File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1998/bhaskar.9805, message 60


Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 09:43:55 -0400
From: Louis Irwin <lirwin1-AT-ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: BHA: truth


Ruth,

For the record, let me record that I merely tried to state the redundancy
theory, not defend it.  Anyway you raise lots of interesting matters.

>Louis your last message was really clear and helpful, but in a way I'm left
>back where I began, in that I still don't really understand how deflationism
>avoids the problematic of correspondence.  I mean, if "It is true that the
>cat (my cat, actually) is black" is equivalent in meaning to "There exists a
>(smart, wonderful) creature who really is a cat and who really is black,"
>then what have we gained, or lost, by holding that you can say something is
>true about the world without actually using the word "true"?  I just don't
>get it.

Deflationary theorists only claim that the concept of truth is redundant.
They still need, as do all of us, to analyze the nature of an assertion
like "The cat is black."  Redundancy theorists, unlike the rest of us,
think that once they have analyzed assertions they are finished - there is
no further problem of 'truth'.  I entirely agree with you that redundancy
theorists cannot avoid the problematic of correspondence, which is at the
level of assertions, but I don't believe it was their belief that
redundancy resolved that issue.

>[Also -- and not terribly important -- could you say that something like the
>inverse of this deflationary thesis is held by Habermas (and whoever he
>learned about language from)?  That is, I understand him to be saying
>something like: "To state that `The cat is black' implicitly commits one to
>affirm the validity of one's statement."  (The difference, of course, being
>that the concept of truth is considered redundant in the one case and as
>transcendentally required in the other.)  Or is Habermas talking about
>honesty rather than about validity, so that this whole comparison is silly?]

To me this sounds like the claim that an assertion of a proposition implies 
a belief in it by the one making the assertion.  I think it was G. E. Moore 
who long ago pointed out the absurdity of saying "It's raining, but I don't 
believe it", which makes an assertion allegedly not believed by the speaker. 
So every assertion is accompanied by a tacit "I believe".  Similary you 
could say that every assertion is accompanied by a tacit "It's true".

>I'm sorry to be doing so much thinking out loud here, but here's the crux of
>what I've been preoccupied with: in so far as truth is an idea, I'd be
>inclined to think that, like other ideas, it doesn't exist on, say, the
>moon, where, apart from the occasional visits by us, there don't seem to be
>any cognizers on board.  This is what sparked my curiousity about just what
>ontological commitments are involved in deflationary and correspondence
>theories of truth respectively.  

A correspondence theory of truth certainly is tied to subjectivity, since it 
understands truth as a correspondence between things in the mind or language 
and things that exist independently of mind and language.  A proposition is 
true if and only if it corresponds to the facts.  A correspondence theory of 
truth could be substantive only if propositions and facts were independently 
identifiable.  If they are not, then the assertion of correspondence
becomes a trivial platitude, a guiding form for a genuine theory of truth.
The problem for a correspondence is not the existence of a correlation
between facts and propositions (or thoughts), but the claim that such a
correspondence explains truth, rather than the other way around.

Bhaskar wants to view truth in an objective way, as alethic truth, which 
exists independently of subjectivity.  Since facts are social constructs, a
correspondence theory would be subjective and trivial as an explanation of
truth, since we will always ensure that our transitive propositions and
facts are correlated.  A correspondence theory could be framed differently,
though: a proposition would be true if and only if it were to correspond to
the intransitive events and situations it describes.  Since events and
situations exist at the level of the actual and are generated by a deeper
level of real structures and mechanisms, an adequate theory of truth is
surely tied to the level of the real, unlike the reformulated
correspondence theory which is actualist in nature. 

>But some questions come after this.  First, can I hold that ideas don't
>exist where there aren't any thinkers (indeed that the question of whether
>they do borders on the unintelligible) and still maintain that the idea of
>truth describes a relationship between concepts, produced by thinkers, and a
>reality which is not itself contingent upon thinkers for its existence?

Here you are in effect producing a critique of a correspondence theory.  We
might agree that there is a concept of "truth" which describes a
correspondence between concepts and reality, however such a concept of
truth must be derivative on an alethic concept of truth, or so CR says, I
believe.

>Second, what about those pesky mathematical ideas?  I mean, they're produced
>by thinkers, but they seem to capture relationships which are *NOT*
>themselves contingent upon anyone's intellectual agency.  So it's a lot more
>tempting to say that the relationship captured by the concept of pi exists,
>whether or not there's anyone around to call it pi, similar to how objects
>fall (or not), regardless of whether there's anyone around to explain this
>state of affairs through the idea of gravity.  Is the concept of truth more
>like the idea of pi in this respect, or more like the idea that capitalism
>is prone to crisis?           

I have mixed feelings about mathematical concepts, but let's agree that pi
does exist independently of human subjectivity.  I think CR wants to say
the capitalism with its propensity to crisis has a reality that cannot be
reduced to human subjectivity, which is nevertheless an essential
component.  So you are asking whether alethic truth, which cannot be
reduced to human subjectivity, has human subjectivity as an essential
component?  I'm inclined to say no, although the temptation to say yes
occurs in dealing with alethic truth of human institutions.  I'm interested
to hear what others on the list think about this one.

Louis Irwin



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