the moment is simply that the notion of truth we do use does have this pretension to absoluteness. It does seek to compare how things are with how we think they are.
It is worth being a little more precise about the sort of comparison we require. Hirst (1974, ch. 5), for instance, has argued that traditional views of truth are impossible because they require a comparison of what we think with the world, presented neat, as it were, unconceptualized. But that is not the sort of comparison we require; if it were we would indeed be in a hopeless state, since as Hirst says, most, if not quite all, of our experience of the world is mediated by our conceptions of it. But we can still distinguish our thought, say, that pineapple juice curdles milk from our observation of what happens when we mix pineapple juice and milk. Our observation is indeed imbued with concepts, but it is quite distinct from the thought we are testing. Our thought can either be as observation reveals or other than observation reveals; we have two distinct items and can make the requisite comparison between them.
If we had allowed earlier that concepts themselves could be true or false, then Hirst's objection might have been somewhat stronger: observation is usually shot through with concepts so we would not be able to get outside our concepts to see whether they are true. But we did not allow that concepts could be true; it is what we do with concepts, the statements we make employing them, that are true or false, and so we do not have the sort of problem that Hirst supposed.
I have been rather short with this deep problem of how we can achieve simple absolute truth. We shall look at some aspects of it again later when we consider what our experience is like. For the time being, I have only wanted to show that some of the comparisons we need are available to us.
Sceptical Theories of Truth
As we have noted, many philosophers have doubted our ability to arrive at the simple but challenging notion of truth as set out above. Instead, they have suggested more modest notions that are within our powers and whose application matches, fairly well at least, what we want to do with truth. One such idea is that the most we can hope from truth is merely coherence with other beliefs; when we say that p is true all we are really claiming is that p is consistent with other claims we accept, or is not inconsistent with any such claims. Another idea that ordinary people often find attractive is that a true claim is one that can prove its worth in use; that truth is a matter of pragmatic utility. An even less specific account is offered by those who insist on speaking only of ' truth for' people; little is usually said about the ' true' portion, but the insistence is that we can only judge of truth for this person or group of people versus truth for that person or group: ' Lafite is better than Bull's Blood' is supposedly true for me, but not perhaps for the promoters of Hungarian wines.
Each of these competing views has a certain plausibility. Coherence with other accepted claims is a sine qua non for any proposition to be accepted, and inconsistency is a major reason for rejecting claims. A good number of claims are useful in practice, and this may seem a more important aspect of them than their strict truth or falsity. After all, we get by in many fields with theories that are known only to be approximations to the truth, that is to say, that are known to be strictly speaking false; and many people think religious belief is necessary for our sanity, or at least our morality, and use this to justify its place in schools, irrespective of its simple truth. Again, as my example may suggest, there are a good number of claims which it is plausible to regard as true for some but not for others. All the same, none of these views captures what is essential for truth, and so they should not be accepted as adequate explications of that notion.
I have already tried to ward off some of the sceptical doubts that can encourage these alternative accounts of truth. Here I want to show briefly how they fail to measure up to our ordinary demands on the notion of truth. Some of these arguments may appear to be attacking ' straw men' since I shall attribute to people views they are unlikely to espouse in cold blood. The point, however, is that if their views are seriously held they must in consistency accept these claims. Their failure to do so testifies to their good sense, but it is fatal for the views they maintain.
A proposition, p, can be consistent with a set of beliefs that A accepts but inconsistent with another set that B accepts; but p is either true or false, it cannot be both. Even if we know that q is true, the fact that p is consistent with q does not show that p is true too; all we can say is what we said above that if we know that q is true, then we know that p is false if it is inconsistent with q. But consistency is a quite different matter from truth.
So too is pragmatic utility. A false claim can be useful, and a true claim can be of no use at all. Two incompatible claims could both serve equally well in all our practical pursuits, but they couldn't both be true.
Finally, as we noted in the previous chapter, the general strategy of making truth relative undermines one of the main practical points of having the terms ' true' and ' false', viz. being able to distinguish mistakes. If ' true' can only be ' true for', we do not seem to have any way to distinguish cases where A thinks that p and p from those where A makes a mistake. Similarly we have no obvious way of acknowledging disagreements between people: when I say p and you say not p it looks to us that there is a disagreement, but on the relativistic notion of truth we seem forced to say that p is true for me but not p is true for you, and there is no disagreement left. One might prefer a world with no mistakes and no disagreements, but this is a rather too easy way of achieving it. The relativist can of course acknowledge a difference: I accept p, you do not. His problem is to characterize this difference as a disagreement without any implicit appeal to notions of simple truth.
The extreme difficulty of avoiding the ordinary absolute notion of truth can be shown by a kind of turning of the tables upon proponents of the views we have mentioned. They say: truth is coherence, or utility, or relative to the speaker. Are we to take these claims themselves as true? Presumably we must, unless the theorists are lying or wasting our time. But then in what sense of ' true'? The ordinary simple absolute sense, or the sense they are each offering us of what truth really is? The obvious way of taking their remarks is the former, the ordinary simple absolute sense. But then the theorists have straightforwardly refuted themselves. They try to tell us that truth can only be coherence, utility, or what-have-you, but they want us to accept that claim itself as true in the ordinary sense they have rejected. If there are no simple truths, then ' truth is coherence' cannot be one either. If it is to be understood as a simple truth, there can be simple truths; so the various theories are in general wrong. (They may be salvaged as limited accounts of some bits of language or thought, but they had pretensions themselves, as general accounts of truth, and those pretensions have been shown to be vain.)
The unobvious way of taking what the theorists say is that these claims are true only in their sense of truth. I am inclined to say then: so what? I'm interested in the truth about truth, not some poor relation. But such a reaction looks rather too much like begging the question against the theorist. So let us persevere with the unobvious interpretations. Take coherence first: it is coherent with our accepted beliefs that truth is coherence with our accepted beliefs. But unfortunately it isn't. I have just presented some reasons for thinking that that view is not consistent with my accepted beliefs about some fundamental but elementary logical matters. (And in saying that, I am obviously falling back into the simple notion of truth; but that is precisely what I meant in saying it was inescapable.)
Let us try utility. It is useful to work with the thought that truth is a matter of practical utility. It is hardly obvious that it is. The cardinals who opposed Galileo were satisfied with stories about the heavens that did useful things like predicting eclipses and fixing the date of Easter; clearing away usable but utterly misguided theories such as Ptolemy's was a preconditon for the advances made possible by Newton, with all the good, and ill, they have brought us. And once again, in disputing the acceptability of the pragmatist's social or historical claim, I am dealing in matters that can only be understood as simply true or false.
The problem with the relativistic notions of truth is to get a clear enough idea of what they involve. If statements are only true for individuals, then I deny that ' statements are only true for individuals' is true for me. If truth is said to be relative to something more subtle than individuals, then I think we should seek to uncover the confusions that lead to such claims, rather than pursue these types of reflexive argument. As we have seen, there are cases where it looks plausible to say that truth is relative, but this is a misleading way of describing what is going on, because fundamentally there is no truth of the matter at all. When we acknowledge the complexity of many common propositions we may be able to restate in acceptable terms most of what people are getting at when they talk of relative truth.
Do We Need a Theory of Truth?
One of the basic ideas that underlies what I have been saying is that any problems there might be for talking about truth already infect the ordinary things we say. If 'It is true that p' creates a problem for you, so must the simple p itself. Talk about truth is a reflective, second-order activity, and easily encourages us to perceive problems; but the hubris we may discover inheres in our simple first-order statements themselves. The point can be made in terms of assertion: in asserting anything, we are asserting it as true. So if we cannot mean what we think we mean by saying 'It is true that p,' we cannot mean what we intend to mean simply by asserting p on its own.
In the course of this exposition of Mackie's 'comparison' theory of truth, we have briefly glanced at some other ' theories' of truth: coherence, pragmatist, and relativist theories. The point I have just been making is the grain of truth in another such theory, the redundancy theory, which goes on, falsely, to say that 'It is true that p' means the same as p. My earlier account denied that equivalence, but I have now endorsed the associated idea that talk of truth is always eliminable, which is to say that any problems with it are to be found in the propositions themselves. There are other theories of truth discussed in philosophy which have not got quite the popular appeal of those we have looked at. But perhaps the most famous theory has not been mentioned so far, the correspondence theory. Here the fundamental idea is that a proposition is true when it corresponds with the facts. That may seem to cover Mackie's account (though, as he says, being simply as things are is a pretty strong kind of correspondence) but its distinctiveness can be seen when we ask exactly what kind of correspondence is envisaged. Typically people have wanted to find a point by point mirroring of bits of the world by bits of the sentences used to express true or false propositions. Such a story might be plausible for maps, or perhaps for pictograms, but ordinary language works in very different ways from such things. And again, even with maps, it is extremely difficult to distinguish the kinds of correspondence required for truth from those that result in systematic error, without some tacit appeal to the simple comparison notion of truth I have offered. So while an unspecified correspondence may be innocuous, let us admit that what we want is to get things simply right, as the comparison account says, and let us note that we do not have to make false assumptions about one to one mappings between words (or components of propositions) and the world.
Truth, Logic and Education
Whether or not we go in for judging propositions true or false, truth matters vitally to us. In the previous chapter I illustrated educational concern for truth, and in this I have suggested in passing that inadequate conceptions of truth can distort or disable educational thinking. But more generally, learning, enquiry, and criticism, can all be regarded as activities centrally concerned to augment the number of true propositions that we know, or to sift out false propositions from among our stock of beliefs. As such, these activities could do with a mechanism that transmits truth or falsehood.
Such mechanisms exist. They are the forms of valid deductive argument. As I briefly mentioned earlier, an argument is a sequence of statements consisting of premises, conclusion, and the link of support between them. In a deductive argument the support is such that if the premises were true then the conclusion would have to be true too. When you have such an argument, truth is transmitted from the set of premises taken together to the conclusion; but conversely, falsehood is transmitted from the conclusion back to the set of premises taken together. If we have some truths, then using them as premises in a deductive argument may yield a new truth; if a deductive argument yields a false conclusion we can be sure that at least one of its premises is false too.
These two facts about deductively valid argument structures are continually being used in the enterprise of knowledge, both on the large-scale social side and in our individual attempts to refashion the web of our beliefs. Experimentation or theoretical criticism is very often a matter of deriving a prediction by valid argument from what has been proposed and looking to see whether that prediction holds; if it doesn't this is pretty damning for the theory in question. Similarly in our own personal grasp of the world around us we are constantly expecting things on the basis of what we already believe and correcting those beliefs when expectations are falsified, and these processes often mirror what explicit deductive argument would yield. As we shall see in more detail later, investigation in real life is complex and this picture of the trouble-free transmission of truth or falsehood is somewhat oversimplified, but simplifications have their uses. No map captures everything, but the existence of tides does not detract from the value of knowing what the coastline looks like.
Given both the fact that these mechanisms for the transmission of truth or falsehood exist, and that they are so pervasive in our cognitive lives, one might well think that the study of deductive logic should have a central role in any initiation into the cognitive enterprise. Schools, however, do not seem to see it that way. They often claim to teach people to reason better by teaching them particular subjects, but it seems that such teaching serves mainly to improve reasoning in the restricted areas in which it is taught. This is not so surprising, since no one ever draws students' attention to the general patterns that are the focus of deductive logic. It may also be true that some forms of non-deductive reasoning are peculiar to different subjects, but that is no reason for not doing what one could about those aspects that are general. As I have acknowledged regarding real life investigation, real life arguments are not so easy to handle as the disinfected simplifications of formal logic, so the subject of deductive logic as an aid to reasoning would not be so cut-and-dried as it might appear; but again this is hardly a reason for not tackling it. Whether or not you are finally convinced that the notion of simple truth is one that it would be worth introducing to students in school in the hope of forestalling the confusion we can see around us, I do think we have here the beginnings of a case for much more serious consideration of the proper place of reasoning in the curriculum (cf. Brandon, 1985b).
Besides transmitting truth, we might like a mechanism for discovering truths in the first place. The possibility, or rather the general impossibility, of such a mechanism is one of the main themes of the theory of knowledge and since it is not really part of my brief to argue for a place for logic in the schools, let us move on to consider knowledge.
2. This passage comes from John Donne's Satyre: Of Religion.
Originally published by Allen & Unwin, 1987, this version last revised June 17th, 2000.
URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/truth.html