Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 10:52:25 -0400
From: Louis Irwin <lirwin1-AT-ix.netcom.com>
Subject: RE: BHA: truth


Wallace,

The quotations from the Devitt and Devitt/Sterelny books are very
interesting.  For the record, I have not read either, so I haven't
dismissed them as actualist or otherwise (unless I commented on someone
else's summary).

I take the point about truth not being tied to evidence.  I agree that a
realist needs to adopt some such view.

>According to Devitt, truth has a robust explanatory role in our theory of
>higher animals and their languages; in other words, it is needed to explain
>the role mental and linguistic symbols play in our lives. This is not to say
>that truth is needed to explain our linguistic or other behaviour; rather,
>it is needed to explain "meaning," i.e., "the properties of symbols that
>enable them to play a variety of social roles" (_Realism and Truth _296_),
>properties such as stimulus independence, arbitrariness, medium
>independence, and so on. Correspondence theorists explain meaning in terms
>of truth, they explain truth in terms of reference and structure, and they
>explain reference in terms of causal links between linguistic symbols and
>world.

This is an attractive theory.  Everything rests on a causal theory of
reference, which I support.  My only problem is that a causal theory of
reference is not a correspondence theory at all!  A correspondence theory
of reference would say that reference consists in the match between our
concepts and the things onceptualized as if we could produce our concept of
"cat" and refer to cats independently. A causal theory of reference just
does not work that way.  Maybe I'm being too rigid in what I designate
"correspondence theory".  On the other hand, the conceptual danger is that
any realist theory is designated a "correspondence theory", in which case
that description does not tell us much.

Louis Irwin






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