The Concept of Truth

The Concept of Truth 9780230_297852_01_prexii.indd i 2/16/2011 7:26:53 PM Also by Richard Campbell FROM BELIEF TO U...

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The Concept of Truth

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Also by Richard Campbell FROM BELIEF TO UNDERSTANDING: A Study of Anselm’s Proslogion Argument on the Existence of God (1976) SECONDARY EDUCATION FOR CANBERRA: Report of the Working Committee for College Proposals for the Australian Capital Territory (1973) TRUTH AND HISTORICITY (1992)

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The Concept of Truth Richard Campbell Emeritus Professor, Australian National University

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© Richard Campbell 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29785–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Campbell, Richard James, 1939– The concept of truth / Richard Campbell. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–29785–2 (hardback) 1. Truth. I. Title. BD171.C355 2011 121—dc22

2011004358

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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To Petra, who is always true

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Contents Preface

x

1 Introduction: Truth in Trouble 1.1 The trouble with truth 1.2 The undermining of truth 1.3 The rise of relativism 1.4 Confronting the challenge

1 1 4 9 13

2 The Linguistic Conception of Truth 2.1 Conceptions and theories of truth 2.2 Different conceptions of truth 2.3 The linguistic conception 2.4 Rendering truths explicit 2.5 The ‘truth-values’ of linguistic items 2.6 The relation of agreement 2.7 Minimalist and disquotation theories

17 17 19 20 27 32 36 41

3 The Functions Truth Serves 3.1 Desiderata for truth-theories 3.2 The relevance of the desiderata 3.3 The point of the predicate “true” 3.4 The opposition between truth and falsity 3.5 Norms and facts 3.6 Pointers to the primary locus of truth

45 45 49 50 54 55 58

4 Truth in Action 4.1 Self-maintenance 4.2 Autonomous life 4.3 Functions and normativity 4.4 The emergence of goal-seeking 4.5 The emergence of error 4.6 Minimal action 4.6.1 Goal- directedness 4.6.2 The possibility of error 4.6.3 Behaving as a functional whole 4.7 Self- directed and reflective action 4.8 The irreducibility of actions 4.9 The actions of bacteria 4.10 The grounding of truth

62 63 66 73 76 78 80 81 83 86 88 91 93 95

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Contents

5 Acting Truly 5.1 Truth as the agreement of an object with its concept 5.2 The normativity of truth 5.3 Being genuine and being faithful 5.4 Consistency in action 5.5 The historicity of human being 5.6 The temporality of truth 5.7 Acting faithfully: Objectivity and openness

100 100 104 106 110 112 115 118

6 The Genesis of Representations 6.1 Representation as correspondence 6.2 The interactive model of representation 6.3 The term “representation” 6.4 Detecting misrepresentations 6.5 The biosemantic model 6.6 Representations in human consciousness 6.7 Representing objects

125 126 132 136 138 142 144 149

7

157 158 159 164 168 173 174 178

Acts of Assertion 7.1 Assertions as speech-acts 7.2 Identifying assertions 7.3 The function of linguistic representations 7.4 Simple acts of assertion – referring 7.5 Simple acts of assertion – predicating 7.6 Simple acts of assertion – communicating 7.7 Complex assertions

8 The Truth of Statements 8.1 Understanding and interpretation 8.2 Interpretation and description 8.3 Ascribing truth to statements 8.4 Evaluating the T-schemata 8.5 Appropriateness and success 8.6 False statements

182 182 187 192 196 199 204

9

212 213 217 220 223 225 233

The Challenge of Sceptical Relativism 9.1 The possibility of truth 9.2 Engaging with the world 9.3 The relativist predisposition 9.4 The presuppositions of relativism 9.5 The human situation 9.6 Relativity and truth

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Contents ix

10

Truth as Faithfulness 10.1 Perspectives and faithfulness 10.2 Openness to the truth 10.3 Truth as a value

241 241 244 246

Bibliography

249

Index

255

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Preface This book is the second I have written on the topic of truth. In my Truth and Historicity (Oxford: 1992), I sought to throw light on our contemporary intellectual predicament by examining the different conceptions of truth held by philosophers from its beginning in ancient Greece to the present. That was a historically structured book, tracing the intellectual tensions which led from the early Greek idea that truth is timeless, unchanging, and free from all relativism, up to the seventeenth-century crisis which led to the collapse of that idea, and then on through the emergence of historical consciousness to the existentialist, sociological and linguistic approaches of our own time. My thesis was that the current mood of sceptical relativism arises from the way those differing past conceptions continue to resound in our present-day use of the word, while the growing awareness of our historicity has rendered truth in those senses unattainable. This book builds on the former, without presupposing acquaintance with it. In the final chapter of Truth and Historicity I sketched an action-based conception of truth. This, I suggested, would offer a constructive way of responding to sceptical relativism while taking account of our historicity. But it was only a sketch. This book seeks to develop that idea systematically. In working out how to flesh it out I have learnt much from Mark Bickhard, of Lehigh University. Since our first meeting in 1999, I have come to appreciate his radical rethinking of the metaphysical underpinnings of how we understand ourselves. His influence pervades especially Chapters 4, 5 and 6. This project has been sustained by the unflagging support of my wife Petra, who has read and re-read numerous drafts and offered incisive comments upon them. Without her encouragement, criticism, and advice, this would have been a poorer and less accessible work. R.J.C. The Australian National University October 2010

x

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ὁ δὲ ποιῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἔϱχεται πϱὸς τὸ φῶς He who does the truth comes to the light – John 3:21

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1 Introduction: Truth in Trouble

1.1

The trouble with truth

Truth is in trouble. A deep and pervasive disillusion with the very concept now pervades Western culture. Of course, the words “truth” and “true” are still in regular use, but appeals to truth, whether made by powerful public figures or in ordinary private disagreements, are liable these days to be met with cynicism – dismissed as little more than power plays. In part, this disparagement springs from a healthy distrust of those who have a manifest interest in manipulating and deceiving us, be it in private and personal relationships, or in the public domain, by making up stories likely to achieve their own ends. When politicians begin some pronouncement by saying, “The reality is ...” or “The truth is ...” what follows is little more than the ‘spin’ which they wish us to accept and believe. Again, it is proverbial that truth is the first casualty in war. Perhaps people have always been persuaded to join in wars by misguided beliefs, half-truths and trickery, but today those ‘justifications’ have been quickly shown up for all the world to see, as blatant falsehoods. Logically, the exposure of lies provides no grounds for distrusting truth. On the contrary, falsity can only be exposed by showing that something inconsistent with it is true. But when the issues involved are universally recognized as of great consequence, such as going to war, or incarcerating citizens and refugees without fair trial, or covering up corruption, the eventual outcome of repeated instances of lying is to undermine confidence in the practice of assertion itself, of truth-telling. Maybe more political statements are true than are false, but how is the ordinary citizen to recognize which is which? As people have become increasingly sensitive to this predicament, demand for greater transparency and accountability in public and corporate affairs has grown. Indeed, there is an argument that these calls amount to a subtle but significant shift in the concept of democracy. Most Western countries settled in the twentieth century for some form of representative democracy, 1

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wherein every three to five years the people elected representatives whom they trust to make political and economic decisions on their behalf. That trust is being eroded, with increasing suspicion of the integrity of political processes and doubts about the truthfulness of public discourse. More subtle and damaging than blatant lies is the manipulation of public opinion by using the mass media to ‘sell’ some particular interpretation of events for political advantage. The activities of ‘spin doctors’ to massage public opinion have more to do with gaining or retaining power than with matters of truth. And paradoxically, the pressure on the media to present a ‘balance’ of views has meant that insubstantial or crackpot opinions are often given unwarranted airtime, while inconvenient truths are dismissed as ‘mere theories’ contested by socalled ‘experts’ with dubious credentials. Similarly, most people are aware that the extravagant claims typical of commercial advertisements cannot be taken at face value – but it is just too hard for the ordinary shopper to evaluate them all. Often, these advertisements provide little information about a product which might satisfy the requirements of potential buyers. Rather, they aim to create ‘needs’ which previously did not exist at all. “Truth in advertising” is an empty slogan. But the trouble with truth stems not just from public lies, deception, and manipulation. Deeper and more significant social changes have rendered problematic traditional understandings of truth itself. As the mass media have made us increasingly aware of the diversity amongst peoples – linguistically, culturally, ethnically, religiously, economically – there has been a growing tendency to regard the ‘truths’ claimed by particular cultural traditions as having, at best, circumscribed validity. Any legitimacy conceded to claims which reflect another culture is limited strictly to that culture. This has led to differences in belief being regarded simply as alternative truths, each equally valid. In the face of all this, some look to scientific investigation to provide the procedures by which to distinguish truth from falsity. But, despite the spectacular advances of modern science, fostering technological innovations and engineering triumphs, it seems unlikely that science can deliver the verities for which many yearn. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a general belief that, apart from a few residual anomalies, physics was close to achieving its final form. Further reflection on those anomalies soon shattered that optimism and led to radically novel theories. Even now, physics is riven by deep theoretical inconsistencies, yet to be overcome. But more than that, the contemporary understanding of scientific method favours the view that scientific theories can never be proven true, only more or less probable. More precisely, as Karl Popper once insisted, theories cannot be verified, only falsified. At best, the evidence can only provide support – not proof – for the surviving alternatives. Some philosophers of science maintain that eventually the sciences will converge, so that what emerges at the end will put all doubts and anxieties

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Introduction: Truth in Trouble

3

to rest. One of the best-known and influential statements of this view comes from C.S. Pierce in 1878: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object presented in this opinion is the real.” But that inquiry will reach a final consummation is little more than a confession of faith. Such an ideal seems little more than unwarranted confidence in our capacity to comprehend the world in its entirety. As John McDowell (1994, 40) has said, “There is no guarantee that the world is completely within the reach of a system of concepts and conceptions as it stands at some particular moment of historical development”.The history of scientific investigation over the past 200 years has rather been one of increasing specialization, with practitioners knowing more and more about less and less. The vision of an overall synoptic theory of everything seems to be receding, rather than seeming attainable. At another level, in ordinary discussions, people have become more sensitive to how each person’s interpretation and perspective influence how they understand matters. Indeed, it is a mark of maturity to recognize that ‘there are two sides to every story’, as the cliché has it. Nor is this just homely wisdom; the law courts have learnt that even impartial eyewitness accounts of some incident are not always reliable, and seek corroboration before reckoning such evidence as factual. Likewise, expert witnesses have too frequently been found wanting as they have been tempted to pontificate on topics beyond the often quite narrow range of their expertise, or have allowed hearsay to influence their testimony. The net effect of becoming sensitive to the influence of interpretation and perspective is to take the confident assertions of others with the proverbial ‘grain of salt’. Where the truth lies is often past finding out. More than that: this wisdom comes at the expense of easy assumptions about truth itself. A widespread reaction – expressed in many an ordinary conversation – has been to ‘relativize’ truth, to hold that what is ‘true for you’ need not be ‘true for me’. When philosophers have attended to this phenomenon they have tended to regard it as a logical howler, and some have railed against confusing truth with belief. Such commentary, however, fails to get to grips with the deep roots from which this relativism has grown. The phenomenon in question warrants deeper exploration than that. Resistance to accepting the truthclaims of others does not stem just from the difficulty of establishing their truth. Nor is it simply the result of more people having direct experience of cultural differences, made easier by modern means of transport, large-scale immigration, and televised reports. Also feeding into the relativizing of truth is a formal feature of statement-making itself. An act of assertion makes a claim, an explicit declaration as to how something or other is. That is uncontroversial. But there is another claim implicit in any act of assertion. Speakers (and writers) purport to be knowledgeable about the state of affairs of which they are speaking. Of course, this is not as strong as if the speaker had made that claim explicitly. But generally

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anyone making a statement is expressing a belief that that is how the matter stands. By so doing, the speaker is implicitly claiming to be in a position to speak authoritatively on the matter. That fact explains why speakers sometimes encounter challenges to their right to make the statements they have, as if the very making of statements were intrinsically authoritarian. Hence, when appeals to truth are dismissed as little more than power plays, that rejection is not simply perverse. It draws upon the very nature of assertion itself. As challenges to the legitimacy of exercises of authority have become more widespread, so it has become easier to dismiss those truthclaims with which one does not agree. This disputing of authority extends far beyond political domains. From the rebelliousness of teenagers to the breakdown of respect for the learned professions, speaking with authority is often perceived nowadays as authoritarian. Of course, being an authority is not the same as being authoritarian. Nevertheless, all too frequently, this rejection goes so far as dismissing the validity of someone’s right to make the statements they have, instead of engaging with its content. All of this has put even seemingly straightforward questions of truth in doubt, and on the larger issues of life and death there is now widespread avoidance, agnosticism, or scepticism. So long as those doubts are confined to particular claims, or particular classes of claims, they do not attack the very concept of truth. But the cumulative effect of these developments has been to throw doubt on the usefulness and viability of that concept itself. That conclusion does not necessarily follow from the various trends we have briefly reviewed, but pointing out that logical fact does not help much. When truthfulness is systematically doubted, truth itself becomes dubious. This profound and pervasive disillusion and distrust of truthclaims is a relatively new phenomenon in Western culture. It is the deep problem of truth in our time. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who suggested that what we call truth is no more than today’s ‘convenient fiction’. We might entertain a grudging admiration for the mischievous character of this dictum, but if it were generally adopted it would subvert the whole practice of truthtelling. To explore how that practice is to be understood, and to articulate a richer and more securely based conception of truth than philosophers over the past century have standardly expounded, is the purpose of this book. Rethinking how the concept of truth is grounded will show that its devaluing is ill-founded.

1.2

The undermining of truth

This brief review does no more than identify a number of symptoms. In part, those developments can be attributed to the impact of social changes, themselves profoundly affected by rapid technological change. But diagnosing this malaise along the lines of the sociology of knowledge, while no

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5

doubt illuminating, would not get to the heart of the matter. For what we are observing are the consequences of conceptual developments beginning as far back as ancient Greek philosophy, which impinge upon the way truth itself has been understood, valued, and promoted from one era to another. Deep philosophical issues underlie these changes, which have seeped down into popular consciousness. I examined these conceptual developments at length in my Truth and Historicity (Campbell 1992). Here it will suffice to delineate them briefly. While the disillusion with truth is a relatively recent phenomenon, and while the technological changes mentioned have had their greatest impact within living memory, its philosophical roots are planted much further back. The intellectual formation of Western culture owes much to successive mutations of the synthesis of ancient Greek philosophy and Biblical Christianity first forged in the early centuries of the Christian era. Relevant here is why this synthesis eventually broke down. For Plato – and Aristotle too – truth (which is how we translate their word alētheia) was an ontological concept. That is, Plato took alētheia to be primarily an objective state of the Real (to on): the state of being manifest, not forgotten or concealed, or obscured by any admixture of otherness. For him, reality was not the phenomena we observe in our ever- changing world, but the changeless realm of eternal Forms or Ideas, the archetypes of those phenomena. Modern readers, who usually think of truth as a feature of statements or propositions, find this conception of truth, as the unhiddenness of the Real, a very strange idea. Nevertheless, certain features of that conception have been passed down to us through a series of conceptual transformations, even as that conception itself has been rendered nigh unintelligible. A crucial alteration was wrought by Augustine, with his Christianized neo-Platonic makeover of the Platonic tradition, when he identified truth in Plato’s sense with God. For Augustine, and the theological tradition stemming from him, God is the Truth. If truth is a state of the Real – indeed of what Plato at one point called ‘the really real reality’ (ousia ontos ousa, Phaedrus, 247c.) – and if one also believes, as Augustine did, that God is the most real and the creator of everything else, then that identification makes logical sense. Nevertheless, this conceptual fusion generated profound conceptual tensions and a powerful dynamic. For instance, one issue which had to be resolved is the following. For Plato, the Real was constituted by the many Forms. His thinking about them was modelled on geometrical figures, whose properties are absolute, unchanging, timeless, and perspectivally neutral. These eternal Forms are what justify the use in language of general terms – universals – to describe distinct things, which occur at different times and places. The major metaphysical divide was between the Real, thus characterized, and the worldly realm of becoming (genesis). But as Christian theology developed, the major divide

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came to be drawn through a different point, between the eternal creator and everything else, all of which was either created by God, or made out of creaturely components. In this theology, the only real distinctions within God which could be allowed were those between the Persons of the Trinity. So Augustine’s identification of truth with God provoked the question of how the many Forms posited by Plato and his followers could be maintained as distinct realities. This conundrum spawned many contradictions. Although various abstruse and subtle proposals were advanced over the following centuries to ease the tensions thus generated, basically only two ways of resolving them were logically possible. Either the Forms themselves – and the eternal truths which articulate them – were created, and therefore neither divine nor eternal; or they had to be internalized within God, saving their eternal character, but sacrificing their distinctness. Either way, the Forms could no longer serve the metaphysical role proposed by Plato, and had to be radically transformed. Since Plato had understood truth in terms of the Forms, either strategy meant that his conception of truth had to be radically transformed too. Right up to the end of the medieval period, the tradition accepted the option devised by Augustine, of internalizing the Forms within God as divine ideas, and wrestled with the consequent issue of how to explain their multiplicity. It was René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, who broke with this tradition by opting for the other alternative, that they too were created.1 Holding that no real distinction could be maintained between the divine understanding and the divine will, Descartes held that the eternal truths, such as those of mathematics, have been established by the same kind of causality as that by which God had created all things, and are unchanging only because God’s will is unchanging. Although Descartes only dared express this novel solution in letters written to his friend Mersenne, within a generation Thomas Hobbes was openly declaring that we can demonstrate geometry because we humans have made it, a position then developed systematically in the first decade of the eighteenth century by Giambattista Vico (1965, 23). Again, while for Plato truth was primarily a state of the Real, from as early as the Homeric poems the Greeks had standardly used their word for “true” (alēthes) also to comment on what is said (logoi). (Of course, the word “true” is still used in this way today.) For Plato, however, this was a derivative use, which makes sense if speaking is understood simply as a way of picking out realities (although that caused Plato a severe problem: how to explain the very possibility of false speech). But when this metaphysical picture was transposed into a conceptual framework constrained by Christian doctrines another question arose: how now should the truth of statements be understood?

1. That the Forms were themselves created had in fact been proposed once before, by the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (20BCE–50CE).

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The most thorough answer was worked out by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It drew upon Aristotle’s reworking of the Platonic doctrine of Forms, with further modifications to make it fit within a Christian setting. Aquinas dealt with the problem of how there could be a multiplicity of Forms within God by proposing that God knows his own essence in all the many ways in which it is knowable, not only in itself, but also as some likeness of it can be participated in by created things. Accordingly, the many ways in which God knows his own essence provide multiple models for the creation of different things in the world. Aquinas then invoked the Aristotelian view that the very same form which is individuated in some particular lump of matter can also inform the intellect of a particular knower. This ‘double occurrence’ of the forms – in matter and in a human intellect – is what enables true judgements to be made about the created items in the world. These considerations led to the construction of a very powerful model of scientific explanation (contrary to the modern prejudice which mocks the medievals for being scientifically ignorant). Although the medievals did not explicitly articulate this model as I am about to, it can be reconstructed from their writings. According to this model, and leaving aside the complications which arise whenever voluntary agents like us are involved, the explanation of some phenomenon requires ascending a five-step chain of reasoning. Firstly, identify all the agents (the ‘efficient causes’) operating in the situation in question. Next, sort out which aspect of the observed behaviour is attributable to which of these agents. That is, one has to resolve the ‘forced’ or ‘violent’ behaviour in question into the effects of the ‘natural’ behaviour of each agent. Thirdly, explain the ‘natural’ action of each efficient cause by citing its nature or essence. Fourthly, identify the nature or essence of each agent in terms of its form and ‘common matter’. That essence is determined solely by a thing’s form and its ‘common matter’, that is, the kind of stuff out of which it is made, not by the particular lump of stuff which that form is in. Finally, those forms, since they are purely intelligible, can be described by stating their definitions. Once this inductive process has been accomplished, it is possible, in principle, to turn it on its head, and deduce why what happened did. Echoes of this model of scientific explanation still survive to this day, especially the explanatory paradigm of a deduction from general laws or principles. But in its medieval version, it depended heavily on the Aristotelian distinction of form and matter, and his fourfold analysis of causality. Significantly, this model admitted only two places where contingency could enter. Namely, it is contingent which agents happen to be operative in the given situation, and it is contingent in which particular lumps of matter the forms identified happen to be instantiated. Since this second source of contingency was irrelevant to the explanation, this was a very ‘necessitarian’ model of explanation. Despite the fact that the evolving synthesis of Platonic metaphysics and Christian doctrine lasted for more than one and a half millennia, it was

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inherently unstable and broke down at the end of the medieval period. At the centre of this breakdown was what I have called ‘the Fracture of the Forms’. By the end of the seventeenth century, it came to be believed that human minds have no special insight into the real essences which make created entities to be what they are. There could be no confidence that the general ideas in terms of which human understanding classifies things are the same as the forms which constitute the real essences of those things and which made them behave as they ‘naturally’ do. Some of the considerations which led to this breakdown were strictly philosophical; some were influenced by developments in physics; and some were theological. In particular, from the fourteenth century onwards the Thomist-Aristotelian model of explanation was attacked as ascribing too much necessity to how things behave, thereby limiting divine freedom. Once again, the tensions in the conceptual fusion of Greek metaphysics and Christian doctrine were stretched to breaking point. A corollary of the insistence on divine sovereignty and freedom was that the utter contingency of created existence became the new theme. Increasingly, from Duns Scotus, through William of Ockham, to Descartes, it was insisted that God could do anything he willed, including making things behave in ways contrary to their natures. Also increasingly, universals (exemplified supremely in the archetypal Forms or Ideas) were reduced to the way general words are used in statements. The upshot was that the old model of scientific explanation, worked out so carefully by the medievals, fractured in the middle. That split occurred in the notion of essence. John Locke was the philosopher who articulated the crucial point, and therefore warrants being recognized as the ‘father of modern philosophy’, an honour more usually accorded to his predecessor Descartes. For Locke, the real essence of a thing is ‘the constitution of its insensible parts’, which is, he tells us “the source of all those operations which are to be found in any individual of that sort” (1700, III, vi, 3). But, he claims, we do not know the real essences of things. So we have to make do with the ‘nominal essence’, which is just “the abstract idea [in the Cartesian, not the Platonic sense] to which the name is annexed” (III, vi, 2). This fracture not only destroyed the medieval chain of scientific explanation. It also threw into question the very possibility of attaining truth. Ever since, the concept of truth itself has become deeply problematic. Truth lost the metaphysical underpinnings which had sustained it throughout many mutations for more than two millennia. It is not too much to say that philosophy in the modern period – that is, ever since the seventeenth century – has been driven by massive intellectual efforts to come to terms with this disruption. Nor is this a problem peculiar to philosophers. The developments I have been summarizing, I am claiming, underlie the popular mood of scepticism about truth manifest in the social phenomena previously mentioned.

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1.3

9

The rise of relativism

As the ideal of scientific knowledge based upon discerning the fixed and eternal essences of things crumbled, so the thought arose that perhaps we humans do not have fixed and eternal essences either. From this thought has emerged the more modern idea of the historicity of human existence. Harbingers of this radical thought can be found in the fifteenth century, in the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Most famously, in 1486 Pico della Mirandola composed a fable in which the Divine Craftsman tells Adam that he is to fix the limits of his nature for himself, for “thou art to be the moulder and maker of thyself; thou wilt sculpt thyself into whatsoever thou dost prefer” (1486[1965], 4–5). Most probably, Pico’s intention with this tale was not to invent a new humanistic metaphysics, but to exhort people not to vegetate, and not to act like animals, but to choose the highest level of moral existence. But in recent times his fable has been read much more radically, as the first proclamation of the idea that every human being is a self-maker, that we each construct our own individual natures. The subsequent centuries saw the emergence of a new appreciation of historical differences, influenced by many factors, including the penetration by European explorers and colonizers into other parts of the world. This gradually crystallized into the notion that human lives are historically structured. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the word “culture”, which had meant cultivating the soil and the development of good manners through education, began to be used to mean the civilization, customs, artistic achievements, etc. of a people, especially at a certain stage of its development or history. Significantly, a few philosophers began to take seriously the historical dimensions of life, thought, language, and religion – especially Vico, Herder, and in the nineteenth century, Hegel and Dilthey. By the twentieth century, this cultural diversity could no longer be ignored. The mixing of cultures through large-scale immigration, and the increasing exposure through the mass media of how different peoples live, have meant that nowadays the variety of cultures impacts upon people in their everyday lives. The increasing awareness of historical and social conditions began to change how we understand ourselves. A few philosophers, most notably Martin Heidegger, began taking the historicity of human existence as a major theme (indeed, in his later writings Heidegger wrote of ‘the history of being’). In more recent times, the globalization of both the news and the entertainment media has been bringing this new self-understanding home to popular consciousness; people in Western societies now know that they can no longer assume that how they think is how anyone would think, at any time or in any culture. This consciousness of how diverse are human ways of thinking has led many to relativize truth itself. For them, truth can no longer be taken as eternal, as it was generally understood from Plato onwards. Those Christians

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10 The Concept of Truth

who continue to accept the Augustinian identification of truth with God still do. And through a curious transposition which we will explore further in the next chapter, it still is by many philosophers in the analytic tradition stemming from Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. But the old ideal of eternal truth is now increasingly dismissed, as simply unattainable by historically situated humans. On this contemporary view, truth is no longer absolute; it is ineluctably infused with the relativities of time, place, culture, and circumstance. It is, however, one thing to deny that truth is absolute; it is another to treat truthclaims as so locked up within personal, historical, and cultural circumstances that those who do not share them are in no position to assess the truth of those claims. That is, it is one thing to insist that truthclaims are unavoidably embedded in a particular context and made from a particular perspective. It is another to regard it as illegitimate for others to venture judgements about those claims. In this latter attitude, the rejection of absolute truth has taken a relativist and sceptical turn. It is being assumed that truthclaims made from one point of view are inaccessible to others. When some today rail against ‘relativism’, it is usually this sceptical form of relativism which is troubling them. Instances of this relativist attitude are so numerous that it will suffice to mention just one striking example taken from a daily newspaper. An interview with the playwright Arthur Miller led to a discussion of his plays After the Fall and Finishing the Picture, which are based on his marriage with the actress Marilyn Monroe. Asked how those plays should be interpreted, he responded, “There is no correct version. It’s purely the way I see it.” But what if the rest of us see it differently? “It doesn’t matter”, he replied, “It’s my truth, not your truth.”2 There has, unsurprisingly, been a backlash against this sort of relativism. Some philosophers have argued that it is self-refuting, and conservative politicians and their supporters fulminate against it, as evidence of the decline of civilization and right thinking. But all their arguments have generally been ineffectual.3 As well, a number of philosophers have developed elaborate arguments designed to show that we still can attain objective knowledge (e.g., McDowell 1994 and Nozick 2001). I find their arguments interesting, illuminating, and generally sound. But it will take more than arguments like these, cogent though they are, to overcome the devaluing of truth which is now so widespread. More influential than these philosophical arguments has been the upsurge of assorted religious and political movements whose adherents insist that they alone have the truth and that alternative opinions and beliefs cannot be tolerated as simply differences in lifestyle, but have to be treated 2. Interview with Deborah Soloman, Canberra Sunday Times, Relax Magazine, 17 October 2004, p. 4. 3. We will examine the allegation that relativism is self-refuting in §9.3.

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as serious errors in need of correction. Nowadays, such people are often labelled ‘fundamentalists’. That term was once a self- description by which certain Christian groups characterized their own theological position, but the label has now acquired a pejorative overtone. With that nuance, the term has now been extended to hard-liners in other religions – for example, certain groups are commonly called Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists – and to others who hold secular ideologies, such as the labelling of certain economic commentators as ‘market fundamentalists’. In part, the rise of these different fundamentalisms is a reaction to the increasing rapidity of change in modern life, itself the result of technological innovation, together with the impact of globalization upon more traditional lifestyles, employment prospects, and inherited social structures. When so much seems to be in turmoil, the stability of one’s life seems to be continually threatened. It is not so extraordinary that many people yearn for some verities by which to steer their way through so many conflicting opinions, threats, and pressures. Yet whether the beliefs invoked as verities are indeed absolute truths is challenged by the awareness of cultural diversity. Exacerbating this tussle over the status of truth have been escalating challenges within Western society to the legitimacy of traditional authority – whether political, professional, or parental. So deep-seated and widespread have these been that the philosopher Jürgen Habermas was moved to write in 1973 about the ‘legitimation problem in late capitalism’. I argued above that to make an act of assertion is implicitly to claim to be in a position to speak authoritatively on the matter. One philosopher who has emphasized this aspect of acts of assertion is Michel Foucault, who has explored the way, in specific periods of history, certain types of discourse become dominant through being established as what he calls ‘regimes of truth’. By that phrase, he was calling attention to how the criteria, procedures, and authorization of what counts as true both legitimize and are supported by power structures. Much quoted is the following passage from an interview given in 1977 (Foucault 1980, 131): Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. This idea led him to suggest that “truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it” (p. 133). This linkage of truth to power has been eagerly seized upon by ‘postmodern’ writers, who are attracted to the idea that truth is produced, not simply discovered. These writers are often so enthused by how the idea of

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‘regimes of truth’ can by deployed to ‘analyse’ practices in a wide variety of disciplines such as biology, management, education, and journalism, that they do not bother to acknowledge the phrase as Foucault’s; it has been incorporated into their discourse. For these writers, the word “Truth” (especially when written with a capital “T”) can only be invoked with heavy irony. Books have appeared with titles like Dismantling Truth (Lawson and Appignanesi 1989). In that vein, these adherents of ‘post-modernism’ rejoiced that the ‘rhetoric of truth’ was being overthrown, for the reason that that rhetoric is invoked only to legitimate certain regimes of power, and to justify terrible acts of oppression. Instead of being distracted by a ‘metaphysical’ obsession with Truth, which has to be rejected as unattainable, we are now being advised to welcome its dismantling, since we have been ‘freed’ to get on with the genuine tasks of living. We should instead accept that the only realistic questions are the practical ones: What should we choose to believe? On what is agreement amongst people possible? What sort of stories are we able to tell? This train of thought reinforces the tendency to relativism. If I do not agree with what you say, I can soften this disagreement by expressing my dissent in a relativist way: I can say that while that might be your truth, it is not the truth for me. Add to this relativist predisposition doubt about ever being able conclusively to verify significant truth-claims, and the cumulative effect has been a wholesale devaluing of truth. In traditional conceptions of truth, it was a highly rated value. Nowadays, many operate with the implicit policy of not recognizing truth as a value at all. Indeed, as we shall see, there are many philosophers who explicitly defend such a view (although, paradoxically, they still refer to truth and falsity as ‘truth-values’). All this has created a great deal of confusion. Contrary to the naïve assumption of the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers of the mid-twentieth century, everyday language is not metaphysically innocent. It is, in fact, a fossil-bed in which is preserved the detritus of the metaphysical systems of past epochs. That is, the words we use still carry with them many of the nuances they acquired at the hands of earlier philosophers. Those past usages continue to resonate when significant words are used today, often in quite different verbal contexts and with different intent. So it is with the words “true” and “truth”. The Platonic nuance of being timeless, absolute, and unchanging continues to echo, despite the fact that few today accept, or even understand, Plato’s metaphysics. As I shall argue, many analytic philosophers still operate with the assumption that, properly speaking, truth is timeless, and have sought ‘eternal sentences’ to be its ‘bearers’. In a covert way, these philosophers still tend to operate with the assumption, drawn from philosophy’s Platonic inheritance, that they can occupy an Olympian standpoint, outside the flow of history, not subject to the limitations of any specific context. Yet the metaphysical frameworks within which that way of understanding truth made sense have been irrevocably undercut by the

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developments outlined above. So long as we hanker after timeless truth we are doomed to scepticism, because truth in that sense is not accessible by historically situated mortals. One possible response is to give up on truth altogether, and welcome its ‘dismantling’. But that is the counsel of despair. In any way of thinking about it, truth is conceptually tied to what is. Giving up on it would mean cutting human thought and behaviour entirely adrift from reality. Down that route lies insanity; those whose thought and behaviour have become disconnected from reality are schizoid. Alternatively, we might embrace a thoroughgoing relativism as the unavoidable consequence of recognizing our relativity. Such an alternative would arguably be sane, but I reject it too. But justifying such a rejection requires showing how truth can be understood in a way compatible with that recognition. The challenge is how to come to terms with our relativity without sliding into sceptical relativism.

1.4

Confronting the challenge

This challenge is metaphysical in character. Philosophers have often thought of themselves as the guardians of truth – not so often of particular truths, but of the centrality and importance of the concept itself. In recent times, however, they have not served that cause well. That is not to overlook the fact that over the past hundred years a great deal of philosophical ink has been spilled on the topic of truth, especially by philosophers in the analytic tradition. The overriding preoccupation of their debates, however, has been with technical issues related to a range of self-styled ‘theories of truth’. Rarely have those theories engaged effectively with the issues underlying this challenge. One of the foremost factors contributing to this preoccupation was the ‘linguistic turn’ philosophy took in the twentieth century as the spirit of the times became impatient with traditional metaphysics. The tempting thought was that if the meaning of troublesome sentences were thoroughly analysed, many old disputes would simply evaporate. At first, the methodological shift signalled by this ‘turn’ was accompanied by resounding selfcongratulation; soon, it was thought, age- old metaphysical disputes would be resolved – or rather, dissolved – through careful analysis of the logic of our language. This was not an intellectual climate conducive to tackling the erosion of trust in the grounding and significance of truth. This new way of philosophizing did have great strengths. It took its inspiration from the new and powerful systems of formal logic invented by Gottlob Frege in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and then developed further by Russell and others. As an analytical tool, it has proved formidable and influential. But towards the end of the twentieth century that optimism was wearing thin. Metaphysical issues were proving resistant to such easy dissolution, and kept reappearing in new guises. While the

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philosophers squabbled over their preferred theories of truth, and tried to clarify their technical details, the mood of sceptical relativism, engendered by the factors mentioned above, has been percolating through to the wider public. I believe that it is not an effective response simply to point out that relativism is an incoherent doctrine, and then insist that truth continues to be of central importance. For as I will argue, the kind of relativism which is so troubling need not be maintained as a doctrine or universal thesis; rather, it displays a distinctive attitude towards certain truthclaims. Indeed, I will argue that trying to rebut relativist responses as expressions of a universal thesis about all truthclaims is misconceived. If we are to confront constructively the intellectual predicament in which we find ourselves we need first to diagnose the conceptual tensions and shifts through which it has arisen, so that we might discern a way forward. That task was the burden of my Truth and Historicity (Campbell 1992). Then, secondly, we need to rethink the concept of truth, in order to articulate a more adequate conception which is compatible with the recognition of our own relativity, without retreating into relativism. This book undertakes that project. The contemporary troubles we have been reviewing are symptoms of truth’s having lost its former metaphysical grounding and its not having an alternative underpinning which would adequately address the issues of relativity implicit in our historicity. In both ancient and medieval times, the way truth was conceived was inextricably bound up in their metaphysics, and the correspondence theory invented by Locke in the seventeenth century was not metaphysically innocent either. So, likewise, our rethinking of this central concept will inevitably take us into metaphysical territory, if we are to demonstrate a new way of grounding truth, and buttressing its significance. Confronting this challenge calls for more than simply replacing the current theories which purport to explain what it is for statements to be true with some other account focussed on that same question. Indeed, I will contend that the preoccupation of philosophers with what I call the ‘linguistic conception’ of truth is the reason why there has been little effective engagement with this challenge. In the next two chapters I will argue that this linguistic conception, according to which only linguistically structured items are true, has resulted in an impoverishment of the concept of truth. Having cut the meaning of “true” off from its roots, the linguistic conception lacks the resources to deal adequately with the many problems it generates. And it fails to respond to the questions we expect a theory of truth to answer, such as why truth should be the goal of inquiry, why it has normative force, why it should be highly esteemed, and so on. These deficiencies suggest that we need a radically different approach. In the rest of the book, I will endeavour to build the case for a more adequate way of understanding truth.

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Articulating an alternative conception will have to demonstrate how it picks up and illuminates ordinary usage. But beyond that, a more adequate conception needs also to be grounded in a thoroughgoing and defensible understanding of how we are in the world – that is, in a sound ontology. Just as earlier conceptions of truth were inextricably intertwined with the metaphysical understandings of their times, so any renewed conception, if it is to be viable and relevant to our times, will have to engage with the metaphysical issues implicit in contemporary science. Accordingly, a preliminary analysis of how the word “true” is regularly used in relation to non-linguistically structured phenomena will lead us to consider, in Chapter 4, the basis on which actions are properly ascribed to all living things. I will argue that being true is a feature of successful actions, and that the capacity to perform at least minimal actions is integral to life itself. That even relatively simple organisms can maintain themselves in existence for significant periods, despite their being in a state far from thermodynamic equilibrium, is made possible by their ability to perform actions. The necessary conditions for the very existence of all forms of life thus provide truth with a metaphysical underpinning different from those traditionally proffered. With the evolution of more complex and flexible life forms, able to perform self- directed and, in the case of humans, reflective actions, the ability to perform actions has consequently developed, so that their actions are directed towards many different goals. Once we acknowledge that actions can be true, it becomes significant that the word “true” has a wide variety of everyday uses other than the assessment of statements. I will explore these non-linguistic occurrences of truth in Chapter 5. Nevertheless, any properly thought- out proposal will also have to show how it can accommodate the ascription of truth to what is asserted. That has always been a central use for the word “true” and its equivalents, from the earliest Greek thinkers to the present, and in every language. It is one thing to protest, as I do, against philosophers’ narrowing down of truth to its being exclusively ascribed to linguistically structured items. But any account, to be credible, does have to show how it aids our understanding of the ascription of “true” to such representations. I take up that issue in Chapters 7 and 8, after considering, in Chapter 6, the genesis of representations in more primitive life forms. Then, in Chapter 9 I address the question of how this action-based conception of truth engages with the issues I have been sketching in this introduction. Unbridled scepticism is unwarranted, since by acting we can make what we have decided to do come true. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to investigate why relativism has proved so appealing and resistant to the normal attacks. I will argue that attempts to show that relativism is a self-refuting thesis are beside the point, but that the ethical attitudes underlying it are deeply conflicted.

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With this rich, action-based conception, it becomes possible to explain how calling statements true derives its meaning and force from the acts of their assertion. Because actions manifest a kind of normativity, truth too has normative force. This also explains why being true not only in what one asserts, but also in other ways of conducting oneself, should be so highly regarded. Philosophy is a reflective discipline, but its practitioners are not onlookers sitting on Mount Olympus. If philosophers are to be effective guardians of truth, they have to take seriously that we humans are all historically situated, acting out of our pasts and projecting ourselves into our futures. An adequate conception of truth has to be grounded in that fact. Working it out is the burden of this book.

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2 The Linguistic Conception of Truth

The dust raised by the hundred-year battle amongst analytic philosophers about their theories of truth has obscured a remarkable fact: almost everyone engaged in these debates agreed on what the philosophical problem of truth is. Despite their differing theories, they all had much the same conception of truth, which they had adopted quite uncritically. It is now timely to examine this common presupposition with rather more critical distance.

2.1 Conceptions and theories of truth Any genuine intellectual disagreement presupposes some basic agreement. Unlike a power struggle, or in a fight over some object, a debate requires a common understanding of the topic under debate, and there must be significant overlaps in how they understand the central terms used to frame their arguments. While disputants might not even agree on the appropriate ways to name and describe the topic of their dispute, at very least they must each identify the other side as talking about much the same. While such unspoken agreement is a precondition of intellectual disagreements about any matter, it is especially evident in theoretical disputes, where the issues at stake are generally spelt out carefully. It follows that serious disputes over what today are called theories of truth can only occur against the background of a shared conception: a set of assumptions, usually unstated, which delimit the domain of their disagreements. As a first step towards clarifying this situation, let us distinguish between theories of truth, on the one hand, and what I am calling conceptions of truth, on the other. Consider the following sets of questions: • What kind of item is properly called “true”? Although items in many different domains may all be called “true” – for example: propositions;

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statements; sentences; beliefs; ideas; actions; tools; species; persons; general ways of behaving towards others, such as love, friendship, and loyalty, etc. – is there one domain which is regarded as fundamental, with the others regarded as derivative upon the basic use, or explained away as metaphorical? To encapsulate these issues in philosophers’ jargon, what kind of item is the primary locus, or ‘bearer’, of truth?1 What is the relation of truth to falsity? Are they opposites of the same order? Alternatively, do truth and falsity differ in status, so that falsity is derivative, as in some sense a deficient mode of truth? What is it about that primary bearer which warrants its being called true? This question is often (but not universally) glossed as: what does its truth consist in? For example, does it consist in some sort of relation between the primary bearer and something else? Or in some significant features of that bearer? Or does it depend upon, or allude to, something about the circumstances in which the bearer occurs?

I mean these questions to be read in the most generous and inclusive sense possible. For example, with respect to the third set, there were philosophers (e.g., some in the tradition of American pragmatism) who rejected outright the search for any explanation of what truth consists in. Nevertheless, they generally still felt obliged to provide some account of our sense that the truth of an utterance depends on two issues: what the words mean, and how the world is arranged. Their answers to these two issues serve, for my purposes, as responses to the third set of questions. More generally, whatever is admitted as relevant to explaining the circumstances of the appropriate use of “true” can be taken as proffering an account of what warrants calling its bearers true. Now, any account of truth, either explicitly or implicitly, addresses these three sets of questions. Genuine competition between theories, however, can only occur within a common underlying conception, in the sense I am explicating. For example, rival theories might agree on how the first and second set of questions are to be answered, but offer competing accounts of the relation between the primary ‘bearer’ and something else, or competing accounts of what that ‘something’ is. Or they might offer differing characterizations of what the ‘bearer’ of truth is, but agree on the domain within which those bearers are to be found. So, even when competing theorists disagree about the correct characterization of the ‘bearer’ of truth, they generally share the same pre-theoretic understanding of the ‘problem’ they are each trying to ‘solve’. Where the 1. The word “bearer” here means no more than these questions indicate. I am not presuming that truth is some sort of property which such a ‘bearer’ has. (Some philosophers object to the term “bearer” because they deny that truth is a property of anything).

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rival candidates fall within the same general domain, and where they agree on the relation of truth to falsity, and where each presupposes that the concept of truth has to do with what words mean and how the world is arranged, their alternative theories share a common conception of truth, as I am using these two terms.

2.2

Different conceptions of truth

On the other hand, differences amongst conceptions of truth arise when there are fundamental differences in how their proponents would answer these three sets of questions. When they presuppose radically different domains, the different conceptions of truth can seem almost incommensurate. It would be quite misleading to call them competing theories. There is little by way of background agreement to constitute genuine disagreement amongst them. Wherever we find sets of answers to these questions which differ radically in this way, we have to deal, not with different theories, but with different conceptions of truth. Those philosophers who over the past hundred years have been contending for their favoured theory have been oblivious to how novel their underlying conception of truth was. Their lack of historical sensitivity meant that they failed to notice that philosophers in previous centuries (with a few notable exceptions) had in fact operated with conceptions of truth fundamentally different from the one they so blithely presupposed. We have already noted how Plato clearly regarded truth as ontological, as a feature of the Real, and only derivatively as a feature of statements or discourse. That ontological understanding was perpetuated in a Christianized form for more than a millennium by philosophers from Augustine, for whom God is ‘the truth’, to Descartes, for whom God is ‘the source of all being and truth’. And for Hegel the true is the whole, by which he meant much more than a comprehensive and coherent account of what there is. He meant that consummation of the historical and conceptual development of everything, which he called the Absolute. Of the Absolute, he maintained, “it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it in truth is, and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself” (1977, §20). Yet it would be a mistake to say that the alētheia of the early Greeks, the veritas of the medievals, and the Wahrheit of Hegel, were concepts altogether different from truth. After all, these philosophers also used those words in ways closely matching our own. In all instances – from Homer to the present – there is a common concern with speaking the truth and eschewing error. Furthermore, despite taking the fundamental occurrence of truth as non-linguistic, each of these philosophers derived from it a substantive account of the truth of statements. While modern readers might find these

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accounts strange, what is being explained is clearly the same issue of the correctness of what is asserted as is debated today. Nevertheless, when one turns to the discussions of truth amongst Englishspeaking philosophers in the past century, one finds oneself in new conceptual territory. As we have seen, whether truth could be attained at all had already become deeply problematic, and it was within this context that interest came to be focussed exclusively upon the truth of such items as judgements, propositions, statements, etc. Most of the disputes were now about the alleged virtues and weaknesses of competing theories addressing the question of how to explain the truth of such items. Essays on the topic took on an increasingly technical and polemical style, engaging at close quarters with the alleged flaws in rival theories, or proposing amendments designed to overcome objections. In philosophy textbooks, the subject of truth comprised nothing more than a review of the various theories concerning the truth of propositions, statements, etc. No longer was the ‘bearer’ of truth something ontological.

2.3 The linguistic conception What is remarkable about this novel conception of truth is how almost all the disputants implicitly agreed on which use of “true” was of philosophical concern, and they shared a common pre-theoretical assumption as to the domain within which the best theory is to be located. That is, they shared a common set of generic answers to the three sets of questions listed above. Yet rarely were attempts made to identify the basic understandings, adopted quite uncritically, which underlay all these rival theories of truth. This common conception must be clearly distinguished from any specific theory propounded within it; it is not itself a theory of truth, since it is presupposed by these theories. This common conception can be delineated, in a preliminary way, in terms of three shared presuppositions, which constitute a distinctive set of answers to the questions listed in the previous section. These presuppositions, however, have hardly ever been called into question or seriously examined by those advocating some particular theory. It is time to identify them. Firstly, it has been generally assumed that truth is a feature only of items with a linguistic structure, or at its most minimal, that the philosophical question of truth is a matter of analysing the use of “true” ascribed to declarative sentences. If other uses of the term were ever acknowledged – and that rarely happened – they were simply dismissed as metaphorical, of little philosophical interest. I am using the generic phrase “items with a linguistic structure” here because, within that assumption, disagreements raged as to whether the ‘bearers’ of truth are judgements, propositions, statements, assertions, beliefs, sentences, utterances, or some such.

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This matter is complicated by the fact that not all philosophers used the words “statement”, “proposition”, “assertion”, and “utterance” with the same sense; there have been differing accounts as to what these terms themselves mean. 2 In order to characterize this conception of truth, however, it matters little which term, with which meaning, is preferred. (For convenience, I shall generally use the term “statement” when speaking generically about what is asserted, or else I shall use the term favoured by particular thinkers under discussion.) What does matter is the fact that rarely, if ever, was this first assumption ever seriously challenged. Generally, the uncritical assumption was that “true” is properly predicable only of linguistically structured items. In the few instances where it was denied that a belief, for example, is a linguistic item, the disagreement was not fundamental, as we shall shortly see. Disputes relating to this presupposition were about how to characterize these bearers, and which kind of linguistically structured item should be reckoned as the primary ‘bearer’ of truth. Secondly, it has been standardly assumed that truth and falsity are opposites of the same order, to be accounted for in the same sort of way. Advances in propositional logic entrenched this assumption. As that logic developed, truth and falsity came to be treated as the two ‘truth-values’ to be assigned to propositions or statements. The familiar procedure of constructing ‘truth-tables’ to test the validity of arguments has reinforced this second assumption: that “true” and “false” are evaluations of the same order which can be assigned to a statement (or proposition), but express opposite values. Thirdly, it was assumed that the truth of a statement depends upon some external relation, usually some sort of agreement, which it bears to something else. In general, disputes on this point were over what kind of item a true statement agrees with. Depending on their preferred answer, these philosophers gave different characterizations of this relation: correspondence; coherence; consensus; etc. The only exceptions to this general assumption were the minimalist and the ‘redundancy’ or ‘disquotation’ theories,

2. All of these words are either ambiguous, or are used with varying meanings stipulated by different philosophers. What one philosopher called a statement, another would call a sentence type; what was called an utterance by one philosopher sounded very like another’s sentence token (that is, a particular instance of a sentence type), while yet others used the word “utterance” to refer a speech-act (that is, a particular act of uttering a sentence token). Again, some philosophers took “proposition” to be equivalent to “judgement” or “statement”, while others reserved the term “proposition” for the ideal content of different acts of assertion made by uttering synonymous declarative sentences, which might well make different statements in different contexts.

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according to each of which all that needs saying is that “p” is true if and only if p, where “p” can be replaced by any declarative sentence.3 But since these latter theories all rely upon this schematic formula, only a slight modification of my point is required: in the case of these theories, this schema displays, rather than asserts, a relation of agreement. By and large (with a few ostensible exceptions) these three assumptions constitute the conceptual ‘space’ within which most philosophers in the twentieth century set about constructing their favoured theories of truth. The very existence of such an implicit agreement on what the philosophical question of truth is about indicates that together these three assumptions demarcate a quite distinctive way of understanding the concept. I call it the ‘linguistic’ conception. Of course, this characterization is very general, and there were some variants which I will discuss shortly. However, since my current concern is to demarcate the difference between particular theories of truth, on the one hand, and on the other, radically different conceptions of truth, it will suffice for present purposes to focus upon these three assumptions. One of the few philosophers to articulate this conception of truth explicitly was Bertrand Russell, who early in the twentieth century laid down three requirements which any theory of truth must fulfil (1912, 120–121). He stipulated: 1. Our theory of truth must be such as to admit its opposite, falsehood. ... 2. ... truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements: hence a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood. 3. ... although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal properties of the beliefs. These three ‘requirements’ closely mirror (with the first and second reversed) the three assumptions which I have identified as constituting this common conception of truth. It is perhaps not so surprising that only at the beginning of the era of dominance of this conception of truth were they so clearly articulated; thereafter, with few exceptions, philosophers in the analytic tradition took these requirements as so obvious as not to need restating. Indeed, that any analysis of truth has to do only with statements seems so

3. Minimalist theories took the (infinitely long) list of substitution instances of the form ‘ “p” is true if and only if p’ as explaining what it is for a statement to be true, albeit minimally (Horwich 1998), whereas ‘disquotation’ theories denied that any explanation of truth is needed. Some commentators do not distinguish between these two.

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obvious to many contemporary philosophers that any questioning of it is likely to be met with bewildered blinks of incomprehension. More recently, a few philosophers have explicitly endorsed this restriction of the topic to linguistically structured items. One is Nicholas Rescher (1973, 1): Philosophical theories [of truth] in general deal exclusively with the truth of statements or propositions – or, derivatively, such complexes thereof as accounts, narrations, and stories. Other uses of “true” in ordinary language ... are beside the point of concern. The same restriction is implied by Richard Rorty in the following (1989, 5): “ to say that the truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations”. Although this conception of truth is largely an invention of the twentieth century, it was anticipated by John Locke, at the end of the seventeenth century. He was the very first philosopher to assume that truth belongs only to propositions. He baldly declared: Truth then seems to me, in the proper sense of the Word, to signify nothing but the joining and separating of Signs, as the Things signified by them, do agree or disagree with one another. The joining or separating of signs here meant is what by another name, we call Proposition. So that Truth properly belongs only to Propositions. (1700, IV, v, 2 – my italics. He says much the same in II, xxxii, 19.) Despite the disingenuous “then” with which he introduces this sweeping claim, Locke simply declares this “nothing but” without the slightest attempt at any prior argument. It is extraordinary that he could so easily dismiss other conceptions of truth, within which all previous philosophy had been conducted, and that he should introduce such a major shift in thinking with no more than this airy verbal gesture. Perhaps for that reason, few philosophers prior to the twentieth century followed Locke’s novel way of conceiving truth. Only over the past one hundred years has it become so dominant. Lest my contention here be misunderstood, I am in no way disputing the incontestable fact that “true” does have a proper use in connection with statements (or propositions). Interest in the truth of statements is nothing new. From the epic poems of Homer to the present, philosophers have puzzled and argued about how statements (logoi to the Greeks) latch onto reality, and how to account for their truth or falsity, and no philosophical investigation of the topic would be credible unless it encompassed that usage. I am not for a moment suggesting that there is anything inappropriate or

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inadequate in that usage. Nor could anyone seriously suggest that theoretical debates about how best to account for the truth of statements are not addressing a topic of major philosophical importance. None of that is in question here. However, acknowledging the importance of that issue is one matter; narrowing down the location of truth exclusively to statements and the like is a different and momentous move. What is striking here is the restriction of truth to the quasi-linguistic domain, as the linguistic conception assumes. That is the philosophical innovation worthy of examination. To this, there is a possible response. Someone familiar with the contemporary debates might well concede that there are philosophers who have maintained the exclusivity of the first assumption, but suggest that this restriction is not essential. Why not see these competing theories as simply offering an account of “true” when applied to linguistic items – and leave it an open question whether there are other philosophically significant uses of “true”? I do not deny that this response might make the investigation upon which we are embarking more congenial to some; removing the exclusive “only” from the first assumption would allow the current theories of truth to stand simply as competing accounts of the truth of statements without commenting on how those accounts relate to the alternative conceptions of truth. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to draw attention to the restrictive nature of the linguistic conception, as I have outlined it, for three reasons: (a) Drawing attention to the exclusivity claim sharpens the contrast with other, including older, conceptions which take the primary locus of truth not to be with linguistically structured items but elsewhere (e.g., for Plato, the Forms; for the Augustinian tradition, God; for Hegel, the Absolute). And, as foreshadowed, I will be arguing later for a primary locus different both from the linguistic domain and from these older ontological conceptions; (b) Everyone allows that “true” (or its cognates in other languages) has an important use in assessing linguistic items, whether or not they believe that that is its primary locus. Therefore, adopting the above suggestion would be of no help in distinguishing distinctively different conceptions of truth; and (c) Not only has it been expressly maintained by some that the philosophical interest in truth is confined to statements or propositions, the practice of many other proponents of theories of truth shows that they accept this restriction too. That is, they have been taking it as read. This narrowing down of the concept of truth goes far beyond acknowledging the importance of giving some account of the truth of statements. Rather, it rules out of court the possibility of any other philosophically

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interesting question of truth. That is extraordinary, for it is far from obvious that this restriction can be justified. Is it sound to assume that language is the only philosophically significant domain where truth occurs? And even if other usages were to be acknowledged, would it be sound to take statements and the like as the primary locus of truth? The success of Russell’s revival of Locke’s linguistic conception of truth was ensured by the ‘linguistic turn’ taken by analytic philosophers thereafter. The energizing force came from the new formal logic initiated by Frege, whose influence upon discussions in the theory of meaning is still very strong. As is well known, Frege’s leading idea was to apply the mathematical theory of functions to the traditional subject-matter of logic, in order to show how the truths of arithmetic could be derived within his reformulated system of logic. Although Russell discovered a fatal contradiction in Frege’s system, he and Whitehead were able to present in their Principia Mathematica of 1910–13 a modified system in which this kind of contradiction could not arise. These developments transformed not only the study of logic, but also philosophy itself. Even the ‘ordinary language’ philosophy which emerged around the middle of the twentieth century manifested its profound influence. Naturally enough, truth became a central topic for those who embraced this new way of doing philosophy, and the new model of mathematical logic promoted linguistically structured items as the proper ‘bearers’ of truth. The ‘material’ that the new logic worked with was formalized sentences and its analytical resources enabled philosophers to formulate their theories more precisely, as well as throwing into stark relief new problems to be solved. Accordingly, it became widely accepted that the way to explicate truth was by transposing the issue onto the level of language. The task was reformulated as explaining the meaning of the word “true”. There was no shortage of candidate theories; the main contenders were correspondence, coherence, semantic, pragmatic, consensus, and minimalist theories. As well, there were various ‘deflationary’ proposals, which offered explanations only of the use of the word “true” while denying that there is any need to say anything more in explanation of what it is for something to be true. These were soon labelled ‘disquotation’ or ‘redundancy’ theories. Indeed, what made a deflationary theory so attractive to its proponents was that it enabled them to dismiss, as a useless ‘metaphysical’ question, the issue of what the truth of a statement consists in. We will not concern ourselves here with debating the relative merits of these different proposals, since all these theories fell in somewhat different ways within that common approach I am calling the linguistic conception of truth. Before moving on, however, I should comment on a couple of ostensible exceptions to that last statement. Some philosophers rejected the ‘linguistic picture’ of belief – the sort of analysis of beliefs which takes them to be linguistic in structure, or perhaps simply dependent upon language – and

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instead sought to explicate belief as a state of a person which can be evaluated for truth or falsity, but which is not itself linguistically structured. On this view, beliefs would be the proper ‘bearer’ of truth but would not, strictly speaking, have a linguistic structure (Stalnaker 1984). That would also follow were one to think that the state of believing is identical to some neural or physical state of the person, which can be assessed for truth or falsity. These positions might seem to fall outside the linguistic conception of truth – but they would do so in a peculiar way. For not only does the articulation of some belief always have a linguistic structure (that, after all, applies trivially to any articulation), but also there is no known way of identifying any particular belief-state other than by articulating the proposition believed. So, while those who hold such a view do not straightforwardly subscribe to the first assumption of the linguistic conception of truth – that the ‘bearer’ of truth is some linguistically structured item – their point of divergence has more to do with their underlying metaphysical commitments than with their understanding of truth. The truth of any specified belief would be subject to the same sort of analysis. For our purposes, it suffices to note that when I include ‘beliefs’ in the list of those linguistically structured items standardly taken to be the bearers of truth, I am referring to beliefs articulated in noun- clauses: “X believes that p”, with some finite clause substituted for “p”. Insofar as such clauses are necessary in order to specify the bearers of truth, or are formally correlated with them, the alternative ways of analysing belief just mentioned are better understood as variants of the linguistic conception of truth, rather than as radical alternatives to it. The same applies to those philosophers who agree that propositions are the primary bearers of truth, but then deny that propositions have a linguistic structure; instead understanding them to be sets of possible worlds. Sets of possible worlds have this advantage over mental states: according to most philosophers (but not David Lewis 1986) each possible world can in principle be specified as an ordered set. That is, rather than articulating a complex sentence, propositions could be specified by listing the individuals and properties located in the relevant possible worlds (although difficulties occur wherever infinite sets are involved). Nevertheless, there is a double peculiarity here: (a) those who characterize propositions in terms of possible worlds agree that propositions are the proper bearers of truth; and (b) there are straightforward formal mappings between such propositions, understood as ordered sets, and sentences. Once again, the point of divergence seems to be motivated by underlying metaphysical commitments, and so far as truth is concerned, seems more technical than substantial. This is not the place to engage in a detailed analysis of belief, nor in debating the suggestion that propositions be analysed as sets of possible worlds. Further complexity is introduced by ‘blind ascriptions’ of truth, that is, cases where one speaker refers to what someone has said, and affirms or

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denies its truth, without actually quoting the speaker’s statement, as in “What the witness said is true”. While such blind ascriptions do not mention any sentence as the bearer of truth, it is clear that any analysis of them is operating within the linguistic conception.

2.4

Rendering truths explicit

This linguistic conception can be held in either hard line or a softer version. The hard-liners adhere strictly to the three presuppositions which distinguish it. There are, however, philosophers who understand truth basically in that way, but who are prepared to admit in addition certain ‘bearers’ which are not linguistically structured. For example, some will allow ‘utterances’ (understood as acts of uttering) or ‘assertions’ (acts of asserting) to be called true. But these philosophers nevertheless insist that the truth of these lastmentioned bearers is derivative, not primary. Generally, they designate the primary ‘bearers’ as ‘propositions’ or ‘statements’ which are supposed to be quite determinate, without any taint of ambiguity, vagueness, or emotional expression. In their book, however, an utterance or an assertion is true only if it succeeds in expressing a determinate proposition which is true. Only determinate propositions are true simpliciter. So while this position allows other sorts of item to be true, it takes their truth to derive from the linguistic case. This is just a softer version of the same conception. What follows from the first presupposition ? If the exclusive (or at any rate, the primary) bearers of truth are to be fully determinate, it must be possible to express in language everything relevant to the truth of its bearer in each case. If so, it must be possible, in principle, to render explicit all the features relevant to its meaning, and thus to its truth. Otherwise, the meaning of these bearers would depend upon non-linguistic features (such as those of the context) which might remain forever implicit. The logical consequence of this requirement found expression in W.V.O. Quine’s championing of ‘eternal sentences’. The aim behind this proposal is to spell out in suitably expanded sentences everything which normally is understood implicitly by speakers and hearers. This aim was neatly expressed by A.J. Ayer (1963, 157–158): if a programme of this sort can be successfully carried out, it vindicates the belief that what can be shown can also be said. To speak a little more precisely, it proves that it is possible to free the interpretation of all narrative statements from any dependence upon their context of utterance; everything that we are ordinarily required to pick up from these contexts can be made explicit. This concords with the assumption that all that should really be necessary for understanding whatever a given language has the resources to communicate, at least in the way of factual information, is the knowledge of the rules which govern it: the identities and the

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spatiotemporal positions of the persons who employ it need not come into the picture: the language can be so reconstructed that the same sentence can correctly be employed to make the same statement by any speaker at any place at any time. Unless this program can be carried out successfully, sentences employed to make statements would not be true or false absolutely; their truth would be relative to speaker, times, and places. They would not express fully determinate statements. So, if truth belongs exclusively or primarily to determinate statements, it is crucial that the program outlined by Ayer be successfully carried out. The question is: Can it? Not all philosophers think so, and I believe that they are right. This contentious issue is of such central importance to the linguistic conception that it requires detailed discussion. For a start, it is not possible to eliminate all self-reflexivity from language. When the sparrow says “I killed Cock Robin”, what the sparrow says is true if and only if that sparrow did kill Cock Robin. So it seems that part of the meaning of “I”, and its use in English, is to serve as a linguistic device by which speakers refer to themselves. But the issue is not so quickly settled. Suppose the sparrow says “I believe that I killed Cock Robin”. That is not equivalent to “The sparrow believes that the sparrow killed Cock Robin”. For this articulate sparrow might not believe that he is a sparrow! The use of “he” in that last sentence, which mirrors in third-person discourse the sparrow’s use of “I”, cannot always be replaced salva veritate by a proper name or a definite description. This reflexive use of third-person pronouns, as surrogates for first-person pronouns, has to be sharply distinguished from other uses of them, which serve quite different roles: ●

●

●

“he” can be used demonstratively to point out someone (“Look, he is driving dangerously!”); “he” can be used to pick up a reference to someone mentioned earlier in the conversation or text (“George always arrives on time, so he should be here soon”); “he” can be used rather like a bound variable in formal logic (“He who hesitates is lost”).

But the reflexive use in subordinate clauses governed by cognitive verbs cannot be assimilated to any of these (Castaneda 1966; 1967). To generalize, a statement or proposition of the form “X believes that he/she is F” is not equivalent to “X believes that ... is F”, where the blank is filled in by substituting X’s proper name, or some definite description or demonstrative expression which refers to X. And that applies to all cases where, instead of “believes”, the sentence contains any other cognitive

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verb, such as “knows”, “is convinced”, “is afraid”, etc. The simplest and most effective counter- example involves supposing that X learns that someone (not further identified) is F and says, using the pronoun “she” demonstratively to point to a woman visible in a mirror, “That’s right; she is F”, without realizing that she is the woman visible in the mirror. This woman is not referring to herself. Regardless of what name or description happens to be its logical or grammatical antecedent, a reflexive use of the personal pronouns “he” or “she” is never replaceable by a name or description which does not contain such a use of that pronoun. This reflexive use of third-person pronouns is how another person is able to mimic, and thereby preserve, the non- eliminable reflexivity of firstperson pronouns. There have been various attempts to accommodate indexicals such as “I” within the linguistic tradition. One proposal is to accept that such essential indexicals cannot be eliminated, but to distinguish between the roles they play in identifying the sense of a sentence, and the thoughts expressed by the utterance of that sentence. Another way of putting this proposal involves distinguishing between direct and indirect objects of thought (as proposed by David Lewis 1979).4 But either way, that tactic involves giving up on the program aimed at producing determinate statements which are true or false absolutely. Another solution proposes that we use indexicals to individuate belief states, which are not identical with, or even in isomorphic correspondence with, the propositions believed, there being only a systematic relationship between the two.5 But that manoeuvre also involves giving up on Ayer’s program. The crucial point is the fact, which earlier philosophers such as Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein understood very clearly, that the self who is perceiving objects within some field cannot be itself one of those objects of experience. Whenever one identifies an object of experience as oneself – however that is done (e.g., pointing out some figure in a group photograph as oneself) – one is not thereby turning oneself into an object. No matter which field one takes to constitute the objects of one’s experience, the person having that experience is never within that field, as one of those objects. Of course, one’s own body can be an object of experience, but what that shows is that I am not identical with my body. (Not that I am a different kind of thing from my body; that was Descartes’ original and fatal mistake.) One always transcends the objects of one’s experience. It follows that reflexivity cannot be eliminated from natural languages. There is a good reason for this: as we shall see in Chapter 4, reflexivity is 4. This is how John Perry (1993, essay 1) proposed that Frege’s system would have to be modified in order to cope with indexicals. 5. This is Perry’s own view, more radical than his suggested modification of Frege’s. See essay 2.

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deeply built into the ontology of all biological creatures, so it is not surprising that all natural languages contain reflexive expressions. Indeed, those who would eliminate such expressions are failing to reckon with this constitutive feature of our way of being. This inability to eliminate reflexivity spills over into the use of demonstratives, tenses, and a whole range of locating adverbs, such as “here”, “now”, “there”, “then”, “today”, “yesterday”, and “next week”. The sense of each of these locutions is to locate some phenomenon from one’s own perspective. Yet attending to how these socalled ‘indexicals’ are used on any particular occasion is essential to understanding what precisely the speaker is claiming, to discerning the ‘content’ of that speech-act. Philosophers seeking ‘objectivity’ generally brush aside these issues arising from reflexivity in order to promote their ideal of the ‘eternal sentence’, whose truth-value remains fixed throughout time and space, and from speaker to speaker. I will content myself here with some observations about time, since if the program breaks down in the temporal dimension it will break down in other respects as well. What has misled these philosophers is the belief that reflexive indicators like “now” can always be replaced by a date and clock reading. Thus, “The cat is now on the mat” is to be replaced by “The cat is on the mat at 10.15 a.m. on 7 October 2010”, provided the former sentence was uttered at that time on that date. But while that looks simple enough, the move is not always happy. For consider “The time is now 10.15 a.m.”. That statement is contingent, and could well be false. But “The time at 10.15 a.m. is 10.15 a.m.” is tautological, and if the original statement were false the recommended replacement would produce something like “The time at 10.30 a.m. is 10.15 a.m.”, which is necessarily false. At first blush, it might seem that this problem is of a piece with the identity statement, “The Evening Star is the Morning Star”, which likewise conveys information despite the fact that substituting that identity in the statement also yields a tautology. As is well known, Frege solved that puzzle with his famous distinction between sense and reference. But, as we have already seen in the case of “I”, where indexicals are essential to the sense of the statement made, they cannot be paraphrased away. That fact motivated the conservative modification of Frege’s position, discussed above, to distinguish between the roles they play in identifying the sense of a sentence, and the thoughts expressed by the utterance of that sentence, But we saw that that tactic involves giving up on the program aimed at producing determinate statements which are true or false absolutely. Nor is the move to a calendar date quite as simple as it looks. Calendars work by taking regular recurrent processes – the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the earth around the sun – as enabling a conventional means of referring to the occurrence of events. A calendar can then be devised by choosing the occurrence of some event as the origin for temporal coordinates and dating every other time in relation to it. But the choice

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of an origin brings us back into the area of our earlier discussion. In the West, that origin has been fixed at the birth of Jesus Christ, but that dating appears to have involved a historical mistake; Biblical scholars nowadays generally agree that that birth occurred in either 6 or 9 BC. So, the origin of the Western calendar is in fact fictitious. That might seem to support the view that there is no reflexivity involved in fixing dates, but that is not right. Since the temporal point of origin cannot be fixed independently, it has to be located by reading back from the present. This, in fact, is what the early church did. Those who invented this calendar ran back through the years until they came to x years before their own present, to the year in which they believed Jesus was born. That they made a mistake in this calculation does nothing to alter the fact that there is a non-eliminable reflexivity in their adoption of the calendar, and that reflexivity is perpetuated in our continued use of that calendar. In brief, my argument is that the determination of what statement a speaker has made on any given occasion cannot always be achieved by devising a suitable ‘eternal sentence’. Not everything relevant to the truth of its bearer can be expressed in language. As Wittgenstein remarked, what can be shown cannot always be said. This argument has turned, however, on requiring that the exclusive (or at any rate, the primary) bearers of truth be fully determinate. It might be countered that that requirement is too strong. Could not one hold that truth is a feature only of items with a linguistic structure, but accept that certain non-linguistic features of the context in which a truth-claim is made might be essentially involved in determining its truth or falsity? In this way, the first presupposition could still be maintained, albeit in a weakened form.6 That riposte is indeed right; the first presupposition could be softened in this way. But doing so has a significant consequence. It follows that the ‘content’ of truthclaims involving indexicals would extend beyond the language used to make them. To put the same point another way, it would follow that truth – at least in these cases (and arguably in others also)7 – would have to be relativized to particular circumstances: speakers, times, and places. For many philosophers in this tradition (although not for all) this would not be a congenial consequence. Our exploration of this first presupposition

6. Some philosophers who appear to maintain the first presupposition – they only ever discuss the truth of linguistic items – are prepared to accept that features of context enter essentially into the content of truth-claims. Two recent examples are John Perry, whose consideration of indexicals is discussed above, and Charles Travis (1997), who argues more radically that often the meaning of even such simple descriptions such as “green” is context-dependent. 7. I will consider a case based upon Travis’s discussion of “green” in §8.2.

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of the linguistic conception of truth thus poses a dilemma: either that presupposition requires that what is ordinarily asserted be paraphrased into ‘eternal sentences’, which in many cases is not possible, or the truth of many ordinary truthclaims has to be relativized to the context of their utterance.

2.5

The ‘truth-values’ of linguistic items

What about the second presupposition of the linguistic conception: that “true” and “false” are opposite evaluations of the same order? This presupposition is never questioned. It was explicitly built into the philosophical buttressing by which Frege supported his new mathematical logic. He proposed that whole sentences refer to one of two objects, just as names do: either the True or the False.8 While few philosophers in the twentieth century adopted this particular Fregean doctrine, its influence persists in the way we continue to speak of the two ‘truth-values’; in teaching students to do truth-tables; in the way many a philosophical analysis proceeds when testing some thesis; and in the way (many) computer programs operate simply on the basis of a two-valued logic (1 or 0). Nevertheless, considerable debate ensued over whether “true” and “false” are the only evaluations which could be assigned to a statement. Partly, this issue was provoked by those sentences in which definite descriptions in subject position do not refer to any existing thing. Russell’s analysis of such sentences, acclaimed for a while as ‘the very paradigm of philosophy’, dissolved the phrase “the present King of France” in such a way that sentences with that phrase in subject position came out false, since no- one is (now) King of France. One alternative approach was to insist that the phrase is indeed a referring expression, but uttering the sentence fails to make a statement, since no such referent can be identified. A third approach was to allow that such an utterance made a statement, but one which is neither true nor false. This idea of ‘truth-value gaps’ introduces a certain complication to the apparent simplicity of the second presupposition. The simplicity of this second presupposition was also challenged by concerns about the adequacy of the formal system of propositional logic invented by Frege, and corrected by Russell and Whitehead. The great

8. There is a tension in Frege’s position on this. His generalization of functiontheory requires a value for sentence-like formulae which fail to designate the True. His logic therefore needs the False. But he also believed that “Logic is concerned only with those grounds of judgement which are truths”, and most notably, “If a sentence uttered with assertoric force expresses a false thought, then it is logically useless and cannot strictly speaking be understood”. The Platonic flavour of those quotations is striking. See my Truth and Historicity, 357–360.

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virtue of this system was that it provided a simple test of whether some set of propositions implies another: by considering all possible combinations of the two truth-values, true and false. On the other hand, it was also provable in this system that a contradiction implies any and every proposition. Concern to avoid this second feature led to the development of alternative systems of propositional logic, which were multi-valued and not straightforwardly truth-functional in the style of the Frege-Russell calculus. Partly connected with the issue of alternative logical systems, debates arose in the second half of the twentieth century about the truth-value to be assigned to undecidable propositions, other than those with ‘empty’ referring expressions. For example, consider statements such as “Either Jones was brave or he was not” asserted after Jones has died, having never encountered danger at any time during his life. Unless one appeals to some hidden mechanism, by which to determine how Jones would have reacted had he encountered danger, there is no fact in virtue of which one would be justified in asserting either disjunct. Likewise, we might never be in a position to declare true or false open- ended negative propositions about the future, such as “A city will never be built on this spot”. And in mathematics, in the absence of some special procedure for deciding such issues, one could never be justified in asserting universal propositions about infinite domains (the examples come from Dummett 1959). Furthermore, Russell’s discovery of a contradiction in Frege’s system of logic stimulated renewed interest in an array of logical paradoxes, some of which have been known since ancient times. Of these, the most famous is the Liar Paradox, which takes many different forms. While this paradox has been much discussed, it is not so often recognized that it strikes at the heart of the linguistic conception of truth. To take a couple of its simplest forms, “This sentence is false” and “What I am now saying is false” seem, on the face of it, to be true if they are false, and false if they are true. It is easy enough to show that such sentences generate explicit contradictions (Kirkham 1995, 272). The issue is how are we to understand such ‘liar sentences’, as they are often called, consistent with how we understand truth. They seem grammatically well-formed; they are not ambiguous or vague; and no- one who holds the linguistic conception of truth can claim that they commit a straightforward category mistake, since, according to them, sentences and statements are precisely the kind of items which bear truthvalues. Many have been the attempts to block this paradox. The most obvious feature of these simple liar sentences is that they are self-referring, something Frege’s logical system also allowed. Accordingly, Russell thought that the way to prevent such contradictions arising was to prevent any possibility of self-reference. To do so, he invented his ‘theory of types’. The crucial move was his socalled ‘vicious circle principle’: whatever concerns all of a

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collection must not be a member of that collection. So, he defined a type as the range of significance of a propositional function (an open sentence), that is, the collection of items for which that function has values. One effect of this was to debar the liar sentence as not well-formed, since the type of item for which the propositional function “... is false” has values was not allowed to include any sentence containing that function. This prohibition served its purpose of preventing contradictions in Frege’s system, but as a general prescription it seems too severe. Russell himself had to add a compensatory axiom, the axiom of infinity, to those proposed by Frege in order to derive elementary arithmetic from his system of logic. Furthermore, the vicious circle principle seems ad hoc; its only rationale is that it prevents paradoxes from arising. Indeed, it would rule out as illformed sentences which seem true. For instance, “This sentence contains five words” is true despite being self-referring, and as we shall shortly see, versions of the Liar Paradox can easily be constructed in which none of the sentences is self-referring. An influential adaptation of Russell’s theory of types was Alfred Tarski’s development of a distinction, applicable to all formal languages, between language levels. According to this distinction, an ordinary statement about something, such as “snow is white”, is said to occur in the object language, whilst any expression referring to that first sentence, such as “ ‘snow is white’ is true”, occurs in the metalanguage. Like the theory of types, this distinction generates a hierarchy of sentences in which those on any meta-level refer to those on the level below. Thereby liar sentences were again ruled out as ill-formed. The significant characteristic of these approaches is that they seek a structural solution to prevent liar-type paradoxes. That is, they presume that what permits the generation of the paradoxes is some flaw in the syntax of the relevant sentences. Rule out the possibility of such linguistic constructions, and the problem is solved! These devices work well enough to prevent liar and similar paradoxes arising in the artificial languages of formally constructed systems. But they are of no help with respect to natural languages. Not only do the grammars of natural languages permit the formulation of liar sentences, but self-reference abounds, as in “This sentence contains five words”. Nor can we assume that speakers of natural languages implicitly index the ‘type’ or ‘level’ at which they are speaking, because they often could not know what that level would be (Kripke 1975). This becomes most obvious when we consider ‘blind ascriptions’ of truth. Suppose one speaker, say Brown, refers to what someone else, say Green, has said. A philosopher who subscribes to a theory of ‘types’ or ‘levels’ of discourse has to say that the ‘level’ of Brown’s sentence is one ‘level’ higher than that of Green’s statement. But since either, or both, of Brown and Green’s statements may

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involve ‘blind ascriptions’ of truth, it cannot be assumed that Brown could determine at which ‘level’ Green’s statement occurs. Indeed, if Brown had said “all of Green’s statements are false” and Green had said “all of Brown’s statements are false”, each of these statements would be ‘meta’ to the other! A circle of references generated in this way is certainly possible, but it would make the determination of levels impossible. So, the object language/metalanguage distinction cannot prevent liar-type paradoxes arising in real-life uses of natural languages. That is a disturbing conclusion for anyone who is looking to find a structural solution to the Liar Paradox. Yet very few manoeuvres are available to anyone who adopts the linguistic conception of truth. One tactic is to admit that some sentences are neither true nor false; they would lack a truth-value. What then would determine whether a sentence has a truth-value? The obvious move is to say that a sentence has a truth-value provided it is not paradoxical. But how is that to be determined? If truth is exclusively attributable to linguistically structured items, those linguistic items whose truth implies their falsity, and vice versa, must somehow not be legitimate linguistic items. But assuming that is erroneous. One of the earliest references to the Liar Paradox occurs in the New Testament, in a letter Paul wrote to Titus (1:12), whom he had left behind in Crete. Paul commented that it was one of them (“their very own prophet”) who said “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons”. Now this statement might well be true; yet it is paradoxical if – but only if – it is asserted by a Cretan. No paradox arises if a non- Cretan asserts this sentence. But whether the speaker of this sentence is a Cretan is an empirical fact, which plays no part in the meaning of what this prophet said. In particular, it is not a syntactic feature of that statement. Trying to rule out paradoxes by identifying some characteristic feature of the sentences expressing them is misconceived. More recently, Saul Kripke has devised other cases in which whether some apparently grammatical sentence generates a paradox depends not upon any intrinsic feature, but upon the empirical facts. He asks us to consider an ordinary statement, made by Jones: (1)

A majority of Nixon’s statements about Watergate are false.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong about this statement, nor is it illformed. Indeed, it might well be true! Its truth or falsity can be ascertained through listing each of Nixon’s statements about Watergate and assessing their truth or falsity. Now, suppose that Nixon’s statements about Watergate are evenly balanced between the true and the false, except for one problematic statement which Nixon might also have made: (2) Everything Jones says about Watergate is true.

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Suppose, in addition, that (1) is Jones’s sole statement about Watergate – or alternatively, that all his Watergate-related statements, leaving aside (1), are true. Then, (1) and (2) are both paradoxical: they are true if and only if they are false. Hence, whether a sentence uttered by one person is paradoxical can depend upon contingent, empirical facts to do with what someone else might have said. And so it seems that whether a sentence has a truth-value depends upon contingent, empirical facts. Kripke’s conclusion is surely sound: it would be fruitless to look for an intrinsic criterion which will enable us to sift out, as meaningless or ill-formed, just those sentences which generate paradoxes; there is no syntactic or semantic ‘sieve’ which will sift out the ‘bad’ cases, while preserving the ‘good’ ones. Furthermore, the manoeuvre of invoking truth-value gaps can stave off disaster only briefly. For while it solves the paradox by refusing truth-value to simple liar sentences, it does not solve the socalled Strengthened Liar. The latter is expressed by such sentences as “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false” or “This sentence is not true”, where one of the ways in which a sentence might not be true is for it not to have a truth-value at all. The issues brought into focus by these paradoxes are tangential to the second presupposition of the linguistic conception of truth. But they complicated still further what had already become complex conceptual terrain and tended to undermine at least some of the characteristic principles of certain theories of truth. It would be overstating the case to say that these difficulties demonstrated that this assumption of the equal status of truth and falsity was itself false. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of these difficulties is to weaken the presumption that the opposite of truth is straightforward falsity, since it has become clear that a statement can fail to be true in many ways. When philosophers are in trouble, they are often tempted either to reach for a distinction, or to stipulate a definition. One response to these troubles was to run the first and second presuppositions together, by restating the first in a way which makes the second analytically true: the bearer of truth and falsity is a statement (or as some would say, a proposition), and statements are those items which are either true or false. In this way, the problems of truth-value gaps, and of undecidiability, are sidestepped by stipulating a definition of the ‘bearer’ of truth. But stipulating definitions which retreat into analyticity is too easy. It buys security at the price of triviality.

2.6

The relation of agreement

Let us now examine the third presupposition. Here, disputes mostly concerned how to characterize the relation of agreement which a truth is supposed to bear to something else, in virtue of which it is true. It was far from clear how this relation of agreement should be understood.

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This question has two dimensions, both of which have proved contentious: (a) Firstly, what is the ‘something else’ with which a truth is supposed somehow to ‘agree’? To this, there was no shortage of proposed answers: a fact; a state of affairs which ‘obtains’; the general state of the world; the totality of other truths; what everyone (or some privileged set of people, excluding ‘the folk’) would agree with; the ideal comprehensive theory towards which scientific investigation is supposed to be tending; etc. (b) Secondly, how does a truth ‘agree’ with what makes it true? Even if it is simply maintained that a statement is true ‘in virtue of’ its relation to something else, how is this “in virtue of” to be understood? Again, there was no shortage of proposed answers: it corresponds to some fact, which is its ‘truth-maker’, or it coheres with some privileged set of statements, or it proves useful, or it is endorsed by a consensus of other speakers under specified conditions, or its assertion is warranted in certain circumstances, etc. Generally, the various theories of truth were labelled according to their differing answers to these two sets of questions. Accordingly, much of the debate involved disputes about the plausibility of the many different ways in which these theories proposed to explicate this third presupposition. Instead of rehearsing all these arguments – there is no shortage of relevant literature – let us consider a prior question: what is involved in all this talk of ‘agreement’? Trying to specify how a bearer of truth (in the minimal sense of the word stipulated) could possibly ‘agree with’ something else inevitably runs into problems, which can only be called metaphysical. That is, behind the seemingly innocuous façade of the linguistic conception of truth there lurk implicit metaphysical models. They fail, however, to survive serious scrutiny. Although this conception of truth takes one of the relata to have a linguistic structure, there are reasons for thinking that these items are not themselves pieces of language. The fact that, in general, there are many different ways of articulating the same truth- claim is what leads to talk of ‘propositional content’, or of ‘sentence-types’ (as distinct from ‘sentence-tokens’), or of the ‘same statement’ being made by different utterances on different occasions. That has led some to suggest that a sequence of real sounds, or a string of real marks on paper, etc. expresses an ideal content, and it is that ‘content’ which is true or false, not the particular phenomenon generated on some occasion in order to assert it. Now, not only is the ontological status of such an ideal entity problematic, but even more troubling is its bearing upon the alleged relation of agreement. How could such an ideal item ‘agree’ with something which is real,

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whether the latter is a fact, a state of affairs, or the state of the world, etc.? That is, how precisely could two items of such different status – one ideal, the other real – ‘agree’ with one another? If the ‘content’ of a statement like “this coin is round” is not a real state of affairs in the observable world (although round coins are), it cannot possess the same sorts of characteristics as the real coin, which it is about. The statement is not material at all – for instance, it is not spatial – and it is never a means of payment. Of course, the sounds produced in uttering this statement – or the marks on paper produced by writing it – are real phenomena in the observable world, but those phenomena do not themselves constitute that statement. There is no characteristic which both could be said to possess, and in virtue of which they could ‘agree’ with one another (Heidegger 1977, 122–123). This train of reasoning is what has led certain philosophers to the conclusion that an ideal item can only agree with another ideal item (or a set of them). That is, it seems to entail some form of idealism. Yet a simple statement like “this coin is round” does seem to be about a real thing: precisely the coin in question. So to be told that the truth of the statement is a matter of its agreeing with other ideal items seems quite implausible. But perhaps we do not have to follow the train of reasoning which led to this impasse. Perhaps instead of admitting an ‘ideal content’, an account can be given of how words come to bear the meanings they do, such that the alleged agreement can be recognized as a relation between two real, yet distinct, items in the world. Not surprisingly, the first philosopher to assert that truth properly belongs only to propositions was also the first to attempt to work out such an account: John Locke. As we noted in §2.3, what to Locke’s mind justifies this restriction of truth exclusively to propositions is his view that truth signifies nothing but the joining and separating of signs, as the things signified by them agree or disagree with one another. On this basis, he then declared that there are two sorts of truth – namely, mental and verbal – just as there are two sorts of signs made use of, namely, ideas and words (1700, IV, v, 2). For Locke, words are meaningful because they are ‘articulate sounds’ used as signs of internal conceptions, conventionally adapted to stand as marks for ideas (or to signify their absence) (III, I, 2). All our ideas ‘spring’ from the two ‘fountains of knowledge’: sensation, by which our senses convey into our minds distinct perceptions of things, according to the various ways wherein those objects affect them; and reflection, which is the mind’s acquaintance with its own internal operations. This socalled ‘empiricist’ account is not metaphysically innocent; underpinning it is the nominalist thesis that everything which exists is in itself a particular individual (another thesis for which Locke never attempted to argue). Nor has what exists been made particular, as ‘moderate realists’ in the medieval period, such as Aquinas and Duns Scotus, had supposed. The correlative epistemological thesis in Locke’s account is that what is

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‘conveyed’ into the mind by sensation are distinct perceptions, that is, each perception causes in us simple ideas of sensible qualities. In receiving these simple ideas, the mind is supposed to be strictly passive; its activity is restricted to ‘framing’ other types of ideas out of the simple ideas produced in this way. For Locke, words ‘stand for’ ideas, which can ultimately be traced back to the generation in us of simple ideas (for a more detailed discussion see Campbell 1992, ch. 10). At bottom, rendering this possible, is a simple causal story. Ideas (in the new sense of that word championed by Locke) thus seem to be real (although mental) entities in the world, causally related to external particulars. Accordingly, the ‘joining and separating of signs’ in a true proposition arrays these latter entities – ideas or words – in ways which correspond to how the distinct qualities of individual things are arrayed in the world. Once all this metaphysical machinery is in place, Locke had what he needed to formulate the first full-blown correspondence theory of truth.9 Implicit in the metaphysical underpinnings of this theory is the radical split which Locke posited between the ‘real essence’ of things and their ‘nominal essence’, noted in §1.2. Since it follows from Locke’s characterization of this split that we can never know that the propositions by which we describe things in the world actually do correspond to how those things are, his position inevitably leads to scepticism. Our concern here, however, is not with that epistemological problem – intractable as it has proved to be ever since the seventeenth century – but with the irreconcilable divide thereby introduced between the mental and linguistic items, on one side, and what they are supposed to be about, on the other. That is, our concern here is not with how we can verify what we say about the world, but with how to understand what is involved in some statement’s being true. How could an array of mental or linguistic items ‘agree with’ something which is not at all mental or linguistic? And if its truth turns on there being some kind of agreement – perhaps some structural isomorphism – between our statements and how things are, the concept of truth itself becomes problematic should it be impossible in principle to verify that such an agreement obtains. We can pose the same problem this way. A Lockean theory of how language is meaningful depends upon a theory of representations, and, on this theory, we have direct cognitive relations only with them. Given that, what could it mean to say that a relation of agreement obtains between an array of such representations and something we know not what? How are we to

9. In saying that Locke was the first to formulate a full-blown correspondence theory of truth, I am aware that I am contradicting those who frequently apply that label to earlier views, such as Aristotle’s. That Aristotle did not hold a correspondence theory will be discussed in §8.3.

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understand mental or linguistic representations if we cannot provide an intelligible model of how those representations represent? What sense is there in even saying that they are representations? No viable explanation of this has ever been forthcoming. Any allegation that nevertheless there is such an agreement has been robbed of any serious content; it has been rendered idle – and purely dogmatic. The only gesture towards an explanation is the claim that (mental or linguistic) representations are caused by what they represent. But that simply pushes the question further back, to how we could ever verify those alleged causal relations. Should it be said that we need another representation in order to understand how the first- order ideas are representative, we would be committed to an infinite regress which is clearly vicious, since this second- order representation would face exactly the same difficulty. That was, in essence, George Berkeley’s criticism of Locke’s theory, and more recent representative theories have fared no better, as we shall see. Not only was Locke’s account of truth the first to warrant the label ‘the correspondence theory of truth’; it has also powerfully influenced much of the debate about the analysis of truth in the twentieth century, even when the epistemology underpinning it was quietly dropped. Nevertheless, the causal flavour of Locke’s account has rendered it attractive to his latterday followers, since it seemed to ease the discomfort of having to acknowledge ‘ideal contents’. It is therefore not surprising that the past century has spawned accounts of truth which, while expressed in terminology different from Locke’s, were nevertheless Lockean in spirit and drew upon essentially the same metaphysical model. For instance, in the 1920s Russell revived Locke’s key notion of simple ideas, dubbing them ‘sense data’ and developing a metaphysics of ‘logical atomism’ which was essentially Lockean in character. Significantly, he too advocated a correspondence theory of truth. Russell claimed that a judgement “puts its objects in a certain order” and that if a judgement is to be true, these objects must actually be in the same order. In this account, “a belief is true when it corresponds to a certain associated complex, and false when it does not” (1912, 128). More recently, some have turned to electrical engineering and borrow the metaphor of ‘transduction’ to propose a more plausible story. Although expressed in very different language, and sounding much more ‘up-to- date’ than Locke’s talk of ‘ideas’, the essential structure of this transduction model is no different from his causal story. And it faces the same fatal difficulties, as we shall see. I will examine this talk of correspondence in more detail in §6.1. Lacking a plausible account of how causal correspondences could engender representations, the relation of ‘agreement’, which is supposed to establish truth, must remain a mystery. We still would have no explanation of how a mental or linguistic item could ‘agree with’ something not at all mental or linguistic. Since its truth is supposed to turn on there being some kind

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of agreement between our statements and how things are, it is no wonder that the concept of truth itself remains problematic.

2.7

Minimalist and disquotation theories

Could these intractable problems be avoided by the simple strategy of remaining within language, but saying as little as possible? Towards the end of the twentieth century, that strategy seemed increasingly appealing and found more and more advocates. Minimalist theories and deflationary theories (of which there were different versions) deliberately avoided any talk of ‘agreement’ and any talk of ‘truth-makers’. Thus, they seemed to avoid the problems raised under the third presupposition of the linguistic conception. Both approaches concur in contending that all a theory of truth needs to do is to explain the use of the word “true”. To do so, both exploited the socalled T-schemata: T1: “p” is true if and only if p. T2: It is true that p if and only if p. Differing varieties of theories proposed along one or other of these lines take the equivalences asserted by the use of “if and only if” in these schemata as different sorts of logical relation: simple co-extension; necessary equivalence (co- extension in every possible world); or synonymy. In some versions of the redundancy theory, this equivalence was interpreted as holding between certain acts: the act of asserting that “p” is true in some sense ‘amounts to’ the act of asserting that p (and similarly for other propositional attitudes). But however the equivalence was understood, these theories all gave an account of “true” in terms of there being some sort of equivalence between the item to which it is ascribed and something else. Neither minimalist nor redundancy theories expressed this equivalence as an agreement. In particular, minimalists did not think of the T-schemata as endorsing in any way the correspondence theory (with its belief in a structural isomorphism between linguistic strings and the world). But I have claimed that their proposals did not radically depart from this third presupposition; such theories display an agreement between “ ‘p’ is true” and “p”. That claim is not uncontroversial. Of course, those who advocated either a minimalist or a redundancy (or ‘disquotational’) analysis of the use of “is true” denied that truth is any sort of substantial relation between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. So, as well as refusing to assert any agreement between linguistic items and anything else, they might likewise deny that the T-schemata display or show such a relation. That is, they could insist that the T-schemata are simply biconditionals, like any other biconditional, and are special only in that they concern the word “true”.

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The appeal to simplicity in such a riposte is disingenuous. Although the advocates of such theories typically saw no need to make significant comment upon the fact, it is notable that what is between the quotation marks on the left-hand side of the biconditional T1 is the same as – or is a translation of – what is on the right-hand side. What are we to make of that, if not a ‘display’ of the relation between a linguistic item which is mentioned and what is asserted when it is used? In maintaining that these biconditionals ‘display’ the crucial agreement, I am invoking one of the essential claims of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that the fundamental features of logic have to be ‘shown’, rather than ‘said’. I cannot see any other way of understanding the point of the biconditional. When we ask about the relation between “p” and p, the most reasonable answer would seem to be: “p” expresses the truth/fact/statement/proposition that p. If minimalists were to concede this, they would nevertheless want to interpret the agreement displayed by their biconditionals as a very ‘thin’ relation. They would (correctly) contend that it is a contingent fact that “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white, since, had the English language evolved differently, the sentence “snow is white” might have meant that grass is green. Like any contingent fact, this linguistic fact can be stated; it does not need to be shown or displayed. (This, of course, is to interpret the biconditionals as asserting simple co- extension between the two sides of the biconditionals, not necessary equivalence, nor synonymy). But given that sentences in contemporary English have acquired the meanings they now have, they do manifest those meanings whenever they are uttered. So, the crucial point remains: all the theories of truth mentioned – even minimalist and redundancy theories – either assert or display some sort of agreement between the bearers of truth and something else. Now, both disquotation and minimalist theories rely on the T-schemata, although they interpret their role differently. Now, in the standard example – “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white – the second occurrence of the word “snow” is being used, not simply mentioned. And the mentioned sentence is true if and only if real snow (the cold, crystalline stuff made of water) is white. The question cannot be avoided of how the sentence, composed as it is of words, comes to ‘agree with’, or ‘express’, how that stuff is. Therefore, even these most parsimonious of theories have to confront the issue of how language relates to the world. That is why it is a mistake to think that the simple strategy of seeming to stay within language, and then saying as little as possible, can avoid the intractable problems so starkly manifest in full-blown correspondence theories. An obvious issue for these theories is how to explain the meaning of “true” in ‘blind’ ascriptions. One simple way of dealing with this seems appealing. Consider, for instance, “Whatever the Pope says ex cathedra is true”. In pidgin-logic, that sentence can be analysed as “for every p, if the Pope says ex cathedra that p, then it is true that p”, which looks like a quantified

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application of schema T2. Problem overcome! Many philosophers who would otherwise have seized on this solution, however, were troubled by a difficulty they saw in it. They understand quantifying over propositions in this way as treating them as objects, in this respect on a par with physical entities. This is a difficulty, of course, should quantification be interpreted as legitimate only when it is ‘over’ a domain of ‘objects’. If quantification is interpreted as shorthand for a range of possible substitution instances, the apparent difficulty dissolves, but objections have been raised to that interpretation. There is a large technical literature dealing with the interpretation of quantification, which we will not pursue here – it would take us off on too long a tangent. Suffice it to note that some such resolution of these issues is required if the T-schemata are to serve a central role in any account of the ascription of truth to linguistically structured items. The difficulties confronting both disquotation and minimalist theories are sharpened yet further by the considerations canvassed in §2.5 concerning the Liar Paradoxes. For if the T-schemata say all that needs to be said about truth, then one instance of T1 is (S) “This sentence is false” is true if and only if this sentence is false. The sentence (S) is ambiguous. The second occurrence in it of the phrase “this sentence” can be taken to refer to the sentence quoted within the lefthand side of the biconditional, or to refer to the whole sentence (S) itself. As an instance of the schema T1, it has to be taken the first way. But then the sentence (S) explicitly says that the quoted sentence is true if and only if it is false. If the phrase is taken the second way, then (S) becomes itself a liar sentence, just like the sentence quoted within it, and a contradiction can be derived from it. Either way, a contradiction ensues. Any theory of truth which relies on nothing other than the T-schemata thereby becomes selfrefuting – unless liar sentences can be excluded from the language. For these theorists, this problem is especially severe, since they cannot appeal to the absence of corresponding facts, or other extrinsic criteria, to resolve such paradoxes. The only plausible response to them is to restrict the permissible instantiations of the T-schema (so Horwich 1998, 40–42 and 136). But on what basis? As we saw in §2.4, paradoxical sentences can be constructed resulting solely from contingent empirical facts. No syntactic or semantic restriction, other than those which would be purely ad hoc, will suffice to exclude the paradoxical instantiations of the T-schemata, while preserving the permissible ones. Yet the only resources these disquotation and minimalist theories have available, from which to devise general principles to restrict permissible instantiations of the T-schema, are syntactic and semantic criteria. It is not good enough for such a theorist to gesture towards the great deal of effort devoted to finding a constructive account of exactly how far one

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can push these equivalences without engendering paradox, and hope to avail oneself of whatever solution this research might eventually produce (Horwich again). Until the requisite restrictive principles are enunciated, and shown to eliminate the paradoxes without going beyond the minimal resources available within these theories, they stand as riddled with selfcontradiction. This way of understanding truth is therefore untenable. As a result, by the end of the century the topic of truth had become a confused and confusing mess. Richard Rorty, amongst others, recommended that philosophers should give up on the whole enterprise of trying to devise an acceptable theory of truth. Indeed, many philosophers of a deflationary disposition claimed virtue in renouncing any interest in Truth (when written with a capital “T”). They thus unwittingly joined forces with the ‘post-modernists’, who welcome the dismantling of truth, in favour of the practical issues of living. The disillusion with the concept of truth is more widespread and more deeply rooted than pessimism about the project of devising a satisfactory theory. That is clear from our review of its basis in Chapter 1. If we are to address this disillusion seriously, we will need a radically different approach, one which draws upon more than the meagre resources available to the linguistic conception.

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3 The Functions Truth Serves

From time to time, protests were voiced that the concept of truth is ‘richer’ than what minimalist and redundancy theories could deliver. These dissenters insisted that truth is a substantial concept; those theories fail to do it justice. As we have seen, there are grounds for complaint. Nevertheless, the protests were largely ineffectual. The reason they did not prevail, I suggest, was because the dissenters were not radical enough; they too were operating within the confines of the linguistic conception, which does not have enough resources to supply a truly substantial theory of truth. So, if a substantial conception of truth is to be worked out, it will have to break out of that restriction. To help clarify what we might be looking for, it is useful to consider what functions a philosophical explication of the concept of the truth of statements (sentence, proposition, judgement, belief, etc.) might reasonably be expected to serve. Doing so will give us some criteria against which to evaluate competing conceptions.

3.1 Desiderata for truth-theories Which questions should a theory which addresses the truth of statements be expected to answer, and which intellectual worries is it intended to assuage? Eight desiderata can be found easily enough in the relevant, rather specialized literature. Depending upon their predilections, philosophers have standardly recommended their favoured theory as satisfying some or all of these. In detailing these eight here, I am not assuming that all of them should necessarily feature in an analysis of the concept of truth, nor that to be adequate a truth-theory should explicitly address them all. But each has in fact been invoked at some stage by some protagonist in the recent debates. Once we have identified them, we can consider whether they should be accepted as constraints upon any adequate explication of the concept of truth. 45

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1. Primarily, of course, any theory of truth can be expected to capture and express in a systematic way the basic sense manifest in standard use of the word with regard to statements. An undisputed intuition is that there is a fundamental linkage between truth and reality. Indeed, from the early Greeks right down to the colloquial speech of today, there is a broad consensus that to speak the truth is to ‘tell it like it is’. Since truth-theories purport to explain what it is for a statement to be true, they were trying to illuminate this ancient and enduring signification. In all the debates swirling about these various theories of truth, a central concern has been somehow to explicate or comment upon this linkage of what is asserted to be so to what is so. 2. Secondly, truth is the goal of inquiry. We investigate matters in order to discover the truth. That implies that the activity of inquiry has truth as its objective, or goal: its telos. Our inquiries are successful if, and only if, they enable us knowingly to tell the truth about the matters inquired into. Once this objective is recognized, we notice that this feature of inquiry has much broader relevance. Indeed, it applies to the activity of statementmaking in general. Of course, that there are familiar contexts where the sense in which truth is the telos of the activity of statement-making is deliberately circumscribed, or cancelled – as in pretending, in joking, in theatrical performances, in playful banter, and in a different way in deliberate acts of lying. But even in such cases, where the context indicates special conditions, or limitations, on how the declarative sentences uttered are to be taken, the very possibility of understanding what is said as a statement takes into account this feature of the practice of assertion. In general, leaving aside those special contexts, in making statements we aim to make statements which are true, because truth is the telos of the activity of statement-making. This might not seem very significant, but in fact it has far-reaching consequences, as we shall see. For this feature of statement-making invests truth with normative force – that is, being true is an essential standard which statements have to satisfy in order to be made well. Recent truth-theories rarely acknowledge this. It follows that false statements are deficient; they are errors. Accordingly, it is reasonable to expect an account of truth to supply some explication of how it comes to be intrinsic to the practice of assertion. The question is: how does truth acquire this normative character? 3. Truth carries normative force in other ways as well. Once the question of what constitutes truth had been transposed into one about the uses of “true”, the way was open for alternative proposals going beyond the truisms of the minimalists and deflationists. One such proposal was that the point of calling some statement ‘true’ was to commend it in some way. It was said that a ‘true’ statement is simply one which is good to believe. Or, it is one which a speaker would be warranted in asserting. Or, it is one which will survive further scientific research. Or, it is one which would command

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a consensus amongst those who renounce all strategic (i.e., manipulative) uses of language, and so on. Theories elaborating these various suggestions are all susceptible to criticism either on the ground that some statement might be true even if, for instance, its speaker lacked sufficient warrant to assert it (or false even though its assertion was warranted at the time), or on the ground that that is not what the word “true” means, or both. But criticisms along these lines are liable to miss the point. They are effective only if what these theories are purporting to analyse is the sense of the word “true”. Such theories, however, need not be presented as analyses of what the word “true” means, or even of the conditions under which its ascription is warranted. They are better understood as accounts of the role that word plays in the community of its users. Accounting for that, their defenders contended, is also a legitimate and significant philosophical enterprise, since, according to them, it explains the function which truth plays as a norm in discourse. These reflections bring into view a third desideratum which accounts of truth might be expected to serve: they should explicate the normative role which truth plays in the community of its users. 4. Again, not only does the word “true” serve to commend what someone says, but speaking the truth also serves a wider function in schemes of moral appraisal. This occurs in two ways. For one, we expect people to be truthful in what they say, and think ill of them when they are not. Of course, being true and being truthful are not the same, but they are closely connected. The personal virtue of truthfulness is often mistaken for sincerity, with which it is related. We generally expect people sincerely to believe what they assert, and to assert what they sincerely believe. To lie or dissemble is rightly regarded as a serious failure of integrity – excusable (maybe) in certain special circumstances, but if so, only because the truth thus hidden is not too momentous and concealing it is motivated by worthy considerations. Despite that, all of us sincerely hold beliefs which turn out to be false, so sincerity is not the same as truthfulness. Here a second ethical dimension of speaking the truth comes into play. It is not enough that people assert what they sincerely believe, and do not lie. We also hold people accountable for the truth of what they assert. It is this fact which gives plausibility to those theories of truth which take it to transcend discourse, in some sense. In both these ways, speaking the truth is highly esteemed. A satisfactory account of truth needs not only to explain how the word “true” comes to have normative force, but also why speaking the truth should have this twofold moral significance. This fourth desideratum is, of course, related to the third, but goes beyond the fact that calling a statement “true” is, amongst other things, to commend it. 5. Another related point is also worth identifying separately. Serious inquiry generally proceeds methodically, guided by heuristic principles

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refined through centuries of human experience and passed down the generations. Accordingly, accounts of truth can reasonably be expected to articulate, without begging the question, something normative about how inquiry should go. That is, a satisfactory view of truth needs to render perspicuous not only how truth is the goal of inquiry, but also how it connects with the heuristic principles which guide intelligent inquiry. These five desiderata are readily understandable even by those unfamiliar with the professional literature of contemporary philosophy. But other, more specialized and technical concerns have also been prominent in this literature. 6. The burst of activity resulting in the development of systems of formal logic, in the wake of Frege’s efforts, also stimulated interest in the logical structure of linguistic expressions, which in turn led to the development of powerful semantic theories. An attractive thesis was that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the conditions under which it would be true. The interplay between the concepts of truth and meaning became a major theme in the philosophy of language. Accordingly, another role for a theory of truth was to explain the meaningfulness of linguistic terms. 7. In a related way, a minimal requirement upon any system of formal logic is that its rules should not allow a false conclusion to be inferred from true premises. In particular, the rules and axioms of propositional logic are typically explained in terms of their being truth-preserving. Alternative systems of formal logic have been developed by logicians who maintain that sound inferences need to be more than simply truth-preserving: for example, some have insisted that validly drawn conclusions should also be relevant to their premises. The issue of what criteria should be satisfied by any sound system of formal logic need not concern us here, but any account of truth should at the very least support the testing of the axioms and rules of any such system for truth-preservation. 8. Analogously, truth is an integral element in our conception of discursive knowledge. Any of my claims to know that p can always be rebutted by showing that what I claim to know is, in fact, false. Most accounts of this kind of knowledge, from as far back as Plato, take it to involve justified true belief, with most of the debates being about the conditions which should count as justifying in this context. Epistemology therefore needs to draw upon an account of truth because of the truth- entailing character of discursive knowledge. Accordingly, an eighth desideratum of truth-theories is that they contribute to these epistemological inquiries. Whether some theory of truth is to be considered adequate turns on which of these eight programmatic concerns it is intended to serve, and how well it does so. Manifestly, few of those engaged in debates about theories of truth had all these desiderata in view, and they are contested. Clearly, we need to explore their cogency.

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3.2 The relevance of the desiderata Least controversial were the first and seventh of these desiderata. Some theorists – especially advocates of deflationary or minimalist theories of truth – explicitly argued against truth-theory needing to satisfy any of them except the first. For these theorists, the first is the only relevant constraint, and it need not be elaborate; all that is needed are such truisms as “ ‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white”. We can imagine them responding: The T-schemata, supplemented by some analysis of ‘blind ascriptions’, specify all that needs to be said philosophically about the [linguistic] concept of truth. Your other desiderata all belong to other areas of philosophy. “True” has no normative or moral force. Certainly, it’s good to have true beliefs, but that is because we fare better in the world with them than if we have false ones. Again, we do think people should tell the truth and we do commend those statements we believe to be true – and the people who make them for doing so – but that is because we think this is a characteristic of a good person, and we believe we all ought to be good people. Ditto the fourth constraint; issues of normativity and value belong to moral theory, not to truth-theory. As for the connection between truth and the principles which guide rational inquiry, it is up to the philosophy of science to tell us what are the appropriate methodologies and heuristic principles. Again, truth-theorists need have no particular view on the connection between truth and meaning – that is for semantic theorists to decide. Likewise, formal validity is the terrain of logicians; valid arguments do have to preserve truth, but that is so whatever theory of truth one holds. Similarly, knowledge-related issues are the domain of the epistemologist; the truism that knowledge that p implies the truth of p holds whatever conception of truth one has. So there is no need for truth-theories per se to meet any but the first desideratum. Although this response is too quick, and too crude, it is not entirely implausible. At bottom, it relies upon a distinction between the concept of (linguistic) truth, which any account of truth can reasonably be expected to explicate, and the explanatory roles which that concept then plays in other fields of philosophical reflection. The last five desiderata do concern roles which the concept of truth plays in morality, in science, in the meaningfulness of language, in logic, and in discursive knowledge generally. Accordingly, there is some force to the argument that accounting for those roles is not, strictly speaking, a constraint upon theories of truth, but upon theories of ethics, upon the philosophy of science, upon semantics, upon logical theory, and upon epistemology, respectively. In particular, unless

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we admit some such distinction between what properly forms part of the concept of truth, and how that concept figures in other fields of inquiry, an account of truth would have to encompass all those related fields as well. A judicious division of labour has its advantages in philosophy, as in other areas of human endeavour. Nevertheless, the role that the concept of truth is required to play in these five fields is not irrelevant to the issue of how we should understand that concept. It is surely a constraint on any plausible account of truth that it not render it mysterious, or even problematic, how truth could play the role it does in those other fields. That thought accordingly yields a significant condition which theories of truth need to satisfy: it is incumbent upon a theorist to explain what it is about truth that makes it apt for these other roles. In that way, and to that extent, we are right to insist that the last five desiderata are relevant to assessing the acceptability of any account of truth.

3.3 The point of the predicate “true” During the second half of the twentieth century, most effort went into debates around the sixth and seventh desiderata: exploring how truth is connected with the meaning of linguistic expressions, and how it figures in the metalogic of systems of formal logic. Minimalist and disquotation theories propose to explicate truth in terms of meaning. The T-schemata presuppose that the sentence said to be true is meaningful and understood. On the other hand, those philosophers who were bothered about what makes language meaningful seized on the notion of truth- conditions – that is, the conditions necessary and sufficient for a given sentence to be true – as a way of explaining what it means. But that presupposes that we already understand what it is for a sentence to be true. Since these programs ran in opposite directions, the result was quite confusing. The philosopher who has most strenuously insisted that the debates over truth and meaning were vitiated by running these two incompatible programs together is Michael Dummett. As he argued, the truth- definition, which lays down the conditions under which an arbitrary sentence of the object-language is true, cannot simultaneously provide us with a grasp of the meaning of each such sentence, unless, indeed, we already know in advance what the point of the predicate so defined is supposed to be. But, if we do know in advance the point of introducing the predicate “true”, then we know something about the concept of truth expressed by that predicate which is not embodied in that, or any other, truth- definition, stipulating the application of the predicate to the sentences of some language. (1978, xxi)

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This powerful argument shows that there is more to the concept of truth than could ever be provided by the truisms encapsulated in the T-schemata. On Dummett’s view, the missing feature, which any minimal definition of truth – and any deflationary analysis – leaves out of account, has to do with the practice of making statements. A proper account of that concept must include an account of its point, of what we use the word “true” for. That directs our attention to the second and third desiderata. To explore Dummett’s argument, let us follow him in supposing that Martians do not have in their own language any predicate which functions like “true” does in English. Imagine that some of these Martians visit Earth and try to develop a theory of human language simply through observing our linguistic activities. They might be able to develop hypotheses about the rules we humans seem to rely upon in our linguistic activities. They might then work out the sense and the reference of the complex utterances they observe. On that basis, these Martians could observe that certain of these humans’ utterances can generally be assigned to one of two classes: those ones that the humans call “true”; and those they call “false”. The Martians might even notice that humans generally seem to approve of the sentences they call “true”, and disapprove of the ones called “false”. But if these Martians thought that they had then worked out all that is required for understanding how human language is significant, they would be mistaken. They would have left a crucial feature out of account: the point of the earthlings’ use of the word “true”. Picking up from the later Wittgenstein the likening of language-use to playing games, Dummett invited his readers to consider this analogy (1973, 295–303). External observers, like the imaginary Martians, who carefully observe us humans playing a competitive game, say chess, might develop a theory which would enable them to predict with great accuracy how chess games would go. But if the Martians do not recognize us to be rational agents, who perform actions designed to achieve certain ends, they could not distinguish the rules of the game from other regularities observable in our play. They would be unaware that essential to the game of chess is that players aim to win. Not only that, how could these Martians distinguish those moves never made because they would be illegal, from moves never made because competent chess players know they would be bad moves, that is, moves likely to lead to defeat? Likewise, Dummett argued, a scientific theory of language-use might enable external observers to explain the meaning of what the speakers were saying, but no such theory would incorporate an understanding of what the speakers were doing. Even if the observers refined their theories to the point where they became highly successful in predicting what a speaker was about to say, such a theory would be seriously inadequate if it did not provide an account which the speakers themselves could access and relate to what they themselves were doing. No theory is adequate if it fails to explain the use of

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language as an activity on the part of rational agents, an explanation which those agents themselves could recognize and verify. The conclusion of his argument is that the practice of statement-making aims at making statements which are true. That is the crucial feature missed by these supposed observers. No account of the game of chess would be adequate if it were restricted to describing the permissible moves and to classifying the possible end-positions into ‘win’, ‘lose’, and ‘stalemate’. What is also required is the vital fact that the point of playing chess is to win. Similarly, any truth-theory which classifies declarative sentences into those designated ‘true’ and those designated ‘false’ – but which fails to explain the fact that, in general, the practice of uttering such sentences aims at making statements which are true – leaves a vital part of the concept of truth out of the account. Any adequate account of the concept of truth must explain its point, what we use the word “true” for. Clearly, if the linguistic conception of truth is to survive, Dummett’s argument has to be refuted. One attempt to do so goes like this (Kirkham 1995, 205). It takes the nub of Dummett’s argument to rest on the following analogy: just as it is part of the concept of playing a competitive game that participants aim to win, so too it is part of the concept of truth that truth is desirable. But, the objection continues, this argument from analogy is faulty; winning is not what one aims at when, say, one’s opponent is a small child suffering from undernourished self-esteem. Perhaps (the objector concedes) a defender of Dummett could reply that, in cases like this, one is really playing a different game, a game in which winning consists in ensuring that the child is victorious. But on this way of thinking, ‘winning’ is just a synonym for ‘achieving one’s goals’, so Dummett is really trying to draw an analogy between truth and achieving one’s goals, and his assertion that they are analogous simply begs the question. So, the objector concludes, the question whether truth is a value is an issue for value theory, not for truth-theory. Attempts at refutation along these lines reveal how profound is the objector’s misunderstanding of the argument he is trying to refute. That misunderstanding draws attention to the critical point in the argument. The attempted refutation portrays the argument from analogy in terms of the personal aims of the individuals who partake in these activities. This move is crucial to the objector’s strategy, since it shifts normativity from public practice into the private desires of those who participate in that practice. Once the argument has been altered in this way, it can be left to psychology to explain how desires come to be directed at preferred ends. But that rendering of Dummett’s argument misses its central thrust. It seriously misrepresents this argument as claiming that part of the concept of truth is that truth is desirable.1 Of course, speakers would generally agree that they desire to be truthful, but the argument is not advancing that 1.

Paul Horwich (1998, 139) misrepresents Dummett’s argument in just this way.

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proposition. To speak of desires is to direct attention to the motivations – not even the intentions – of speakers. But the personal desires of participants are irrelevant to this argument. Rather, just as winning is the objective intrinsic to competitive games, which players adopt as their personal aim when they fully participate in such games, so speaking the truth is the objective intrinsic to the practice of statement-making, which aim speakers adopt as their own when they sincerely make statements. Only secondarily does it become the personal goal of statement-makers. This distinction is essential to understanding the phenomenon of lying: a speaker intending to deceive performs an act (statement-making) whose intrinsic goal (truth-telling) is at odds with their own personal goal (deceiving). By contrast, the strength of the analogy turns upon the directed character of the activities in which the participants engage, irrespective of their private desires or intentions in doing so. So, the attempted refutation can only work by misinterpreting the argument it is trying to refute. Now, this misinterpretation might be put down to Dummett’s way of formulating his own argument; he says that the point of playing chess is that one aims to win. That does indeed attribute the aim to the person who is playing the game. Even so, anyone who reasonably attends to this argument would have recognized that a conceptual conclusion was being drawn, which applies to anyone making statements – that is, to everyone. The universality of that conclusion could only be rendered intelligible by some quite general feature of the practice of statement-making. All it has to do with the personal desires or intentions of individuals is that, in general, by choosing to engage in this practice, they adopt as their personal intention the objective of the practice. That is the crux of the analogy: a person playing chess generally aims to win because aiming to do so is a constitutive feature of that game, whether or not some particular participant on some occasion is seriously trying to win. One cannot understand the game unless one understands that. Even if someone plays some particular game with the personal intention of ensuring that the other side wins, as in the alleged counter- example of an adult who plays in such a way as to ensure that a young opponent wins, it remains that the point of the game is winning. This adult’s behaviour would make no sense otherwise. Nor is this adult playing a different kind of game; that really would be confusing to a small child! Rather, this adult is dissembling, pretending to play to win, but in fact deliberately aiming to lose. In terms of the analogy, such game-playing is like lying: pretending to speak the truth but in fact deliberately saying what one takes to be false. This normative force of truth is different from taking it as a moral value; the latter involves a further step. Rather, that truth is normative for the activity of asserting is what makes possible its playing normative roles in morality, in science, in the meaningfulness of language, in logic, and in knowledge generally. Here is the relevance of the last five desiderata. If all

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we are given by deflationists and minimalists is a set of biconditionals, as in the by-now familiar T-sentences, then its being invoked in these other discourses has to seem utterly mysterious, arbitrary, or explicable only in those other discourses.

3.4

The opposition between truth and falsity

Since aiming at truth is constitutive of the practice of assertion itself, there is an internal relation between the two, to invoke a philosophical term of art which has largely fallen out of use. There has been little consideration given to internal relations since Russell and G.E. Moore attacked the very idea when ushering in analytic philosophy in the early years of the twentieth century. Indeed, since the publication in 1951 of W.V.O. Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1953), the term is seldom even mentioned. Despite the fact that philosophers nowadays rarely consider internal relations, they cannot be so easily ignored. The idea is quite simple: A’s relation to B is internal if A’s being so related is essential to A’s being what it is. The arc of a circle is internally related to the centre of that circle; the arc could not be what it is without having a determinate geometric relationship to that point as its centre. The cardinal numbers are internally related; the number 2 is necessarily the successor of the number 1. Likewise, if a statement’s being true is intrinsic to the practice of assertion, truth is internally related to that practice. On the other hand, a relation between two phenomena is external if the existence of each is independent of the other; they would still be what they are even if they were not so related. But the relation of truth to the activity of statement-making is not like that. It is a mistake to think that the practice of statement-making would be what it is, independently of truth, but then posit a purely external relation between the two. Rather, part of the practice of statement-making is its being internally related to the concept of truth. That practice requires that, for statements to be well-made, they have to be true. To make a statement which is, in fact, false is to have made an error. True statements are better than false statements. A false statement is defective, although that error might not be evident at the time the statement is made and might never become evident. It follows that the second desideratum is central to the concept. That is why we have a ‘prejudice’ in favour of the true, and why that prejudice is entirely appropriate. One attempt to recognize this normativity went as follows: saying that p is true is no more than a way of commending p. This was an extremely deflationary proposal, which won few supporters and was soon abandoned, even by its proponents. But while this extreme proposal found little acceptance as an analysis of truth, those who prefer a more substantial analysis do need to explain why truth should carry the value it does. We

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do regard truth as valuable; to say that some statement is true is indeed to commend it, whether or not we think that being commendable is an intrinsic element in the analysis of what the term “true” means. There is, however, a straightforward way to rescue the valid insight hidden in this unsound proposal. “True” does indeed carry commendatory force, but that is because truth is itself a normative concept – not the other way around. This conclusion is anathema to many contemporary truth-theorists. To their mind, one of the virtues of the linguistic conception is precisely that it is descriptive, not normative. Indeed, truth’s having no intrinsically normative aspect is rendered explicit by the second presupposition of the linguistic conception of truth: that truth and falsity are opposites of the same order. Truth’s normative force therefore calls that presupposition into question. If truth functions as a norm for the practice of statement-making, truth and falsity cannot be evaluations of the same order. Their opposition is that between norm and error. The linguistic conception’s presupposition that truth and falsity are opposites of the same order debars it from being able to meet the second and third of the desiderata identified above, as well as explaining why truth should have moral significance (the fourth desideratum). Arguably, it is also in difficulties in meeting the fifth and seventh desiderata: explaining how truth connects to the heuristic principles that guide rational inquiry, and the constraint on systems of logic that they be truth-preserving, since these two also invoke its normativity. So, what has been seen as one of the virtues of the linguistic conception of truth turns out to be the source of serious deficiencies. When we take the use of statements into account, it becomes evident that the second of the three distinctive presuppositions of the linguistic conception of truth is quite mistaken. We should note here that one variant on disquotation theories of truth likewise implicitly abandons the second presupposition of the linguistic conception of truth. On this view, the role of “true” is to express endorsement of certain sentences (statements, propositions). By recognizing the normative aspect of truth, this proposal acknowledges that truth and falsity are not opposites of the same order. To that extent, this version of the disquotation theory significantly departs from our model of the linguistic conception of truth, and therefore needs to be sharply distinguished from other redundancy and minimalist theories to which it is often likened.

3.5 Norms and facts Adherents of the linguistic conception of truth are not so easily routed. What prevents them from happily acknowledging our conclusions are two conceptual blocs: they have a strong aversion to internal relations; and

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they cannot see how matters of fact, which determine truth, could generate normativity. I will have more to say about internal relations in §6.2, and how truth comes to have normative force will occupy us for the rest of this book. But first we should consider a fundamental objection which, if cogent, would knock this project out of contention straightaway. Such theorists characteristically hold that since questions of truth concern matters of fact, they are utterly distinct from questions of value. It is widely accepted that the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume had shown that no “ought” can be derived from an “is” (1978, Bk. III, 469). So, norms cannot be derived from facts. Accordingly, these theorists claim that their preferred theory tells what truth is – no more, and no less. If pressed, they will proffer psychological theories to explain why people invest that feature of statements with value – for example, because in certain crucial situations preferring true statements to false ones can have significant survival value, and so it is prudent to value truth in general. But to this mindset, explaining our preference for truth must always be another issue, since no account of what truth is can explain any normative force with which it might be invested. If our project is to be worth pursuing, that objection has to be immediately rebutted. Actually, Hume does not argue for his principle in any detail, but a seemingly irrefutable argument for it can easily be constructed (Schurz 1997). As a matter of formal logic, no term can appear in a validly deduced conclusion unless it has appeared somewhere in the premises. So, “ought” cannot appear in any valid conclusion if it has not appeared in the premises. Interpreted simply as a corollary of the rules of deductive logic, this does not tell us much. More interesting – and much more controversial – is a generalization commonly taken to be licensed by this deductive truism: normative statements cannot be derived from factual statements. This more general argument is often taken to follow simply from that feature of deductive logic. If all the premises of a valid argument contain only factual terms, any conclusion can only contain factual terms. So far, so good, but the generalization of that argument relies upon an ancillary principle. Any terms not already available in the premises, so it is claimed, must be explicitly introduced by definitions based on terms in the premises or on those previously defined. Now, in an explicit definition, the defined term is simply an abbreviation for a formula constructed out of other terms already in use, and it is always possible to eliminate the introduced term in favour of that longer formula. Explicit definitions can convey no new information about the world. But if every term not employed as a factual description has to be introduced explicitly, this amounts to insisting that the only kind of acceptable definition is an abbreviation for factual descriptions. Consequently, any terms in the conclusion which are not in the premises can be back-translated through their definitions – in each case substituting the defining phrase or clause for the defined term – until

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the conclusion is stated solely using the terms in the premises. Since those are by assumption strictly factual, then the conclusion must similarly be strictly factual. This oft-repeated argument, however, is unsound. It is based on the assumption that every definition permits back-translation, and that is false. Explicit, abbreviatory definition is not the only form of definition, nor is it the most interesting, nor the most powerful. The assumption in the background of this counter-argument is therefore invalid. There is another form of definition, which the above argument has overlooked: implicit definition (Bickhard 1998). A principle, or set of principles, whose role in some explanatory system is taken to be constitutive of the meaning of some term or operator within it, provides an implicit definition of that term or operator. It was with that sense that J.D. Gergonne introduced the concept of implicit definition in 1818, and that is how it was recognized and employed in the late nineteenth century by Hilbert in his axiomatization of geometry (Kneale 1968, 385). The concept is now used with a somewhat different (although related) sense in mathematical model theory, where an axiom system is taken to implicitly define the class of models in virtue of which those axioms are true. The notion also applies to definitions of single terms as located in relationships with other already available terms, as well as to non-formal senses (Bickhard and Terveen 1995; Hale and Wright 2000). In general, the power of implicit definition is mathematically as great as, or greater than, that of explicit definition. Indeed, Beth’s theorem proves that implicit definition is just as powerful in first- order predicate calculus, with infinite models, where it applies to the implicit definition of single terms. For finite models, and for many other combinations of logics and kinds of models, implicit definition is more powerful than explicit definition (Bickhard 1998, 266). The relevance of this rather technical matter is that implicit definition does not permit back-translation. There is no defining phrase or clause which can be substituted for a term which has been implicitly defined. Even in formal cases, it is a matter of mathematical and logical discovery to determine what characterizes the class of models. But, if implicit definition is a legitimate form of definition, and if implicit definition does not permit back-translation, then the argument attributed to Hume is based on a false premise. That argument is unsound. Of course, it is one thing to show that this argument is unsound; it is quite another to show how norms emerge in nature. The latter is the fundamental issue, which remains outstanding after this attempted knock- out has been dismissed. I will address that issue in the following chapter. The relevance of pointing out that explicit definitions are not the only legitimate sort of definition is to clear away this barrier to the possibility of deriving normativity from a factual base. Our inquiry can proceed.

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3.6 Pointers to the primary locus of truth Where should we look to find a more adequate account of the concept of truth? It might seem unduly ambitious to venture a new answer to this perennial philosophical question. But our examination of the linguistic conception has already yielded some significant clues. We need more than the resources provided by syntax and semantics to understand real-life examples of language-use. Simply articulating the conditions under which a given sentence is true does not explain what language-users are doing. Knowing a language is knowing how to engage in a complex practice. People exhibit their linguistic competence not only in their production of sentences, but also in a range of other practical abilities, like their ability to pick out objects which satisfy some description, their doing what they have been asked to do, and so on. Asserting likewise is exercising a practical ability. And, as we have seen, the practice of assertion aims at making statements which are true. In speaking of assertion here, we are no longer considering it in the sense of the proposition or thought expressed – or the statement made – but rather, in the sense of the act of making such a statement. Thereby, we have moved out of the domain of linguistically structured items, to focus upon a subclass within a different domain, namely, speech-acts. While the first of the three distinctive features of the linguistic conception of truth restricts truth to the linguistic domain, its meaning there cannot be fully explained unless we move beyond language, into the domain of actions. Now, any genuine action embodies a certain kind of normativity. There is a special sort of ‘rightness’ built in to the concept of any action. To anticipate a point for which I will argue in the next chapter, precisely because any action has an intrinsic goal, an objective, what the ancient Greeks called a telos, it can be successful – or it can fail. Yet if I perform some action – for example, firing an arrow at a bullseye – but miss the target, it still remains the case that what I did was fire an arrow at that bullseye. Provided that I was not pretending – or that I was not so incompetent at archery that my performance could not possibly qualify as an attempt to fire at that target – the fact that my action failed to achieve its objective does not cancel the fact that what I did was fire at that bullseye. Some actions don’t succeed! But an effective action, one which does achieve its telos, is done well; in that sense, it is a ‘good’ action. The telos of any type of action functions as a norm, determining what will count as a good instance of that type of action. These two lines of thought thus seem to be leading in the same direction. It seems that any adequate account of the truth of statements will have to refer beyond the linguistic domain, to actions, and it seems that the logical structure of actions might be just what is needed to account for the normativity of truth. The complementarity of these two points is suggestive.

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It provides a strong reason to explore seriously the idea that the domain of actions might be the primary locus of truth. Once we widen the aperture of our minds beyond the narrow focus upon the truth of statements and other such linguistically structured items, we immediately notice that the words “true” and “truth” are generally ascribed much more broadly. That is evident in both ancient and contemporary English, and in many languages other than English. To cite just a few examples, someone can be a true friend; a true coin is not counterfeit; a frog is not a true reptile. Again, wheels, edges, and one’s aim at a target are said to be true. There are countless popular songs avowing true love. Yet another use is in the notion of being true-to: one can be true to one’s word, to one’s ideals, to one’s spouse, or to oneself. The sense of the word “true” in these uses does not appear to have anything to do with the truth of statements. Yet those uses are familiar and occur frequently in everyday talk. That is enough to call into question the way philosophers have by and large ignored such uses of “true” when they have come to elaborate their theories of truth. These uses of “true”, as we shall see in due course, involve adverting to what someone or something is doing. They suddenly take on a heightened significance in the light of the suggestion that the domain of actions might be the primary locus of truth. A few preliminary remarks about those examples will be enough at this stage to indicate the way forward. A true friend is not only someone who can truly be said to be a friend, but also someone whose friendship can be relied upon. Now, while in this case truth is ascribed to persons, it is in their actions over time that true friendship is manifested. It is by proving themselves reliable whenever their support is most needed, especially in difficult and testing circumstances, that true friends show their mettle. Although the ‘bearer’ of truth in the notion of a true friend is a person, the basis for ascribing truth to someone, as a true friend, alludes to that person’s characteristic ways of acting. The same logic is evident in the manifold cases of being-true-to – true to one’s word, to one’s spouse or friend, to one’s ideals, or to oneself. In these cases too, while the ‘bearer’ of truth is a person, it is in that person’s conduct that being true is manifest. Being true to one’s word requires doing something: acting in a way which fulfils what one has said. Being true to another person involves much more than only speaking the truth and not lying to the other; it involves how one interacts with that other person. Again, being true to oneself is a matter of one’s actions expressing one’s own deepest values, beliefs, and sense of identity. In all these cases, the notion of being-true-to refers to how effectively a person’s actions over time manifest such a relationship. Similarly with true love. In this case, the ‘bearer’ is what we might call an emotional disposition. Yet love is not simply a disposition to have warm and affectionate feelings; it also involves sustained acts of devotion and care,

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acts which flow from a commitment to seek out and do whatever will honour and enhance the good of the beloved. So here again, when someone’s love is true, that love is manifest in the lover’s actions. In all these cases of non-linguistic uses of “true” it appears that being true concerns how people conduct themselves. That is, although in each case the ‘bearer’ of truth is a person, or the disposition of a person, ascribing truth to these persons is based upon how they conduct themselves over an extended period. In these non-linguistic contexts, truth has to be construed as grounded in the domain of action. Once we notice this, it becomes evident that there are in these uses more coherence, and more significance, than philosophers’ typical neglect or dismissal of them would lead us to expect. It appears that they might not be as irrelevant to the linguistic uses of “true” as the work of recent philosophers has assumed. They warrant more careful analysis. I could, at this point, launch into an extended conceptual analysis of these non-linguistic uses of the word “true”, and claim that that is the sense also invoked in linguistic uses. That, however, would not be entirely satisfying. If all that could be offered as an alternative to the linguistic conception of truth were a description of the many uses of the word “true”, that analysis might prove interesting in its own right, but it would not carry much persuasive force in commending this unorthodox suggestion. Nothing would have been said to ground any conception(s) which that analysis might yield within a broader understanding of how the world operates. It would lack ontological underpinning. That is not to say that such a conceptual analysis would be pointless; on the contrary, we will examine these uses more closely in Chapter 5. But the alternative conception of truth we are seeking will be all the more plausible if it can be found to be integral to a cogent understanding of significant features of the actual world in which we find ourselves. Accordingly, before taking up the task of analysing these non-linguistic uses of “true”, it would be sensible to explore first whether grounding ascriptions of truth in the domain of action might have greater significance than conceptual analysis alone could provide. The way forward has already been anticipated. The conceptual link between the linguistic and the non-linguistic uses of “true” is secured by their common grounding in actions of some kind. So, if we are to make any progress in understanding how the concept of truth is deeply rooted, it is beginning to look as though we should be seriously examining the domain of actions. For many philosophers, however, the category of action is itself too problematic to bear such a weight. Precisely because actions seem to embody their own intrinsic goals, and to manifest a certain kind of normativity, many philosophers have found it hard to understand how they fit into the rest of the world. Here again, the orthodox dichotomy between facts and norms serves to generate serious conceptual difficulties. For those seeking

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a strictly naturalistic account of all worldly phenomena, actions seem to be anomalous. Far from the category of action providing a firm grounding for the concept of truth, it will strike such thinkers that we have moved from the relatively straightforward to the metaphysically mysterious. For all that the intimations we have been gathering in this section are suggestive, they will simply be rejected as false leads, should the category of action itself be fraught with problems. The best way to meet this challenge is to show how the category of action makes metaphysical sense. That will lead us to investigate how our pretheoretical concept of action is systematically grounded in a wider natural context in such a way that that category can be seen to be far from anomalous. On the contrary, it proves to be metaphysically deep. Since the telos of any type of action functions as a norm, showing how actions emerge as a natural category will thus demonstrate how norms emerge in nature. That will provide the conceptual framework needed to begin working out a substantial conception of truth. Only after all that has been securely established will it be appropriate to return to the issue of the ascription of truth to statements.

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4 Truth in Action

The observations in §3.6 suggest that an adequate conception of truth will ground it in the domain of actions. Since the concept of action is intrinsically normative, that might enable us to explain how truth comes to have its normative character. But for this program to succeed, we will first have to show how the domain of actions can bear the explanatory weight that our leading idea places upon it. Can it do so? How to accommodate actions within a scientifically serious world-view has troubled many thinkers, especially over the past century or so. In the spirit of David Hume and John Stuart Mill, causation is generally analysed nowadays in terms of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of phenomena, so explaining human behaviour in terms of sequences of stimuli and responses sounds suitably scientific. But actions do not fit that pattern. The cause of an action is not some set of conditions or inputs, but an entity. Furthermore, with their goal-seeking and normativity, actions seem puzzling anomalies in an otherwise physical world. For these reasons, many philosophers have found actions to be metaphysical embarrassments, only encountered, as they scan through the biological world, when they finally arrive at human beings. I will argue that, on the contrary, the category of action is not a human peculiarity, a perplexing incongruity in an otherwise mechanistic world. Rather, actions pervade the whole biological domain. We are both entitled and required to ascribe genuine actions to organisms as primitive as bacteria. That claim is likely to raise more than a few philosophical eyebrows! To forestall that response, in this chapter I will introduce a graduated notion of action, building up from a minimal sense in which even primitive organisms can properly be said to perform actions, to the much richer sense in which only we humans act. I will begin by introducing the concept of self-maintenance, and will then argue that what is distinctive about biological organisms is that they are recursively self-maintenant. My argument will be that, in order to keep on existing, living things maintain themselves by performing appropriate 62

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actions (in at least a minimal sense), and that the actions of autonomous life are inherently goal-seeking, and derive their normative character from the effective functioning of the interactive processes in which they engage. Once goal-seeking activity has emerged in this way, more complex creatures can seek a wide range of goals beyond those involved in self-maintenance. Once all that is in place, we will then be in a position to understand how the domain of actions grounds truth, and explains its normativity. If we can show all this, we will be well on the way to explicating a substantial conception of truth which will throw light upon its role in human affairs.

4.1

Self-maintenance

Let us begin by pondering the fact that all biological organisms, from bacteria to humans, are complex entities in a state far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The great puzzle then is how they continue to exist for significant periods, instead of degenerating through entropy into disorganized sludge. The fact that biological organisms nevertheless remain relatively stable over time appears to be inconsistent with the second law of thermodynamics. Organisms are not unique in this respect; there are many inorganic systems which also remain relatively stable despite being in a far-fromequilibrium state. Of course, many other systems also are in far-fromequilibrium states, but they are unstable – they do tend to degenerate naturally towards thermodynamic equilibrium. Systems of this latter type do not evoke the intriguing question raised by those stable systems which persist in such states. Now, the stability of some kinds of entity comes from their having a form of organization which is strongly cohesive; they are energy wells. That is, they persist at or near thermodynamic equilibrium throughout environmental changes, and their organizational structure can be disrupted only by an input of a critical level of energy from external sources. Such a disruption can be brought about only by a significantly higher level of energy than they typically encounter. Hence, they are very stable, cohesive, and robust. Atoms, molecules, and rocks are easily recognizable examples. But many stable phenomena in the world are not like that. Their state is far from equilibrium; they consist of shallow energy wells, and their organizational structure is readily susceptible to disruption. The puzzle about any such entity is: how is its existence possible? How can it be both stable yet in a far-fromequilibrium state? That is the metaphysically revealing question to ask. The first step towards solving that puzzle is to note that any such entity can only persist if it regularly obtains advantageous inputs of energy from its external environment. The most primitive sort of system where this happens is one which is kept going artificially, entirely by external means. This happens in a chemical bath whose processes are kept going by external pumps which maintain an input of the required chemicals from external

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reservoirs, while other pumps remove waste products (Bickhard 2000). Until such a system is switched off, or runs out of chemicals, the chemical processes within the bath are kept going, but their stability is completely dependent upon its environmental conditions: the pumps and the supplies contained in the external reservoirs. While this bath might be of interest to a chemical engineer, it is not very interesting from a metaphysical point of view. Still, its dependence upon external supplies illustrates an essential feature of all stable far-fromequilibrium systems. The point is that the stability of all such systems depends crucially upon their being necessarily open processes. Accordingly, the following analysis takes the minimal type of stability evident in such a chemical bath as a point de départ, as we move towards understanding what is essential to living organisms. The continued operation of chemical baths contributes nothing to their own persistence. Their processes are regulated quite externally; there is no sense in which such a system regulates itself. But there are many other relatively stable far-fromequilibrium systems which do regulate themselves. These systems operate in ways which enable them to persist without such artificially devised inputs. Like chemical baths, their continuing stability must result from external inputs, but unlike them, they persist because their intrinsic processes elicit those inputs naturally from their ambient environment. An interesting non-biological example is a candle flame, which typically will keep burning for hours – but only so long as fuel and oxygen continue to be drawn into the process. Cut off either, and the flame goes out. But, unlike a simple chemical bath, a candle flame makes several active contributions to its own persistence. It maintains its temperature above the combustion threshold; it melts and then vaporizes wax into a continuing supply of fuel; and in normal atmospheric conditions, it induces convection currents, thereby sucking in the oxygen it needs and carrying away the carbon dioxide produced by its own combustion (Bickhard 1993, 1998). Because a candle flame is a self- organizing system in a far-fromequilibrium state, its continued existence depends upon its interactions with its environment. Receiving such inputs is a necessary condition of its persistence. We cannot say what a candle flame is without mentioning its relations with external elements. The very being of the flame, therefore, is a function (in part) of these external relations. Thus, these physically external relations are logically internal to any flame; that is, they are constitutive of its very being. Not only its properties, but also its continuing existence, depend upon them. If the temperature of the atmosphere around the candle were (independently) to rise gradually to that of the flame itself, the convection currents required to suck in new oxygen and remove carbon dioxide would progressively become less effective. Either the flame would then go out, smothered by the carbon

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dioxide it had been producing, or the entire candle would first melt and then vaporize. A candle flame is an emergent phenomenon. Its continuing ability to be self-maintaining cannot be explained simply as the physical resultant of the causal properties of its distinct constituents, since they are continually being consumed. Of course, in one sense its persistence is dependent upon its constituents: should the candle flame have burnt all its fuel, or become deprived of oxygen, it will cease to be. But so long as those boundary conditions are fulfilled – in general, so long as its external requirements for fuel and oxygen continue to be satisfied, and it is not blown or snuffed out – the flame keeps on contributing to its own persistence. The only coherent way of conceptualizing a flame is as a dynamic, self-organizing system of processes, flowing through time, which succeeds in maintaining its own process of burning. The ability of a complex system to do this is a holistic property of the system itself, not of its constituents. The intuitive idea of emergence is that of a whole which is somehow ‘more than the sum of its parts’. The only extra feature which a whole could have, over and above those which could result from an aggregation of its parts,1 is how the parts are organized. William Wimsatt (1997) has turned this observation into a positive definition of the concept of emergence: an emergent property is – roughly – a system property which is dependent upon the mode of organization of its parts. Whilst emergence involves some kind of interdependence of diverse parts, there are many kinds of such interaction, and no clear way to classify them. In this sense, the properties and powers of a candle flame are emergent, being dependent on its organization. In fact, the distinctive properties and powers of every phenomenon, as diverse as quantum fields and football clubs, are generated by the way a set of constituent entities and/or processes is both patterned and flowing. Organization inherently involves both spatial and temporal aspects; it is a dynamic concept. What is crucial for the persistence of any system in a far-fromequilibrium state is whether its constituting organization persists. By its ‘constituting organization’, I am referring to the way its constituent processes are constrained and regulated over time such that the integrity of the total system remains relatively stable, and in virtue of which it has its typical characteristics and typically operates. Its identity over time consists in the persistence of that form of organization (perhaps with modifications) – not in the persistence of its constituents. 1. Wimsatt (1986) has identified four distinct conditions under which a system property might be an aggregate of the properties of its proper parts. That implies a correlative range of ways in which holistic system properties might not be aggregative. That provides at least four distinct and precise senses in which a holistic property might be dependent on the organization of a system’s parts, and thus be emergent.

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Many types of dynamic system retain their organizational integrity, and their distinctive properties and powers, even though their constituents are replaced over time by other similar ones. That is why those systems which have emergent properties and powers – that is, ones which are nonaggregative – have to be ascribed to the set of constituent entities and/or processes, and not to those constituents themselves. Just as a set is not identical with any or all of its members, so those properties which are dependent upon the mode of organization of a system’s constituent parts are not the same as the properties of those parts. Different sets of similar constituents can manifest over time the same dynamic constituting organization in this sense, and generate the same kinds of properties and powers. If we think of the difference between kinds of entity as arising from their having relatively stable, cohesive but different forms of organization, constituting organization proves to be the contemporary and temporalized analogue of an Aristotelian form.

4.2

Autonomous life

This puzzle of how something can be in a far-fromequilibrium state, but yet stable, applies to every biological entity – from bacteria to humans. So self-maintenance must somehow figure in explaining their very existence too. The ability of organisms to maintain themselves, however, involves a further level of complexity which inorganic self-maintaining systems lack. Unlike candle flames, biological systems are able to maintain stability over time not only within certain ranges of conditions, but also within certain ranges of changes of conditions. They can switch to deploying different kinds of processes depending on their detecting differing conditions in their environment. Bacteria provide a simple example. In a liquid, they either swim or tumble, and have the ability to regulate their swimming so that they move towards a source of nutrients. Research on the bacteria E. Coli has discovered how processes along a network of proteins serve to modulate the frequency of their tumbling motion. When moving up a nutrient gradient, these bacteria encounter over time an increasing concentration of the nutrient. In response, the frequency of their tumbling decreases and thus they tend to continue swimming up the gradient. If they do not encounter increasing concentrations of the nutrient, they keep alternating between periods of tumbling and swimming until they do come across a nutrient gradient. As a result, they swim towards the nutrient source (Alon et al. 1999). Each of these two kinds of activity – swimming and tumbling – contributes in different ways to the bacterium’s typical behaviour as it detects significant variations in its environmental conditions. Each serves a selfmaintaining function, in the different circumstances. The bacterium’s ability to detect nutrient-gradients, and to respond by switching between its

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two modes of behaving, means that not only is it self-maintenant, but it also thereby maintains its own ability to be self-maintenant in the different circumstances. That is, it exhibits recursive self-maintenance.2 A relatively stable and cohesive organization of processes which contains within itself sufficient complexity to operate in ways which ensure (within limits) its own viability and coherence is an autonomous system (Christensen and Hooker 2000b). Recursive self-maintenance has a strong claim to be considered the distinctive characteristic of life. The usual definitions of life, and of related concepts like organism and life form, propose a variety of empirical characteristics which all and only living things are supposed to satisfy, such as being highly organized, responding to stimuli, growing, taking from the environment, self-moving, etc. As Michael Thompson (2008) has shown, these candidates fail to withstand critical scrutiny; there are counterexamples to each of these commonly cited criteria. Such counterexamples can be blocked by invoking restrictions such as ‘vital organization’ etc., but the word “vital” just means “relating to life”, thereby reducing the proposed definitions to trivial circularity. It seems more promising to recognize that thermodynamics identifies a sounder, more generic, and better defined class of items within which to locate living things. Interestingly, the astrophysicist Charles Lineweaver (2006) has proposed that living things be simply identified as far-fromequilibrium dissipative structures. On this basis, however, stars would also count as alive. Nor will simple self-maintenance do, since some inorganic systems are also self-maintenant (e.g., candle flames). Recursive self-maintenance more plausibly exploits this insight, without counting as alive such counter-intuitive examples. Biological organisms, like all far-fromequilibrium systems which are selfmaintenant, are necessarily open, depending on regular interactions with their environment for their continued existence. But, unlike candle flames, their form of self- organization characteristically has a self-generated boundary which demarcates their internal processes from those external interactions. Generally, this boundary is marked by a surrounding membrane of some sort; in animals, this takes the form of a skin or shell. For this reason, it has been all too easy to regard the entity as constituted by the organization of processes inside this membrane – indeed, our language enshrines this by coining nouns to denote such entities – and to overlook the fact that its external interactions also belong to its very being. If a biological entity is to be recursively self-maintenant it must contain within itself some sort of infrastructure which enables the relevant shifts and adjustments in its own interior processes. Infrastructure, in this sense, is structure within its system which is stable relative to the time scales in

2.

The term ‘recursive self-maintenance’, so far as I am aware, was first coined by Mark Bickhard (1993; 2000), from whom the above examples are drawn.

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which those relevant shifts occur. Some sort of switching mechanism is the simplest form of infrastructure which can perform the function of selecting which of its interior processes to activate, as required. Multicellular organisms contain much more elaborate infrastructure which enables continual adjustment to detected variations in their environmental conditions; this is both more complex and more subtle than simple switching. Organisms, from single cells to complex mammals, repeatedly adjust their operations, thereby maintaining themselves in existence (barring fatal accidents, infections, and cumulative wear and tear). Any adequate description of how they do this must include two broad types of interactive process, each made up of many sub-processes. Firstly, they must keep interacting with their environments in order to seek out and ingest whatever ordered free energy and materials they require, and to expel disordered energy and waste materials, all the while avoiding or ameliorating damage. Secondly, they must activate internal recursive mechanisms in order continually to process the materials they have ingested, converting them into new forms within themselves. This second type of interaction serves two interconnected functions: adjusting their own metabolism to return it to a balanced state; and repairing and regenerating themselves by reconstituting the specific organs and processes by which metabolic processing occurs. Thereby they continually regenerate themselves as integrated functional wholes (Hooker 2009).3 Both these types of process are cyclic. The processes of external interactions cycle from arousal, through hunting, ingesting, resting, and back to arousal, while the internal metabolic interactions cycle from hunger, through digesting, satiation, and back to hunger. These two cycles need to be coordinated and synchronized so that they operate reciprocally. The cycles of interaction with the environment deliver energy and material components to the organism in a usable form when and where they are needed. That enables it to complete the regeneration cycles in its cellular processes. The latter include the regeneration of its interactive capacities, both the capacity to interact with the environment in food-acquiring ways, and the metabolic capacity to repair damage. While some of these interactive processes are indispensable for an organism’s survival – for a huge number of species: breathing; eating; drinking; and excreting – if others

3. It is necessary to speak of ‘functional wholes’ here, and not ‘physical wholes’, because many organisms which lose certain bits still manage to survive and function, although often not as well. While cutting a cell in two will kill it, plants and animals can usually get by without some of their parts; indeed, they typically shed cells, and sometimes limbs or skin, in their cycles of regeneration. What is crucial is whether the constituting organization of the organism is thereby self-constituted and self-maintained.

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work in less than optimal ways, that can impair its functioning, without immediately or inevitably proving fatal. Through these interconnected cyclical processes, an organism ensures its own coherence. But only for a finite period. In order to survive, organisms must interact with environments which are not wholly benign; they are also impacted by hostile and damaging influences. Since their energy wells are relatively shallow, they are vulnerable to harm from external sources. Wounds, infections, and poor access to optimal resources in their environment can all take their toll. Secondly, the processes by which they repair damage and regenerate do not always work perfectly; replacement cells are not always exact copies. The consequence of these two negative factors is aging, and eventually death. Aging thus militates against self-maintenance. When their complex of interactive processes is functioning well enough, however, and provided they do not suffer fatal accidents or diseases, or become too old, organisms are able to keep themselves in existence throughout many environmental changes. What I am arguing is that recursive self-maintenance is a necessary condition for the continuing existence and integrity of living systems. It follows, to express this crucial point in traditional metaphysical language, that these interactive processes are part of the ‘essence’ of any life form. They are essential to what it is to be a living thing. Once those processes irrevocably break down, the organism dies. There are other ways in which biological organisms exhibit recursive selfmaintenance: they generally are able either to replicate themselves or reproduce other individuals conforming to the same archetype as themselves. The qualification “generally” is required because in biology systems, heredity is inexact – mutant molecules make more mutants – unlike autocatalytic chemical systems in which molecules catalyse exact copies of themselves. The commonly accepted way of distinguishing between different biological species is whether individuals are able to produce offspring which are likewise able to produce fertile offspring. Although it is not usually put this way, the persistence of a biological species thus also manifests recursive self-maintenance (Griesemer 2000). In this case, it is not the individual organism which is maintained in existence, but another individual (or other individuals) conforming to the same archetype, which can persist beyond the parents’ own lifespan. The persistence of their constituting organization is especially pertinent for multicellular organisms; they typically persist while replacing a number of times the cells which constitute their bodies. And they typically retain their identity while they grow, change, and age. It follows that what organisms typically maintain through their own recursive processes are their own forms of constituting organization. It is in that sense that they maintain themselves. And what they typically reproduce is that form of constituting organization which identifies the species to which they belong (barring mutations).

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The significance of these points is often overlooked by philosophers. In the standard debates about the socalled ‘mind–body problem’, for example, it has been all too easy to assume that a human body has a stable set of constituents: cells and complexes of cells, ultimately composed of whatever is physically basic. To argue that these physical constituents are what ‘do all the causal work’ (Kim 1998, 37) is to ignore the fact that we humans normally replace almost all the molecules in our bodies many times during our lifetimes, and that our existence depends essentially on external interactions. Those philosophers who have taken note of the turnover of constituents in biological systems have tended to assimilate it to the case, much discussed as a puzzle about identity, of the ship once used by the Greek hero Theseus, some of whose planks were replaced after each voyage. To think about the turnover of the cells in an organism’s body in the terms of that famous example, however, is to miss the most significant aspect: that, unlike that ship, an organism’s body is a self-organized system of processes whose very existence depends upon its external interactions, whereby it feeds, repairs, and renews itself. There is no permanent physical base to which its functioning could be reduced. In this respect, biological systems are like candle flames. Once those activities cease, they die, and their former bodies immediately begin to rot. My proposal is that the recursive self-maintenance of individuals and of the species to which all kinds of autonomous biological entities belong is the distinctive characteristic of life. Recursive self-maintenance is a reflexive concept. Before proceeding, I need to address a possible objection. According to Thompson (2008, 45–46), defining life by invoking reflexivity as part of a defining characteristic of life is vacuous; the phrase to which the prefix “self-“ is attached should be replaced in each case with some such transparently circle-making expression as “bio-“, “biological”, or “vital”. This objection is not, however, effective against my proposal. Not every self-maintenant system is biological (e.g., a candle flame), although recursively self-maintenant ones are. “Selfmaintaining” is therefore not a dummy for “biological”. Nor is the word “recursive”, since its original use was in mathematics, and it has a clear and proper use across many domains. The fact that reflexivity is widespread does not make it vacuous, nor is attributing recursive processes to organisms circular. Thompson suggests that what really gets registered in criteria of selfmaintenance and reproduction is the notion of vital operation, and that presupposes a grasp of the appropriate category of form. He proposes that the concept of a life form can be derived from a specific form of proposition, canonically expressed in sentences of the form “The S is (or has, or does) F”, for example, “The bobcat breeds in the spring”, which cannot be analysed along the lines of Russell’s definite descriptions. Paraphrases of this form of proposition abound. For example, “Ss are/have/do F”, or “It belongs to an

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S to be/have/do F”, or “Ss characteristically (or typically) are/have/do F” all express the same judgement as the canonical form (2008, 52). He calls this distinctive form of proposition a ‘natural-historical judgment’ and goes on to propose that an organism can be defined as “the object of any possible judgement, this S is F, to which some system of natural-historical judgements, the S is G, H, etc., might correspond” (76–77). Such judgements do have a distinct logical form, and do refer to a distinct metaphysical category. It is, in fact, the way an archetype of any sort is described. The descriptions of candle flames and of the behaviour of organisms which I am giving throughout this book are archetypal in just this sense. (To interpret them as empirical generalizations would be a misunderstanding.) But archetypical descriptions can be given of types of entity other than life forms. Everything Thompson says about ‘natural-historical’ judgements seems to apply equally well to “The candle flame is self-maintenant”, to ‘The medieval manuscript is a rare and beautiful thing”, and indeed to any archetypal judgement which describes the typical behaviour or characteristics of inorganic entities in standard conditions.4 Another difficulty with Thompson’s approach is that he defines a life form concept as a concept which “provides the subject for this form of judgement”, and a life form or species as “anything that is, or could be immediately designated by a life-form concept” (76). But “the kidney filters blood” conforms to his criteria for a natural-historical judgement, yet kidneys do not constitute a species, nor are they organisms; they are biological organs, which is not the same. Consequently, Thompson’s central thesis – that this distinctive logical form serves to define the concepts of an organism and a life form – cannot be sustained. Although these biological concepts cannot be derived in this way just from considerations of formal logic, I am not suggesting that recursive selfmaintenance is a straightforwardly empirical concept. So what kind of concept is it? Our discussion has identified three distinctive features which help clarify its status: 4.

Thompson does consider some non-organic cases where appeal is made to ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ conditions, for example, “Water is a liquid” (70), where, he maintains, there is an implicit appeal to room temperature as normal or standard. He comments, “What is ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ is here evidently judged by reference to myself. The ‘normal conditions’ presupposed in such a statement as “Water is a liquid” are not normal conditions for water – continuous bits of it will indifferently occupy any of the three states of water – and to articulate them is not to articulate any truth about water” (70–71). That response is fair enough in this case, but it does not apply to the above counter-examples, such as the candle flame. This latter case does presuppose what are the normal conditions for a candle flame, and an indefinite number of possible circumstances could interfere with its typical operation. The only other possible counter-example he considers is “Oxygen is a gas”, which he claims is true simpliciter, and so dismisses as not relevant.

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1. Recursive self-maintenance involves reiterating cycles of reflexive interactions. But reflexivity is a logical concept. Recursiveness also is a logicomathematical concept. 2. What archetypal organisms maintain through their own interactive and recursive processes are their own forms of constituting organization. That is what justifies and gives content to talk of their maintaining their own life form, despite their being in a far-fromequilibrium state, and of perpetuating the life form of their species. 3. The concept of recursive self-maintenance concerns the formal conditions of an organism’s existence – one of the categories, according to Kant and Hegel. I say “formal conditions” because the concept does not specify the sorts of process by which different kinds of organism maintain themselves. What is meant by saying that organisms ‘maintain’ themselves is that, through the effective functioning of their own interactive processes, they bring about the continuance in existence of their form of constituting organization. They persist. Persistence is just a temporalized extension of the category of existence. Similarly, to say that organisms ‘reproduce’ themselves is that, through the effective functioning of certain of their own processes, other exemplars of their form of constituting organization come into existence, so that the species persists. Therefore, it seems better to classify the concept of recursive self-maintenance as meta-physical, rather than empirical, involving as it does the logical feature of reiterated reflexivity, constituting organization as the contemporary, dynamic analogue of the traditional category of form, and the formal conditions of an organism’s existence through time. Nevertheless, how different kinds of organism maintain themselves, and reproduce, is an empirical question. The specific processes involved are many and varied. Investigating them is an empirical task, undertaken by physiologists and biochemists. It is not relevant to pursue that question here. With these clarifications, we can now formulate some definitions. An organism, that is, an individual living thing, is an entity whose constituting organization manifests recursive self-maintenance. A life form or species concept is a concept which provides the subject for an archetypal judgement describing a recursively self-maintenant entity. And a life form or species is anything that is, or could be, immediately designated by a life form concept. This series of definitions is not invalidated by the fact that empirical cases occur which only marginally instantiate the concept of life. (The world often does not fit neatly into our clearly defined concepts.) For example, opinions differ on whether viruses are a form of life, or organic structures which interact with living organisms. Viruses resemble organisms in that they possess genes and evolve by natural selection, and reproduce. Specific

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viral strains reproduce and mutate in ways which enable that strain to continue in existence. However, they do not have a cellular structure, nor do they have their own metabolism – rather, metabolic processes occur which make massive use of the infrastructure of their hosts – and they require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot reproduce outside their hosts. They spontaneously create multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly within their host cells, in a way analogous to the autonomous growth of crystals.

4.3

Functions and normativity

Our consideration of the necessary conditions for the existence of organisms has inevitably invoked functional concepts. Only if those recursive processes fulfil their functions (at least somewhat effectively) within the organization which constitutes the organism can it persist. Reflecting upon the nature of functions will make plain how normativity emerges with life. The basic concept here is that of serving a function (Bickhard 1998 and 2000). It is exemplified in self-maintenance. Insofar as some component part, or subordinate process, of a system contributes to the persistence of the system itself – insofar as it contributes to maintaining that system’s far-fromequilibrium stability – it ‘serves’ such a function. Precisely because these functional relationships are logically internal to the constituting organization of living things, the function served by some component or process is necessarily relative to the system to whose self-maintenance it is contributing. For example, the gut of a parasite serves functions which contribute to the parasite’s continued existence – it is functional for the parasite – but anything which is functional for a parasite is generally dysfunctional for its host. A related, but importantly different, concept is that of ‘having’ a function. A component or feature of a system will have a function insofar as it is dynamically presupposed by the continued functioning of that system. In other words, that component or feature of a system is an instance of a type which tends to serve – which has a disposition to serve – some function within that system. The explicit reference to types of components is necessary here because some particular instance might have the infrastructure typically exhibited by a type of component which normally serves some significant function within an overall system, yet that instance might actually fail to serve that function in some particular case. For example, in many kinds of animal kidneys have the function of filtering blood, but a particular kidney which is diseased might not be working properly; in that animal’s body this kidney might not be serving the function which it has. It has become dysfunctional. The important point is that the concept of having a function is defined here in terms of serving a function; a kidney does not serve the function of filtering blood because it has that function (for instance, as the result of

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evolutionary history). Rather, it has the function because it is of a type which serves that function. The existence of kidneys is, no doubt, a matter of evolution, but any explanation of their evolutionary selection has to be given in terms of the ability of their evolutionary predecessors to serve that function, not the other way around. The asymmetry between serving a function and being dysfunctional, both of which can be applied to instances of the same type, brings us into normative territory. That normativity is made explicit by introducing one more concept: that of having a ‘proper’ function. When the function of some component or feature of a system has been dynamically presupposed by the development and self-maintenance of that system, it has that function as a ‘proper function’. In this sense, kidneys have the proper function of filtering blood; without at least one effectively functioning kidney, the animal will die. That certain organs and processes typically serve significant functions – significant, that is, to the continued survival and effective operation of an organism – is a matter of fact. Not all philosophers agree. In their opinion, there are no functional facts in the realm of nature beyond causal facts, and any assignment of function is strictly observer-relative. They argue for this by posing a dilemma: either “function” is defined in terms of causes, or functions are defined in terms of the furtherance of a set of values which we humans hold dear: life, survival, reproduction, health. On the first alternative, there is nothing intrinsically functional about functions; they are simply causes like any other sets of conditions. On the second, they are observer-relative and projected illegitimately onto natural phenomena. Behind this argument lies an understanding of causality which has prevailed since the seventeenth century. That is, the realm of nature is taken to be governed by natural laws which, in general, portray all events in dynamical systems as the outcomes of past states of that system. This understanding has been thought to be the consequence of rejecting Aristotelian final causes, which Descartes famously dismissed as “useless in physics”. This understanding of causality, however, is simplistic. To anticipate, not all effects can be analysed as the outcomes of past set of conditions. When we are considering the behaviour of organisms, we have to allow for what they do. When an organism’s internal processes and organs, in response to indications they detect, switch other internal processes on and off (or adjust them appropriately), they are behaving as regulatory mechanisms. When the outcome of those adjustments correlate to a high degree with future states which are advantageous to the organism – advantageous in the sense that they tend to sustain that system’s stability and effectiveness – they serve functions essential to the continued viability of the organism itself. By regulating its activity accordingly, an organism is able to maintain itself. And we can understand this sort of behaviour without falling back upon

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the reactive paradigm which understands change as always caused by past situations. The concept of some component ‘having a proper function’ has in fact been recognized in recent work within the philosophy of biology. However, the most sophisticated way of explicating it, generally referred to as the biosemantic or etiological view, understands the three concepts above the wrong way around. That is, the concept of ‘having a proper function’ is defined in terms of ‘having a function’, which in turn is explained by reference to evolutionary history (Millikan 1984, §93). This alternative view can be illustrated by considering why the proper function of a heart is to pump blood, not to make heartbeat sounds. According to this approach, this is because the very existence of a heart in an animal has come about because there were things in the past, the evolutionary predecessors of hearts, which were selected for their ability to pump blood, not for their ability to make heartbeat sounds. Being ‘selected’ here means that there were positive statistical correlations between an animal’s having a heart which pumps blood and its survival. The etiological approach takes something to have a function because of certain facts about its evolutionary history. As plausible as this view initially sounds, it has a counter-intuitive consequence. It implies that two systems, identical molecule for molecule, could nevertheless have very different functions for their parts – or even one might have functions and the other none – if their histories were appropriately different.5 Moreover, past history can have causal effects only in the present, so the etiological account of functions renders them causally epiphenomenal. On the other hand, when ‘having a function’ is defined in terms of ‘serving a function’ that unwelcome consequence no longer follows. Of course, doing so requires some other explanation of ‘serving a function’. But that is precisely what our interactive account provides. Some component part of a system (or the system itself) serves a function with respect to the whole system insofar as it contributes to the self-maintenance of the system’s farfrom- equilibrium condition. This provides an explanation, alternative to the etiological approach, of why the function of a heart is to pump blood, rather than to make heartbeat sounds: pumping blood contributes to an animal’s self-maintenance, while making heartbeat sounds does not. Normativity thus becomes manifest initially in the emergence of organisms which act to maintain their own existence as autonomous systems. Describing the viability conditions of these creatures requires the normative notions of ‘serving a function’, ‘having a function’, and ‘having a proper function’. This normativity is due to the asymmetries implicit in the

5. Millikan herself points out this strange consequence, but is prepared to embrace it. I will discuss Millikan’s model, including this consequence, in more detail in §6.5.

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viability conditions of biological systems. Where self-maintenant far-fromequilibrium systems are involved – whether the system’s exterior and interior processes serve the function of keeping it in existence, or are dysfunctional – the asymmetries manifest in those processes are what ground these norms. The fact that certain organs and internal processes can become dysfunctional – because they are not serving their proper functions very well – is what makes possible the existence of defective organisms. That is why an archetypal description of an organism of the form “The S is F”, together with “This S is not F”, implies “This S is defective in that it is not F”.6 The validity of that implication is justified by the fact that the infrastructure of living things enables them to continue in existence as functional wholes. It is important to stress that these asymmetries are empirical: so long as the self-maintenant processes which constitute a candle flame are working, there is a flame to be observed. Otherwise, there is not. A world containing this candle flame is not symmetrical with a world which is otherwise the same but from which this flame is absent. The burning of a candle changes its world. That asymmetry is a matter of observation. Likewise, the existence of biological organisms, including ourselves, depends on the actual asymmetry in the universe between far-fromequilibrium and equilibrium systems of processes, and that is no less empirical than the best scientific theories (Bickhard 2000). So, while the asymmetry of norms derives proximally from the normative asymmetry between function and dysfunction, it derives ultimately from the thermodynamic asymmetry between those systems which are in equilibrium and those which are not. The maintenance of that thermodynamic asymmetry is what distinguishes between those entities whose stability stems from their being deep energy wells and those whose stability depends essentially on their being open systems in continual interaction with their environments.

4.4

The emergence of goal-seeking

With the effective functioning and interaction of the various parts of any organism’s infrastructure, another significant characteristic becomes manifest: goaldirectedness. Goal-seeking emerges initially in those activities which promote its self-maintenance and development.

6. Thompson (2008, 80–81) proposes that it is in this sense that his ‘naturalhistorical judgements’ are normative, and not by each proposition’s bearing some sort of normative infrastructure. He is right to recognize the validity of this inference, but he provides no account of what justifies this form of inference, nor why these locutions have a use.

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The behaviour of many kinds of biological organisms typically involves future- directedness; they clearly anticipate future situations and adjust their behaviour accordingly. This anticipatory behaviour stands as a direct challenge to the understanding of change as always reactive, always an effect of past situations. Thus, the adjustments of behaviour which result in bacteria alternating between periods of swimming and tumbling generally produce outcomes which correlate significantly with future states which tend to sustain their stability and effectiveness. Although bacteria know nothing about those future states, their behaving in this way is enough to justify our describing their activity as directed towards future goals. That is, their movement anticipates a future situation of obtaining nourishment, and how it unfolds is regulated accordingly. These movements are self-generated; they are not produced as a result of the manipulations of any external agent. This is the crucial difference between the goal-seeking activities of a living organism and any machine with in-built feedback loops designed to direct it towards some target. An example of the latter is a heat-seeking missile. There is, of course, a sense in which the movements of such a missile may be said to be goaldirected, in that its feedback mechanisms serve to ‘correct’ any deviations from its specified path and have the effect of ensuring (if it is working properly, and is not shot down) that it hits its target. But it is not autonomous in the way we have seen a bacterium to be. A missile’s target is selected by the people who fired it, and its ways of adjusting its movements towards that target have been built in by its manufacturers; its operation is not self- organized. By contrast, even in the case of a simple bacterium, its environmental interactions and its internal metabolic processes are initiated by itself, and contribute essentially to its own self-maintenance and constituting organization. A system of metabolic processes sustaining an inherent constituting organization cannot be defined for a missile. In quite primitive organisms, goal-seeking behaviour is directed simply at maintaining their own continued existence, and the persistence of their species. As more complex life forms evolved, other forms of goal-seeking also became manifest in their behaviour. Their activities came to include choosing a suitable mate, caring for both mates and offspring, seeking comfort, satisfying curiosity, playing, etc. As their internal infrastructure became more and more complex, so the range of goals progressively broadened. The more highly developed an organism is, the less is there a single routine of specific tasks which it must perform in order to attain its goal. Goal-seeking activity becomes increasingly more self- directed, more varied, and more generic. Let me also emphasize that goal-seeking is not the same as being selfmaintaining per se – candle flames are self-maintenant but they do not seek any goals. And while keeping alive remains a very strong drive, it does not always override other ends which living things also seek. For example,

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amongst those species which reproduce sexually, the drive to mate often overrides the drive to survive (e.g., those male spiders which typically are eaten by the female with whom they have just mated). And in tight corners, animals will often sacrifice themselves in order to enable the survival of others (especially their own offspring). With humans, the goals pursued often have nothing to do with survival; indeed, sometimes the pursuit of ideals overrules the survival of both oneself and others. So, while selfmaintenance remains a necessary condition for the existence of all living things, it does not follow that it is their overarching goal. My argument bears no such implication. Indeed, I am doubtful whether there is a single goal which all living systems seek above all others. Aristotle famously argued that humans do have an overarching goal, namely, eudaimonia (the sort of happiness or flourishing worth seeking, or having), although good luck is also required to achieve it. Whether humans have any such overarching goal is not germane to the current investigation. It has been argued, however, that the theory of biological evolution by natural selection implies that the overarching goal of living systems is the production of a new and viable generation of the species to which they belong.7 That is as may be, but even if so, that fact would not invalidate the thesis for which I have been arguing, that recursive self-maintenance is a necessary condition for the persistence of living systems. The very existence of living systems is possible only if the interactive processes I have been describing are functioning effectively.

4.5

The emergence of error

The emergence of life brings with it yet another feature which bears directly on our quest for a richer concept of truth: the normative notion of error emerges as a central feature of their behaviour. An organism must have some way of differentiating those environments in which it will engage in one sort of process, from those in which it will engage in some other. It needs to elicit (or minimally, receive) signals from

7. See, for instance, Richard Dawkins, 1976 and 1983. For Dawkins, genes are the important units of selection, because they are replicators. A replicator is any entity in the universe which interacts with its world, including other replicators, in such a way that copies of itself are made. For Dawkins, organisms and groups of organisms are simply vehicles in which genes travel about. His ‘gene’s eye view’ is criticized by J. Griesemer (2000), who argues for a distinction between ‘replication’, in Dawkins’ sense, and ‘reproduction’. Entities which were capable of independent reproduction before the process of evolutionary transition can only reproduce as parts of a larger whole afterwards. So organisms which can reproduce are more than mere ‘vehicles’; indeed, they are the units of selection.

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its environment, which it can use to regulate and select amongst its internal processes. These processes then serve to indicate what it might do next, based on the signals it has elicited. Great care has to be exercised in interpreting what is going on here. It must firmly be said that in no sense are the internal indications it registers ‘representations’ which ‘correspond’ to items in that environment. I will expand on this point shortly, and will take up the sense in which we can speak of representations in Chapter 6. An organism’s signal- eliciting-and-registration infrastructure comes to play an essential role in the procedures by which the system itself continually tests how it is faring. It needs to keep doing this in order to ensure, insofar as lies within its own powers, that it continues to attain its goals. Depending on the outcomes of its testing, it regulates its internal activity by switching amongst, or adjusting to, the various kinds of environmental interactions available to it in ways apt to optimize its behaviour. These minimal notions of goaldirectedness and signalling are enough to justify the claim that the system can go wrong. The organism can make a mistake. Furthermore, attributing that mistake to the organism’s system itself makes sense in terms of the system’s own operations. Strictly in terms of the operations of the organism, it can be in error. That is, it is possible for an organism to discriminate something in its environment which leads it to switch into a procedure which happens not to be appropriate for it in that environment. When it does so, it has manifestly made a mistake. In the case of relatively primitive organisms, what justifies the phrase “not appropriate” here is the fact that the chosen procedure fails to contribute to their self-maintenance. Certain bacteria will swim up a saccharine gradient as well as up sugar gradients which provide nourishment – but when they do so, they err. This is an error because the organism will receive no nutrients from saccharine, despite its having done what normally provides it with necessary nutrients. The appropriateness in question is therefore a practical matter. In this case, the indicated action is not fitting for that kind of situation. On this account, an organism can be in error – it can make a mistake – even if it does not have the concept of error, and has no way of knowing that it is in error. Nevertheless, this point is highly significant. It shows that error can have endogenous sources, as well as adventitious ones. While any organism can be in error, more complex organisms have developed a capacity to detect that they have made an error. Once again, making such a discovery does not require that these organisms have a concept of error, only that they have an adverse reaction to the inappropriate situation into which they have got themselves, and that that reaction stimulates them to take remedial action. To understand this aright, it is imperative to renounce any temptation to project onto the organism itself information which is available only to external users or observers.

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Consider a frog. As it sits on its lily-pad, its visual scan might register a functional indication of a type which normally would relate to a bug flying nearby. That internal indication can serve to initiate and control tongueflicking interactions which yield eating the bug. Suppose, however, that this time that moving shape is in fact a pebble thrown in the air above its pond. If the frog flicks its tongue and tries to eat, it will have a surprise – or at least, will experience some discomfort – should it succeed in catching that pebble with its tongue. Even if the frog should swallow the pebble, it will fail to eat it. In a minimal sense (for we should presume no more than necessary), the frog will detect that its activity has been erroneous. The pebble will not satisfy its hunger. The error it discovers, however, will not be anything about pebbles or bugs; its discovery will be that its tongue-flicking and eating actions were not appropriate. Organisms more complex than frogs, ones which have evolved appropriate sub-systems, can learn from such failures how to make finer discriminations and modify their activities accordingly. A psychologist’s rat soon learns how to run a maze in order to get food, for instance, learning to turn left rather than right at the first corner when, on previous occasions of running the maze, turning right did not result in its reaching the food-bin. Learning exercises an ability, manifested by an entity which has emerged through evolution, which logically requires the kinds of interactive and reflexive processes we have been discussing.

4.6

Minimal action

The concepts required to develop an account of action are now to hand. Explaining the recursive self-maintenance of an organism required the use of action verbs to describe its behaviour. We can, and must, speak of what it is doing, and what it is able to do. The capacity to perform actions is integral to life itself. Invoking the verb “to do” here might perhaps be interpreted as nothing more than a way of referring to objective behavioural phenomena, rather than to actions, strictly speaking – and so might be regarded as not very significant. Indeed, there is a loose sense in which any process can be said to be ‘doing’ something. But I submit that we have to speak about what an organism is doing in a stronger sense than that. Our descriptions of their behaviour invoke the language of action in a metaphysically serious way, and make no sense without it. In the face of the doubts mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the challenge is to show how these ways of speaking are legitimate. First, note that, in general, actions are constituted through self- organizing feedback processes, involving internal flows of energy and bodily movements, bringing about external changes. Admittedly, some actions are described in terms of what they achieve – “the boy broke the window” – and that

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achievement is an event, rather than a process. But achievements are simply the end points of an action (throwing a stone.) We will explore the intimate relation between actions and their ends below. Our question is: what are the distinctive features of those processes which are actions? I propose a graduated conception of action, building up from the concept of a minimal action. For some process to qualify minimally as an action, it has to satisfy three criteria. These criteria are each necessary, and jointly sufficient, to pick out the simplest and most basic kinds of action. The effect of applying these criteria is that only living things perform minimal actions; non- organic things ‘do’ something only in the loose and metaphorical sense attributable to any process. There is a stronger notion of action which presupposes that, in addition to the three criteria I am about to propose, some process should only be called an ‘action’ if it is initiated by a selfdirected agent. And there is an even stronger sense which requires reflective appraisal of potential outcomes, and deliberation about which of them to pursue. Only humans perform what I call reflective actions. Since these stronger senses of action build upon that of a minimal action, I will postpone discussion of them until after I have elaborated the three basic criteria. But since any action, whether minimal or sophisticated, has to satisfy these three, my discussion of them will range across actions of all kinds. 4.6.1 Goal- directedness Firstly, to count as a minimal action, some movement has to be self-generated and goaldirected. As we saw, the movements of a missile do not count, strictly speaking, as genuine actions – they just mimic actions – because they are not autonomous. They are neither minimally anticipative, nor are the norms by which its flight is directed towards the target its own. Now, all action involves self-projection into the future; an agent acts towards some end. That is the crucial difference between an action and a mere movement: a movement, or a series of movements, does not necessarily aim at anything. Both involve change over time, but an action involves more than that. It is characteristic of an action – any action – that it intrinsically involves a telos, a future situation towards which it directs its own movement. The structure of action is essentially teleological.8 In fact, actions are normally identified in terms of their intrinsic ends. That is, generally one action is individuated from another not just by the bodily movements (or mental processing) they involve, but also by the future situations the achieving of which would constitute the successful performance of those actions. These two aspects – a movement towards some goal, and 8.

This was Aristotle’s insight, no doubt suggested by his strong interest in biology. His construing non-biological phenomena also as teleological, involving what his medieval followers called ‘final causes’, was the main target of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

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a future situation towards which that bodily movement is projected – are encompassed within the concept of an action. Of course, in the case of nonhuman organisms, the goals sought are often implicit; for some behaviour to count as an action, its end need not be explicitly articulated, or even visualized. (It is possible that some kinds of animals are able to visualize their goals, although they cannot articulate them.) But no sense can be made of their activities in, for example, hunting for food, unless we ascribe genuine goal-seeking actions to them. Actions are identified in terms of their intrinsic ends even if some extraneous factor were to intervene to prevent some particular action from achieving that end. It would still be the case that what the agent was doing, albeit without success, was directed towards that end. Failure to attain the intrinsic end, however, is not always a matter of prevention. Suppose I was walking to the bank, but on the way met some friends and fell into an extended conversation with them which lasted until past the bank’s closing time, with the result that I never actually arrived there that day. Despite the fact that I never reached the bank, it nevertheless remains the case that walking to the bank is what I was doing when I met my friends. The goaldirectedness of any piece of behaviour which counts as an action does not require that its objective be actually attained, nor that its non-fulfilment is necessarily a matter of its being prevented by some external force. Actions are identified in terms of their intrinsic ends because the relation between the action and its telos is logically an ‘internal’ relation. Just like the examples we noted in §3.4, without internal relations no sense can be made of the concept of action. The point is that an action of any specific type is constituted and identified by its relation to a certain sort of outcome, even though it might fail to achieve that outcome. The ends towards which actions are directed ‘nest’. That is, an action might be performed in order to achieve a certain end, which is sought in order to achieve some further end, and so on. For example, a frog flicks its tongue in order to catch a bug, in order to eat. Since actions are typically described in terms of their ends, and because the ends nest in this way, the agent can be described as performing a nested series of actions. Thus, the potential action which is most proximately indicated to the frog is to flick its tongue. But since the point of flicking its tongue is to catch a bug, we would also be right to say that the potential action indicated to the frog was catching a bug. In turn, that tongue-flicking and bug- catching opportunity was an eating opportunity. That actions are necessarily goaldirected has unfortunately been widely misunderstood because of the pervasive tendency to restrict goaldirectedness to the human mind. Once that restriction is conceded, any talk of goalseeking behaviour on the part of non-humans is easily dismissed as anthropomorphic projection. But that is perverse. Goal-directedness is indeed one

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characteristic of human mentality, but it is also manifest in primitive biological organisms, which cannot be described as self- consciously aware. So, what justifies the ascription of goaldirectedness to even such relatively simple organisms as bacteria? The answer is the contingent fact that their behaviour is evidence of regulative routines which serve selfmaintaining functions. I will not attempt here to address the question of how it came about that there are organisms with behavioural routines serving these functions – that is a question of natural history. Presumably, the answer will be along the lines of some account based on evolutionary selection. But it might well be the case that there is no general account to be given which would explain the emergence of all the different kinds of life, with their distinctive properties. That is, it might well be the case that there is no philosophical answer to the question of how life emerged. Perhaps the emergence of the goaldirectedness which is an indispensable ingredient in all biological process-systems followed no single story which could be specified in much more detail than we have given here. It is a fact of natural history that there came to exist organisms with behavioural routines which serve these functions. But that such systems did emerge, with this distinctive characteristic, is a fact which any plausible ontology must accommodate. What is unmistakable is that goal-seeking, and orientation to the future, is not peculiar to human mentality; it is not a puzzling anomaly only encountered in human beings. The way in which countless far-fromequilibrium systems maintain themselves in existence by regulating their internal regulative processes provides the physico-chemical and biological bases in terms of which goal-seeking can be understood. Presumably, these regulatory processes were selected through evolution precisely because they proved effective in serving that function. Accordingly, they now have that function. (This relation between ‘serving’ and ‘having’ some function is what the etiological theory understands the wrong way around.) That is the conceptual basis of goaldirectedness in primitive organisms. And once the capacity to perform actions emerged, more complex and flexible life forms evolved, which exercise that capacity in pursuit of other ends beyond their own self-maintenance. 4.6.2 The possibility of error Secondly, to count as an action, an organism’s behaviour must admit the possibility of error. The organism might discriminate something in its environment which leads it to initiate a procedure that happens not to be appropriate in that environment. We saw in §4.5 that a frog which flicks its tongue and tries to eat a pebble thrown in the air nearby will detect that it has made an error. This possibility of error is criterial; that is, some behaviour qualifies as a minimal action only if it could go wrong. A specific routine which has evolved in organisms

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of some kind because it serves their self-maintenance might not on occasion fulfil its proper function. Or, in more complex animals, behaviour directed towards some goal other than survival might fail to attain it. Just as the viability conditions of organisms manifest the normative asymmetry between function and dysfunction, so also the possibility of error entails that the concept of action is also intrinsically normative. That normativity is inherent in actions of any sort has not always been recognized – perhaps because of a common tendency, especially since the time of Hume and Kant, to understand normativity in terms of moral “oughts”, deriving from the imperatives of a command or moral law. Since it is highly implausible to believe that every possible action involves an implicit reference to moral strictures, it has been all too easy to overlook the rather different kind of normativity inherent in the very concept of action. To sharpen the focus upon this latter kind of normativity, consider an archer’s action of firing an arrow at a bullseye. If the arrow hits its mark, the action is successful. Suppose, on the other hand, the arrow misses the centre of the target, lodging instead in one of the outer rings. That does not negate the fact that the action performed was nevertheless one of firing at the bullseye. But the act has not fulfilled its proper telos; it failed to achieve its goal. Not just the arrow, but also the act of firing it, has missed its mark. In this case, there is a disparity between what the act was, and what it actually accomplished. Its missing the mark is precisely the occurrence of that disparity. Hitting the bullseye towards which the arrow was fired functions as the norm determining the error which has occurred, since it is internally related to the act of firing, despite its actual result. Another way of making clear that there is a kind of normativity here is to express the point in terms of (a non-moral) “ought”. Given the action, the arrow ought to have hit the bullseye, but it did not. But this “ought” does not express a moral requirement; it simply expresses the internal relation between hitting the bullseye and the act of firing at it. There is an asymmetry between success and failure; the identity of the action itself puts a premium on success. The kind of normativity which characterizes action is founded on that asymmetry. As we saw, that identity is conferred by the act’s telos. Accordingly, the telos serves as the norm which the act has to fulfil, if it is to be properly performed. ‘Going wrong’ like this admits of degrees; the arrow might lodge quite near the centre of the target, or in the outer rings, or it might miss the target altogether. The further away from the bullseye it lands, the worse was the action performed (and the lower the score!). Now suppose that when the archer let the arrow go from the bow, it flew at right angles to the line between the archer and the target. In this case, it becomes difficult to maintain that what the archer did was a case of ‘firing at the bullseye’. In this respect, action is somewhat like light radiating from a source: the greater

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the disparity between the intended goal and the actual result, the more the action itself dissipates, until eventually, instead of saying that the action was performed extremely badly, we have to say that the agent altogether failed to perform that act. There is a certain kind of exception to this second criterion of an action – that it admit the possibility of error – which is instructive. Some actions are necessarily successful, for example, murdering. In these cases, if the action has been performed, there is no possibility that it failed. If someone has murdered another person, the latter is always dead. Our natural languages contain many words which are (or are cognates of) ‘achievement’ verbs; that is, they have success ‘built in’. For instance, just as the telos of running a race is to win, so winning is necessarily successful. This linguistic phenomenon is so common it would be tedious to multiply examples. In all these cases, the internal relation between the action and its telos has been elevated into a conceptual necessity. Nevertheless, so strong is the requirement that actions should admit the possibility of error that natural languages have devised ways of reinserting a logical gap into cases of necessarily successful action. Thereby, these cases exemplify the cliché about exceptions proving the rule. The logical gap opened up by the possibility of error must be marked somehow. The usual way of doing that in English is to invoke auxiliary verbs like “try”, “attempt” and “intend”; even though a murder necessarily is productive of a death, someone can attempt to murder someone else, but fail. So, even though some actions, if performed at all, are performed successfully, the actions involved in carrying them out still could go wrong – which in fact confirms the point. There are many ways in which actions might go wrong, and they are importantly different. In the case of minimal actions, the most fundamental way is that the action performed might not contribute to the agent’s self-maintenance. That can come about through the action’s not serving the proper function that it should. That is, the organism did not carry out some specific routine completely or adequately, perhaps through some malfunction. Alternatively, error can come about by an action’s failing to achieve the goal towards which it was directed, not through some malfunction, but because the environmental conditions were not right. But in more complex creatures than those primitive life forms, where the norms governing action are increasingly generic, and actions become increasingly self- directed rather than the enactment of predetermined task-routines, there need not be any link to self-maintenance at all. The goals humans pursue exemplify a vast array of norms. In these cases, error can also occur through misperception, miscalculation, confusion, infelicitous choice of means, conflicting norms, inadequate resources, and so on. In every case, however, the crucial point is that genuine actions, even if quite minimal, are always liable to error.

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4.6.3 Behaving as a functional whole The third criterion which some behaviour must satisfy to count as an action has been implicit in my exposition thus far. It is time to make it explicit. Speaking of goaldirectedness and the possibility of error – the first two criteria – only makes sense if the subject to which the action is ascribed is the entire organism. It is a bacterium which seeks sugar, and can be deceived by a saccharine solution. It is a frog which flicks its tongue and eats bugs, and can be tricked into also flicking at pebbles. And it is a person who fires arrows at bullseyes. This logical feature is quite general: it is characteristic of actiondescriptions that they are attributable to an agent as a functional whole. How is it determined which is the relevant agent? That issue cannot be determined a priori. I am claiming that a movement which is goaldirected and could be in error is a candidate for being considered as an action. The putative action is typically described by a verb-phrase. The question then becomes: in each case, what is the appropriate subject of this verb-phrase? In all three examples cited in the previous paragraph, the answer is an entity of some sort: a bacterium; a frog; and a person, respectively. In general, through their interactive processes, entities are constituted by internal, dynamic bonds which generate a cohesive organizational form. The operation of those bonds is what brings it about that a system of processes behaves in an unitary way, individuating the entity from its environment. That is an empirically discernible matter. And it is the way a biological entity’s internal processes are organized which determines whether it is able to maintain itself in existence, as an integrated whole, throughout its various activities. That its complex of processes works in such a way is the basis in reality for our identifying it as an entity. An entity’s being an individual whole arises from the specific operations and interactions of its constituent processes. Again, recursive self-maintenance is a holistic feature; it only makes sense when attributed to an integrated system. It follows that the goaldirected activity of such an entity has to be attributed to the system as a functioning whole. Only autonomous entities can be goaldirected and can err in so doing. This is what justifies our speaking of them as agents. Because actions are performed by integrated agents, the normativity inherent in their goal-seeking, and possibly erring, devolves from the whole process system to its sub-processes. It does not build up from lower order to higher order, unless the lower orders are already independently normative. Even so relatively simple an organism as a bacterium makes this clear; it makes no sense to ascribe ‘swimming’ and ‘tumbling’ to anything short of the bacterium as a whole. Those are the activities which are goaldirected, and which can go wrong.

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On the other hand, a chain of causation which passes through an organism, but serves no function in its self-maintaining processes, or in its other goal-seeking activities, is not an action it performs. To take a familiar example, if a doctor testing my reflexes strikes my kneecap with a hard object, in just the right place, my foot will jerk out. Suppose my foot thereby comes into contact with the doctor. It would not, strictly speaking, be correct to say that I kicked the doctor – but not because I had no desire to do so (although that would be so). Rather, the movement of my foot was brought about by a chain of causation which was not self-generated. It did not involve any of the interactive activities which contribute to the attainment of any of my generic norms, nor to my persistence as a self-maintenant organism. Recent philosophical discussion of human behaviour has become quite confused because of the prevalent failure to recognize that this third characteristic is an essential feature of the logic of action (or if it has been recognized, the usual response is to try to explain it away). The widely held doctrine that an action is a bodily movement caused by a desire exemplifies this failure. On that view, genuine agency is dissolved, and the goaldirectedness of action is shifted to the logical structure of desires. But such an analysis, at best, could only describe a chain of causation which passes through the agent. The only ground for saying of someone that she did something would be that she was the one who ‘had’ the desire, and that it was via the movements of parts of her body that the desired outcome was effected. (On a physicalist interpretation, the first of these conditions is also reduced to something of the second kind.) On this approach, the attribution of the action to a person is justifiable only in terms of the location of the causally connected movements within a certain human body. Such crude ‘analyses’ fail to attend to the nature of those organisms which provide the paradigms of action. I have been insisting that the interesting and fundamental question about autonomous living things is why, because of entropy, they do not degenerate to sludge in thermodynamic equilibrium. The recursive self-maintenance of an organism is what requires the category of action to be predicated of it as an integrated action-system. Since what is at issue is the persistence of such organic systems, as functional wholes, and since their survival can only be described in reflexive language – as selfmaintenance – the behavioural routines which collectively enable such a system to maintain itself in existence can only be attributed to it, as a whole. In stark contrast to the many attempts to reduce action to causal chains, the model of action I am presenting explicates action by drawing attention to reflexive loops running from the action-system as a functional whole to particular sub-processes internal to its own functioning, and back again in ways which obtain closure. These sub-processes in turn regulate the dynamic flow of energy within the system. These recursive loops thereby serve to direct the operation of the whole system. In this way, to say that an agent ‘does’ something is to say that it determines itself, a truism Aristotle

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well understood. Indeed, it was Aristotle’s recognition of this that led him to articulate what the medieval Aristotelians called ‘efficient causation’. The ‘efficient cause’ of some change is the agent which brings it about. The more recent talk of necessary and sufficient conditions, derived from John Stuart Mill, is not an explication of efficient causation, but an attempt to displace it. The subjects in these two ways of speaking are in fundamentally different metaphysical categories. Lest more is read into this vindication of efficient causation than I intend, let me again emphasize that reclaiming scientific legitimacy for the concepts of action and agency does not imply any attempt to resurrect the entire gamut of Aristotelian metaphysics. For Aristotle and his followers, particular entities (what the medievals called substantiae, substances) constitute the primary category of being – primary in all senses: “in definition and in knowledge and in time” (Metaphysics, VII, 1028a83). The category of action was dependent upon this primary category. What I am claiming here, however, is compatible with regarding both autonomous entities and their actions as emergent phenomena. In the relatively simple biological examples which I have mostly been discussing, the actions of some organisms are directly concerned with maintaining the functioning of the system which it is. In these cases, an organism’s actions are directed towards whatever is necessary for the survival and persistence of that system. As we move towards more complex organisms, such as human beings, the ends sought become progressively more generic and more diverse, and exemplify other values than sheer survival. Choice and variety amongst goals of widely differing kinds increasingly enter the picture, as do flexibility and adaptiveness in choosing the optimal means to attain the chosen goals. So does sociality, and a drive towards increasing autonomy. But these increases in complexity do nothing to undermine the logical features manifest most clearly in the more primitive examples. Whilst I act towards many different ends, and seek to satisfy widely diverse generic norms, my actions are always mine. Each is something I perform. In summary, when a movement satisfies these three criteria – (a) when it is directed towards some goal, (b) when it can be in error, and (c) when it is such that it has to be attributed to a living thing as a functional whole – it is appropriately described as an action, at least in the minimal sense. Understood in the way I have explicated, these criteria effectively distinguish those phenomena which are genuine cases of autonomous action from those that can be so described only metaphorically.

4.7

Self- directed and reflective action

Once organisms emerged with the ability to perform minimal actions, the possibility arose of creatures evolving with the ability to perform actions

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of greater complexity, and to pursue goals other than those related to their self-maintenance. That is what happened. An adequate taxonomy of actions has to encompass these developments. While primitive organisms have the ability to perform minimal actions, their doing so amounts to largely automatic responses to their detection of relevant stimuli. There are many kinds of organisms, including all kinds of mammals, whose responses to stimuli are not automatic, who learn from their errors, and who modify their behaviour accordingly. They are flexible learners, who are able to perform actions in a richer sense than the minimal actions picked out by our three criteria. In the graduated conception of action which I am developing, richer concepts of action can be generated by progressively adding further criteria. As always, the effect of enriching the concept is to narrow its extension. Responses become flexible when some sort of selection has to be made amongst potential actions. One such circumstance arises when an organism detects, roughly at the same time, two or more changes in its environment, each of which indicates quite different kinds of potential interaction. Once more, a frog provides one of the most primitive examples. A frog might detect a small moving shape – a bug is flying within striking distance – and at roughly the same time see a larger moving shape – a hawk is hovering overhead. Does it flick its tongue at the bug, or dive off its lily-pad into the water? In frogs, the ability to select diving into the water need be no more than its being able to discriminate between these two affective stimuli and its having an instinctual tendency, developed through evolution, for its reaction to the larger shape to be dominant. Greater flexibility is needed when more than one potential interaction is available under a single differentiated condition, and that indication does not determine only one potential action as apt in that environment. Higher-level organisms can learn from the success and failure of their previous interactions, thereby acquiring the ability to select amongst the potential actions available to them in a current situation the one most likely to succeed, and to adapt their behaviour accordingly. Nor do they simply select some specific task-routine and switch into it. Rather, for them, any significant action is likely to involve a continual process of appraising and evaluating, of selecting and adjusting – all of which calls upon their previous experience of which actions are most appropriate in which kinds of situation. There are animals which can do this even though they lack the higherlevel cognitive skills of humans. As Christensen and Hooker point out (2001, 52), Cheetahs must learn to recognize appropriate prey using complex, context-sensitive discrimination honed by experience. Moreover, simply travelling in the direction of the prey is unlikely to result in catching it.

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Cheetahs must tailor their actions to the behaviour of the prey by stalking it and responding to its movements during the chase. For this reason, the tendency amongst psychologists to divide learning into conditioned responses, on the one hand, and cognitive learning, on the other, is too simple-minded. The learning which feeds into this continual selecting and adjusting of motor action is still practical, not theoretical as the cognitivists would have it, but it is too norm-governed to fit into the causal models of stimulus–response conditioning. Those animals which are flexible learners like this have an even stronger claim for recognition as genuine agents who act. Let us call such behaviour self-directed actions. Self- directed actions cannot be ascribed to an organism unless its selection of what to do is based on its anticipation and evaluation of likely outcomes of its potential actions. While the drives motivating its activity might still be instinctual, the activity itself is adaptable and skilful. On this basis, a bacterium’s swimming and tumbling would not count as actions of that sort, whereas a rat’s successful running of a maze would. With the evolution of animals with reflective self- consciousness, goalseeking has become no longer associated necessarily with instinctual drives, nor with basic survival. We humans choose and pursue a broad range of goals – both specific and generic – which we internalize within consciousness. We deliberate about what to do, and how best to do it. Since we also have acquired linguistic abilities, we can articulate those goals by explicitly stating our reasons for acting as we do, and justify our actions in terms of them. This yields a yet richer concept of action. On top of anticipation and evaluation, actions in this sense can only be ascribed where there is deliberation between available options and consideration of how best to achieve some goal. This ability requires self- consciousness and high-level cognitive skills. Adding that extra criterion to the four already mentioned yields an even stronger concept of action: what we can call reflective action. On that criterion, rats and cheetahs do not perform reflective actions. Only this last concept of action – reflective action – can plausibly be restricted to humans. But action in the other senses, which also are goal-directed and oriented to the future, can properly be ascribed to non-human organisms. One final comment about the criteria which differentiate actions, in this graduated way, in increasingly stronger senses. I have cast this discussion in terms of ascribing action to organisms. I have done so because it facilitated the analysis. But lest my proceeding in this way should lead to misunderstandings, let me make it clear that I am not for a moment suggesting that action is a concept which we project onto simpler organisms. Rather, my argument is that, provided the relevant conditions are satisfied, they do perform actions in either of the first two senses. Since the language of action

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is justified in these circumstances, the category of action has been shown to be metaphysically deep.

4.8 The irreducibility of actions This graduated analysis of the concept of action strikes me as entirely plausible. However, many philosophers profess difficulties in understanding how talk of action, with its implications of agency and teleology, could be reconciled with a scientific view of the world. For them, agency seems to have no place in an otherwise physical world; ultimately, it has to be explained in purely physical terms – or else explained away. Indeed, the denial of agency has been identified as one of three distinguishing features of analytic philosophy (Capaldi 1991, 47). So, am I, by invoking the language of action, simply falling back upon simple-minded metaphors, something to which ‘the folk’ are prone but which have no place in serious science, nor in scientifically informed philosophy? Of course, the implicit claim here that scientific discourse is a metaphor-free zone is plainly false – as the most cursory glance at quantum physics, for instance, will reveal. Furthermore, the conceptual underpinnings of the analysis I am presenting here draw upon the findings of recent scientific research. But since the denial of agency is entrenched in so much contemporary philosophy and psychology, it is pertinent to consider how plausible an alternative account might be. If taking actions seriously is incompatible with scientific objectivity, they have to be ‘analysed’ by means of some reductive strategy. It is widely accepted that an action is a bodily movement caused by a mental state: a desire or an intention. If these mental states can then be considered identical with brain states, the strategy is well on the way to reducing actions to physiology, and, for physicalists, ultimately to physics. By substituting a causal relation between a mental state and a bodily movement for the teleology which agency entails, this account sounds appropriately ‘scientific’. But that appearance is deceptive. It is doubtful whether there are any ‘mental states’ – there are mental processes – and they do not have independently observable features which would enable them to be individually identified. All attempts to get rid of teleology by this counterfeit scientism founder on the simple fact that there is no way to individuate desires and intentions except by the events or actions which would fulfil them. This can be seen most clearly in the case of intentions. No advance towards an explanation of the essential directedness of actions is gained by invoking intentions; rather, intentions themselves have to be explicated in terms of the teleology of actions. Consequently, any purported theory which might purport to ‘analyse’ actions in terms of intentions would be viciously circular.

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Similar difficulties afflict attempts to reduce actions to movements caused by desires. The idea is that the relevant desire can be individuated simply as the one which was causally efficacious. Thereby, the goaldirectedness of action is shifted to the logical structure of desires. This too is far from credible; as a piece of conceptual analysis this account suffers from a number of serious flaws. For a start, often when I have a desire, what I desire is not simply that something- or- other be the case; rather, what I want is to do something- or- other. If invoking my desires is at all relevant here, it has to be acknowledged that what I desire is to perform that action. So, invoking desires does not eliminate actions from the analysis. Again, the formula that an action is a bodily movement caused by a desire fails to take into account the crucial feature encapsulated in my third criterion of a minimal action, that actions are properly ascribed to an organism as a functional whole. Like every other sort of emergent phenomenon, actions are complex organizations of sub-processes. The sub-processes encompassed within bodily actions interact within a single integrated system which is nothing short of the entity itself. That is why the subject of actiondescriptions has to be an entity, not a set of conditions. The logic of actiondescriptions reflects these facts, yet the proposed ‘analysis’ ignores this logical feature. Furthermore, the plausibility of this formula depends upon its glossing over the crucial distinction we investigated in §3.3. Suppose that I am running in the 100 metres race at an athletics competition. The point of racing, the telos of that action, is to win. If that were not so, what the contestants are doing would not constitute a race. So, insofar as what I am doing is racing, I am participating in an activity whose telos is winning. But all of that is compatible with my having private reasons for not wanting to win. Perhaps I have accepted a bribe to let someone else win; perhaps I want my friend to get a psychological boost from winning more than I want to win myself. But whatever might be my particular desires, they can differ from the intrinsic teleology of the activity in which I am a participant. Note that in this case, I could not have the private desires we have imagined, were I not racing. So, not only does this kind of case show that the intentionality of the activities in which agents participate is not necessarily the same as the intentions and desires of an individual agent, the ascription of desires to individuals only makes sense provided they can be distinguished from the actions in which they are engaged. It is for this reason that the man who drove the getaway car for criminals who held up a bank is judged by courts of law to have been a participant in that robbery. The legal principal applied is that his act of driving the car was part of the wider act of armed robbery. If his defence is that he did not rob the bank, since all he wanted to do was drive the car, his plea will be of no avail. He will be found guilty, just like his partners in crime, whatever

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his private intentions or desires might have been. Once again, the proffered analysis is viciously circular. One more case: consider lying. Telling a lie is a second- order action, parasitic upon the first- order practice of assertion, making statements. People lie in order to deceive. That is their private intention. But a condition of a lie’s success is that the act of telling it is taken by their audience to be a genuine assertion, that is, an act of truth-telling. Unless the audience is deceived into believing (wrongly) that the speaker’s personal intent in speaking is the same as the point of the assertion performed, namely, truth-telling, the lie will not be effective as a lie. So lying is a clear case where the telos of an act – a speech-act of assertion – is at odds with what the agents are intending to do by performing those acts. Our natural languages explicitly recognize this crucial conceptual gap between the intrinsic telos of an action and the desires of individuals who perform that action. That is another reason why those languages contain significant auxiliary verbs, such as “try”, “attempt”, “intend”, etc. Yet this distinction has to be disregarded by those who characterize an action as a bodily movement caused by a desire. Their position rests on their failure to analyse carefully the relevant cases. I conclude that any attempt to reduce the directedness of actions to mental states is unsound and misguided.

4.9

The actions of bacteria

The graduated analysis of action I have offered, however, needs to confront yet another line of objection. “Surely”, it will be said, “action is selfconscious, intentional behaviour, and only humans are capable of that”. Misgivings along these lines are understandable, since that is true of what I am calling reflective action. But despite being understandable, to limit the category of action in this way is too restrictive and distorting. It was because I was mindful of the differences between the behaviour of bacteria and full-blooded human actions that I proposed a graduated series of criteria. The behaviour of bacteria is the test case. One carefully articulated argument for denying that bacteria can perform actions goes as follows (Fodor 1986). Perhaps the movements of a bacterium which we called ‘swimming’ and ‘tumbling’ can count as responses – but not as actions in any serious sense. Fodor concedes that we may describe phenomena which affect the bacterium as ‘stimuli’, that we may describe the effects of these socalled stimuli as ‘behavioural responses’, and that the causal interaction between stimulus and organism involves the ‘detection’ of some property of the former by the latter. (To attribute ‘stimuli detectors’ to bacteria is highly misleading, but I will let that pass until Chapter 6.) Still, even if those forms of description are allowed, all that happens when a bacterium ‘detects’ a

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relevant ‘stimulus’ and ‘responds’ is the lawful co-variance of a property of the stimulus with a property of the response. This is not enough, it has been argued, to justify ascribing intentional behaviour to bacteria. According to this argument, the crucial difference between us humans and bacteria, in this regard, is that a bacterium’s ‘responses’ to stimuli are law-governed, whereas we humans frequently respond to what we observe in ways which are not. Our behaviour often comes about as a result of our seeing something which has a certain feature, where there are not lawful relations between that kind of feature and our response to seeing it. On this view, the ascription of actions is only legitimate where there is a possibility that an organism’s responses to the detection of relevant stimuli are not governed by natural laws, and that only happens with humans whose responses involve their mental representations. This objection is not convincing. The invocation of law-like regularities is tendentious and a red herring. The ‘laws’ which are alleged to govern the behaviour of bacteria are extremely context-sensitive. For instance, most bacteria can survive and operate only within a narrow range of temperatures. The concept of ‘law’ must somehow accommodate this sensitivity. One tactic might be to broaden the concept of law to include all cases of appropriate responses to context-sensitive phenomena, in which case it will not sharply distinguish between humans and bacteria. Alternatively, the concept of law might be narrowed by including all the contextual conditions within the statement of the ‘law’ itself, in which case the ‘regularity’ might be safeguarded, but at the cost of rendering it so specific that it hardly warrants the honorific name of ‘law’. Such highly restricted regularities could well be applicable to much of the ‘intentional’ behaviour of humans as well. So, neither of these tactics will provide a sharp distinction between humans and bacteria. Furthermore, if it is empirically possible for a bacterium to err in its responses (by swimming up a saccharine gradient), that shows that the connection between the presence of an upward sugar gradient and its swimming towards the source of the sugar is not a matter of lawful regularity. To this rebuttal, it might be replied that there is lawful regularity between the presence of an upward gradient of sugar or sugar-mimicking substances such as saccharine and the swimming behaviour of these bacteria. That possible reply, however, would miss the point that the proper function of this bacterium’s sugar-detecting mechanism is to detect sugar, not saccharine; its ability to do so is what enables it to survive. But its being tricked by the presence of saccharine shows that its detectors are not infallible. It is just as well for the future of the species that bacteria are not deceived like this very often; otherwise, the species might well die out. The fact that the sugar- detectors of these bacteria usually operate successfully is what provides the actual basis of their continuing to survive, manifesting this goal-seeking activity.

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Someone who wishes to press this objection, however, might concede this point, but still insist that, even if the presence of an upward sugar gradient is not necessary for the bacterium’s swimming behaviour, it is nevertheless sufficient – and that is enough to establish law-like regularity. This second reply, however, assumes that a bacterium’s sugar- detecting apparatus always works perfectly, that it is never dysfunctional. Of course, if a bacterium’s sugar- detectors do not work properly, it will not optimize its chances of feeding on sugar, and it will probably die. But that takes nothing away from the point that the alleged law-like regularity is sometimes infringed. The upshot is that the presence of an upward sugar gradient is neither necessary nor sufficient for a bacterium’s swimming behaviour. There is nothing in this counter-argument which justifies the claim that bacteria cannot perform minimal actions. And note: the counter-argument has been refuted without implausibly ascribing intentional or conscious states to such a primitive organism. Of course, if we were to take the ability to respond selectively to detected features which are not linked by law-like regularities to those responses as criterial for the ascription of intentional states (as Fodor indeed proposes), then we will have to allow the ascription of intentional states to bacteria. But that is a consequence of this position; indeed, it is a reductio ad absurdum of the plausibility of this proposed criterion. I conclude that the objection fails, and that we can continue to ascribe minimal action to such primitive organisms.

4.10

The grounding of truth

I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that since the concept of action is intrinsically normative, that might enable us to explain how truth comes to have its normative character. We now have a graduated series of definitions of what constitutes an action, in progressively stronger senses. The emergence of autonomous entities, which have to perform actions (in at least a minimal sense) in order to stay alive, and in order to reproduce their own species, is what grounds truth, and explains its normative character. Two implications of the analysis thus far bear directly upon my overall project. Firstly, since the possibility of error is one of the basic criteria for recognizing an organism’s movement as an action, it is legitimate to speak of their behaviour as involving error and mistakes. Even bacteria can manifestly ‘get it right’, or ‘go wrong’. It follows that such situations involve issues of truth. ‘Getting it right’ invokes precisely the kind of normativity we have found in the concept of truth, which implies the absence of error. Of course, anyone who effectively operates with the linguistic conception of truth will find it odd to attribute truth to such cases of pragmatic success. But when an organism acts in error it has manifestly made a mistake; it has wrongly taken the situation to be of a sort which it is not, and consequently its action

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is inappropriate. Its activity has failed to attain its goal. On the other hand, in cases of successful action, its aim has proved to be true. I submit that we need to recognize that truth is grounded precisely in this kind of context. Truth and error – rather than truth and falsity – prove to be the more significant correlative concepts. Secondly, in these situations, the issue of truth versus error concerns what it is appropriate to do, not what it is appropriate to say. Bacteria do not make statements! Nor am I, through some absurd anthropomorphism, attributing any beliefs to bacteria. Nevertheless, if we are right to recognize that what such organisms are doing raise issues of error, it follows that any comprehensive account of truth must accommodate – indeed, be grounded by – an understanding of truth as manifest in certain practices. This point supports the highly salient conclusion which emerged from our investigation into the linguistic conception of truth. Let me work through how these implications are manifest in the case of our frog, sitting on its lily-pad. There are two opposite outcomes of its acting upon its detection of an opportunity for eating. These exhibit three different, but interrelated, senses in which we can speak of truth and error in this case. The first and fundamental sense has to do with success. The frog’s tongueflicking actions turn out to be true or erroneous, depending upon whether those actions succeed in fulfilling its basic goal: obtaining food. The function for which frogs have evolved the ability to flick their tongues is to acquire nourishment. Satisfying hunger is what an exercise of those abilities ought to accomplish; that is the proper function of its having those ways of behaving. Alternatively, when the actions fail to fulfil their proper functions (because what it detected was in fact a pebble), they are erroneous. This is how even the actions of a frog manifest the normativity of truth. Since actions are identified in terms of their goals, when they are successful, those actions have fulfilled their identity-conditions. That is, in cases of success the future situation which an action anticipates as its telos is identical with its actual result. So they are true in the sense of their actually having accomplished what they sought to do; they were what they were directed at being. And if the action is in error, there is a disparity between what the action was and what it accomplished. The asymmetry between the success and failure of the actions, between identity and disparity, is what confers normativity on truth. Just as actions should be successful, so should they be true. This is a practical sense of “true”. In this fundamental sense, the question of truth or error concerns the success or otherwise of what is done; it is not a matter of what is said. The frog’s actions of flicking its tongue and eating in this circumstance turn out to be true precisely in the sense that they achieve their ends, thereby fulfilling the goal of acquiring the nourishment that the frog needs. This exemplifies truth as success.

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The second sense relates to reliability. The functional indications registered inside the frog will turn out to be reliable or unreliable, depending on whether what were indicated – namely, tongue-flicking-andeating opportunities – were in fact so. A functional indication will be true when what was detected was indeed a flying insect. Alternatively, that functional indication will be false – that is, unreliable – if what was detected was in fact a pebble. This way of describing what such an indication indicates – namely, a certain opportunity – is natural enough, but it is important to keep in mind that, strictly speaking, what is indicated to the frog is a potential action. It is as if the frog, on the basis of what it has detected, has received a certain instruction: “Activate your tongue-flicking, direct it at that moving dark speck, and eat!” The signalling of that action is what is triggered by its detection of that dark speck moving across its visual field. The crucial question – crucial because the frog’s survival depends upon such indications – is whether that signal is reliable. In this second sense, an indication is true – that is, reliable – when the action of the frog, stimulated by that indication, proves successful. Success entails the reliability of that indication. For that reason, this second sense of “true”, like the first from which it derives, is a practical sense. It too relates to what is done, not what is said. In the next chapter, I will argue that reliability is one of the basic senses in which human actions are said to be true. The third sense in which we can speak of truth and error applies to those environmental conditions which would support the success of these functional indications. Those conditions operate as dynamic presuppositions of the frog’s interactive system; there being a favourable opportunity to flick its tongue presupposes that there is in its vicinity something good to eat. In this way, the effective functioning of any organism depends upon its dynamic presuppositions. To say that a dynamic system ‘presupposes’ something at some time is a way of expressing the fact that something is necessary for the action to succeed. These presuppositions of the functional indications upon which it might act are capable of being wrong. If the frog catches a pebble, the frog will discover that this was not, after all, a situation offering something good to eat. However, describing the frog’s discovery in those terms can be misleading, unless handled with care. For it presents the frog’s detecting its practical mistake as its discovering something of the form ‘that p’, and we have no grounds for ascribing propositional knowledge to a frog. For this reason, it must be emphasized that the dynamic presuppositions of an action-system can be described as such only by us, who are external observers of a frog’s behaviour. Frogs can’t do that! Nevertheless, functional indications do have an informational aspect, in the minimal sense in which the word “information” has come to be used in the natural sciences. In these contexts, “information” means any differentiation inhering in one of two or more alternative sequences, arrangements,

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etc., which produces different responses in something, and which is capable of being stored in, transferred by, and communicated to something. In this sense, the informational aspect of functional indications can be expressed (by us, as intelligent external observers, although not by non-human organisms themselves) by describing them as implicit predications about that environment, namely, that it is apt for the interactions indicated. When a frog detects an environmental differentiation which is a signal to flick its tongue and eat, and when it successfully performs such an action, it has correctly detected that it is in a situation apt for flicking its tongue and eating. My putting it that way, as the frog’s correctly detecting something in its environment, invokes the familiar sense of truth- as- correctness. There are, however, two important points to note about invoking this third sense of truth in our description of the frog’s behaviour: (a) The relevant predication is only ever implicit in cases of non-human organisms. This predication is, of course, implicit in a non-formal sense. But the literature on dynamic systems demonstrates how functional linkages can provide implicit, dynamic definitions. (b) The implicit predication which is true in this sense can be recognized as such only by us, who are in these cases external, language-using observers. It is also important to emphasize that the sense of truth-ascorrectness can only be invoked here because it is grounded in the two previous senses identified. All these three related senses of truth, then, properly apply even in such primitive cases as interactions between a frog and bugs in its environment. To summarize, an action is true when it succeeds in doing what is functionally appropriate; an indication of a potential action is true when it is reliable; and an implicit predication of an environment which it is of the right kind for engaging in the indicated activity is true when it is correct. Truth-value, in these three related senses, thus comes into play where what I have called ‘minimal actions’ become possible: in relatively primitive organisms. But such organisms can deal with the issue of truth only in the first two senses. The third sense, truth-ascorrectness, necessarily remains implicit until we humans emerged with our distinctive capacities for linguistic description and discursive knowledge. The ascription of “truth” and “falsity” to the activities of such primitive organisms should not mislead us into thinking that somehow they have a rudimentary analogue of the linguistic abilities that philosophers associate with those words. On the contrary, the appropriateness in question is a practical matter; the indicated action either is or is not apt for that kind of situation. The fundamental question of truth or falsity accordingly concerns what to do, not just what it is appropriate to say. We now have established the groundwork for what it would be appropriate to call an ‘interactive’ conception of truth. For truth, in the threefold

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senses described, is grounded in the category of action, and our graduated analysis of the increasingly refined concepts of action has been made possible by our examination of the distinctive functions which characterize life. And just as actions exhibit a kind of normativity, so truth, by being grounded in action, is a normative concept. Having established that, we can now begin to elaborate a rich conception of truth.

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5 Acting Truly

Our investigation of autonomous life has justified a graduated concept of action applicable to the entire biological domain. And the logical structure of actions validates three related senses in which an action can be true: it can succeed in doing what it aims to accomplish; the functional indications which render it appropriate can be reliable; and its dynamic presuppositions can be correct. Our analysis thus demonstrates how truth is grounded in the category of action. How do these three senses of “true” accord with the use of that word in everyday contexts? Certainly, those who believe that the linguistic conception of truth says all that is philosophically significant about it will think our findings surprising, if not outlandish. On the other hand, in §3.6 I drew attention in a preliminary way to some examples where “true” is ascribed to non-linguistic bearers, and suggested that in these contexts truth has to be construed as rooted in the domain of action. That suggestion has now found significant support from our inquiry into the ascription of actions to organisms. Our two lines of inquiry significantly converge. For these nonlinguistic uses of “true” suddenly take on a deeper import in the light of our interactive ontology. So it looks as if there might be in these uses more coherence, and more relevance, than philosophers’ usual neglect of them would lead one to expect. It is time to look at them more closely.

5.1 Truth as the agreement of an object with its concept How should we understand being a true friend? Or a true coin? At least part of the import of “true” in these contexts is to imply that the friend, or the coin, is genuine or authentic. So let us begin our exploration of these nonlinguistic uses by unpacking that sense of the word. We will then consider other uses in order to assess what support there might be for the three senses mentioned above. One of the few philosophers to take the description “true friend” seriously was Hegel (1991, §24, 60). He thought that usages like this show partial 100

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traces of the ‘deeper and philosophical meaning’ of truth, in contrast with what truth means ‘in common life’. It will prove illuminating to examine how he treats them. Like many philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hegel explained the concept of truth in terms of ‘agreement’. Indeed, as we have noted, the notion of agreement has a long history in explaining the concept of truth; it predates the preoccupation of today’s philosophers with statements. A couple of centuries ago it was a commonplace to define truth as the agreement of knowledge, concepts, or ideas with their objects.1 We today might read their talk of ‘agreement’ simply as a loose and vague way of expressing what is now said with greater clarity and precision in the various theories dealing with the truth of statements. But such a reaction would be too quick. Concepts are not statements; they are not linguistically structured items.2 More importantly, such a reaction would close off a possibly fruitful suggestion. So, how effective is the definition of truth as ‘the agreement of a concept with its object’ in explaining these cases? For Hegel, the trouble with this way of understanding truth is that “we presuppose an object to which our representation is supposed to conform”. His deep conviction, with which he began the Introduction to his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, was that Philosophy, unlike the other sciences, cannot presuppose its objects as given immediately by representation, nor can it presuppose the method of their cognition as already accepted. (It is noteworthy that it is precisely the presupposition of a reality transcending our ways of understanding it which has also been called into question by post-modernism. Any such presupposition can no longer be taken as unproblematic.) Furthermore, Hegel points out, in everyday talk of true friends we mean a friend whose way of acting conforms to the concept of friendship. This ‘conforming’ does not fit those definitions of truth. It is not a case of the concept of ‘friend’ agreeing with its object. Rather, the ‘agreement’ runs the other way. If Jack is Fred’s true friend, what is meant is that Jack is a person whose way of conducting himself towards Fred exemplifies the concept of what a friend is. If we must use this terminology, Jack’s conduct (the object) ‘agrees with’ the concept of friendship; not the other way around. 1.

For Hume, truth consists “in the discovery of the proportion of ideas, consider’d as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence” (A Treatise of Human Nature, II, iii, §10, 448). Likewise, Kant defined truth as “the agreement of knowledge with its object”, Critique of Pure Reason, A58/B83; A 191/B236; A642/ B670. 2. At least, philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Hegel did not think of concepts as linguistically structured items. Since Frege and Russell, it has become more common to think of them as ‘open sentences’ or ‘propositional functions’, with the form “... is F”. But to read that way of construing concepts back into the philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would be grossly anachronistic.

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For Hegel, to say of something that it is ‘untrue’ amounts to saying that it is bad, that it involves an inner inadequacy. We can form a correct representation of a bad object, he says, “but the content of this representation is something inwardly ‘untrue’ ” (1991, §24, 60). Likewise, it may be correct to say that someone is ill, “but a content like this is not true, for an ill body is not in agreement with the concept of life” (1991, §172, 250). His sound point is that living is essential to the continuing existence of a body, but if a body is sick, it is not functioning in the way it ought to function; how it actually is does not accord with the concept of a properly functioning, living body. And, of course, if the illness is severe enough, the body will stop living altogether – thereby making that inner contradiction manifest, as he would put it. Understood in this way, Hegel’s thought is clear and intelligible. Two features of this analysis, however, are worth noting. He has recognized that truth is a normative concept, signalled by his use of “ought”. However, he makes little of that. Rather, he immediately explicates it in terms of an object’s agreement with its concept, an account with obvious Platonic resonances. His granting priority to the concept with which a true object ‘agrees’ does capture one sense of “true”, namely, that calling something “a true such-and-such” can express a recognition that it exemplifies well the ideal, or the archetype, of being a such-and-such. But he does not rest his account of “true” simply on this point. In his Logic, Hegel cites the standard definition of truth of his day only to point out its inadequacies. His own view is that “in the philosophical sense ‘truth’, expressed abstractly and in general, means the agreement of a content with itself”.3 By this ‘agreement with itself’ he means that if, say, Jack is a true friend, then how Jack is ‘agrees’ with how a friend is; Jack’s behaviour agrees with what he himself is: a friend. It would take us too far afield to pursue here Hegel’s way of trying to revive an ontological conception of truth, and thereby to validate what he calls ‘the philosophical sense’ of the term. But his remarks do call attention to the fact that these everyday uses of “true” apply it directly to objects in ways which call attention to the fact that a ‘false’ object is one which is not what it purports to be. Accordingly, although a true coin is properly contrasted with a false or counterfeit coin, these opposed attributions are not on an equal footing. A false or counterfeit coin is a coin only in a deficient sense. A true coin is a metal object which properly exemplifies the concept; it is what a coin purports to be, whereas a false coin is not. Again, to say that a frog is not a true reptile is to say that, although many of the characteristics of a frog

3. §24, ad. 2 (1991, 60) my emphasis. The qualification, “expressed abstractly and in general”, is his warning signal that even his own preferred definition will be misleading until it is fully spelt out by his entire philosophical system.

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are like those of reptiles, a frog is not a genuine reptile; its reality does not properly exemplify the concept of a reptile. In all these kinds of usage, to say that something is a ‘false’ such-and-such is to signal a deficiency or privation, whereas a ‘true’ such-and-such is unquestionably a such-and-such. The force of the adjective “false” is to cancel the noun to which it is attached, whilst “true”, like “genuine”, serves to reinforce that description. Cases like these call into question the assumption that “true” and “false” are opposites of the same order. Another interesting usage is the description of a wheel, post, or beam as “true”, meaning that it is correctly positioned, or upright, or balanced, or level.4 If the wheel, post, or beam is to perform its intended function, it needs to be in the correct position, upright, balanced, or level, respectively. Examples like these could perhaps be made to fit the formula of an object agreeing with its concept. We might say that the concrete actuality of the thing must be such that it conforms to how it was meant to function in the construction in question (we might say, somewhat stiltedly, it conforms to the concept of its function). In a further extension of this line of explanation, we might explain how one’s aim with an arrow or a gun can be true, that is accurate. The idea would be that the arrow or gun is actually in line with the intended target. Likewise, when stud animals breed true, they produce offspring without variation from the type and characteristics of their parents. Leaving aside the rather forced character of some of these explanations, Hegel’s comment is relevant to all these cases: the relevant agreement is of objects with their concepts, not the opposite way around. It is not so easy, however, to explain true love in this way. When singers avow true love, they are not only asserting that their love is genuine and authentic. They probably do mean that also, but their prime assurance to their beloved is that their love will last, that they will remain faithful “until the end of time”. It would be quite forced to try to wring that assurance out of the word “love” alone. The commitment to be faithful is precisely what the adjective “true” is meant to add. A true love is a love that is not only authentic and genuine, but also steadfast and reliable; it can be depended upon by the beloved, not just now but forever. In this connection, it is relevant to notice another significant use of “true” where it is crystal clear that it means faithful, steadfast, reliable, or dependable – slightly different nuances of the same concept. This is the sense called into play by the concept of being true to: true to one’s word, to one’s ideals, to one’s spouse or friend, or to oneself. In all these examples, to be true is to be faithful to someone, or to some principle, ideal, or cause. One is true to one’s word if one’s word can be relied upon; a man is true to his wife if he

4.

According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary. The compilers might well have added “straight” as a possible meaning of “true” in this context.

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remains faithful to her; I am true to myself if my actions express my own deepest values, beliefs, and sense of identity, despite external pressures to act in ways which would betray those ideals. I will return to this conceptual linkage between truth and faithfulness later. For the moment, it suffices to recognize this sense of the word. Once it is recognized that being faithful is one of the meanings of being true, our acceptance that a ‘true’ friend simply means “genuine” was too quick. A true friend is not only someone who can truly be said to be a friend, nor does being a true friend simply mean being a genuine friend. A true fiend is also someone whose friendship can be relied upon, who can be trusted, and who will keep showing that friendship with steadfastness and integrity. So, in addition to the sense of being genuine and authentic, “true” in this usage also conveys the sense of being faithful and dependable. Hegel’s according priority to the concept with which a true object ‘agrees’ does capture one sense of “true”, namely, that calling something “a true such-and-such” can express a recognition that it exemplifies well the ideal of being a such-and-such. But while that is sometimes the main point being made, to explicate truth solely in terms of ideals would be too intellectualist an explanation; it would have to be forced to fit many of these cases; it underplays the normative sense he has noticed; and it would fail to pick up the sense of truth as faithfulness.

5.2

The normativity of truth

If a wheel, post, or beam is to be true, it has to be able to serve the function required by that construction. That concept – serving a function – was introduced in §4.3 in connection with living organisms; here it is needed to describe artefacts. But whether functions derive from processes of natural selection, or from human manufacture and use, does not affect the relevance of the concept of ‘serving a function’ to the present inquiry. This serving of an intended function is also the sense in which a breeder might say that stud sheep are breeding true; producing lambs without significant variation from the valued characteristics of their parents is what the breeding program aims to do. Similarly, when one’s aim with an arrow or a gun is true, that means more than its being accurate; accuracy of aim is precisely what the act of taking aim is meant to achieve. In all these cases, then, the point of ascribing truth is to say that the positioning of the wheel, post, or beam, the breeding of lambs, the taking aim, has been successful – or at least good enough to serve the relevant function (the beam does not have to be exactly vertical to be true; the lambs may look slightly different from their parents, etc.). “True” is used to draw attention to that success. Another revealing example of this use of “true” comes from a radio broadcast describing a rugby league football game. As a player attempted a difficult goal-kick from the sideline, the commentator exclaimed excitedly “It’s high!

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It’s straight! It’s true!”5 What did he mean by that last description? Answer: that the football had passed between the goalposts, above the crossbar. The goal-kick had gone as it ought; the kicker’s action had been successful. This connection between being true and being successful recalls the first criterion for ascribing minimal action proposed in §4.6.1: that an action is individuated by the telos which would be achieved were it successful. So, where something has some function to serve – whether resulting from natural selection, or from its design, or from its current use – there is something which it is supposed to do, or some way which it is supposed to be. As noted, something is called ‘true’, in this sense, when it succeeds in serving this function, when it actually does what it has to do. That is the crucial point: something’s being true, in this sense, just is its being successful in fulfilling its function.6 This usage of “true” reflects the predisposition towards success built into the very concept of action. Indeed, as we noted in §4.6.2, some actiondescriptions are necessarily successful, in that they imply achievement of their goal. This implication of success underlies the sense in which something’s being “true” means that it is genuine. A false friend is not a genuine friend. However, we do not have to understand that sense of “true” in terms of an object’s ‘agreeing with’ the concept invoked to describe it. Rather, genuine friends are people who consistently succeed in showing understanding of, and providing companionship and support for, their friend. I will explore what this involves more fully in the next section. Here the point to notice is that being a genuine friend is an achievement. What marks people’s friendship as genuine is that they consistently conduct themselves in ways which demonstrate their friendship. Someone’s disposition to be friendly to another is put to the test when difficult times arise, when events occur which put stress upon their relationship. That is when genuine friends show themselves to be more than ‘fair weather’ friends. To call someone a ‘true’ friend is to call attention to this achievement. The sense of “true” as reliable or faithful likewise implies success. Someone or something which is true in this sense proves over time to be reliable; one can depend upon it. That too is an achievement. The same element of achievement is evident in the phrase “being true to ...”. When Shakespeare’s Polonius urges Laertes, “To thine own self be true”, he is giving the latter advice on how to conduct his life. If he succeeds, “it must

5.

Tim Gavel, ABC Radio, Canberra, 15 July 2007. A more complex use of “true”, which partly picks up this sense, is that of true and false coins. A false coin is one that has not been properly authorized to be used as currency. I will examine the relation of authorization to truth in such cases in the next section. The point to note here is that, so long as its being counterfeit has not been detected, a false coin will fulfil the same function as genuine coins do, serving as a means of commercial exchange. 6.

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follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man” (Hamlet, Act I, scene iii). This implication of success in fulfilling designated functions, and in consistently achieving valued ways of relating to others (or to certain ideals, or to oneself), explains why “true” expresses normative force. When something is as it is meant to be, when one’s actions achieve their ends, when one’s ways of relating succeed in showing virtuous characteristics such as friendship, love, or integrity, a relevant norm is being fulfilled. This normative force explains why saying that something is a ‘false’ such-and-such signals a deficiency or privation, a failure to perform in the way required if the description is to be appropriate. This normative force explains why the terms “true” and “false” are not on equal footing. What mediates the conceptual connections between all these uses of “true” and the concepts of achievement and fulfilment is the concept of action. Since truth in non-linguistic contexts is grounded in the domain of action, it carries over from that domain the intrinsic normativity characteristic of all actions. Just as it is a logical feature of actions to be directed towards some end, so being true in all these cases exhibits that same normativity. We should note in passing yet another way in which certain actiondescriptions are necessarily successful. There is a systematic ambiguity in our use of certain action-verbs. What I have in mind are those actiondescriptions whose use sometimes exemplifies the normativity characteristic of all actions, but at other times does not. For instance, consider the following exchange. After presenting a paper to a work-in-progress seminar, I might respond to a colleague’s criticism by saying, “That’s no objection!”. My colleague could well reply in return, “Yes it is. I have just objected to what you said!”. In this imaginary exchange, I would be using the verb “object” normatively (that is, only successful actions of that sort count as examples of objecting), whereas my colleague would be using that same verb purely descriptively (she can correctly claim to be performing the speech-act of objecting). Just as the normative use of action-verbs implies that the action is successful – its intrinsic end has been achieved – so calling someone or something true implies that it is properly so called; it rightly fulfils the description. It will be my contention that this is also what explains the normative force of “true” evident in its use with linguistically structured items, noted in §3.1. But before proceeding to argue that, it will be informative to consider these non-linguistic uses more closely.

5.3

Being genuine and being faithful

I have been arguing that the non-linguistic uses of “true” manifest two distinct but interrelated senses: being genuine or authentic, and being reliable

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or faithful. Of those two, the second sense is arguably the more interesting, and – so I will argue – the more fundamental. Yet a fully worked- out account of the concept of truth-as-faithfulness is wanting; philosophers have neglected the concept. If there is anything in the thought that the primary locus of truth is a matter of faithful action – of being true to someone or something – we should investigate that sense further before we consider the correctness of statements. While these two senses of “true” are distinct, both are invoked in talk of true friends, true love, and being true to something or someone. In these contexts, the ascription of “true” qualifies the essential future-orientation characteristic of any human action. It claims that, because a person’s disposition to show friendship, to love, or to act with integrity is genuine, it will in the future remain reliable and steadfast. The person’s friendship, love, or integrity is so firm that it is not liable to breakdown. Questions of integrity most clearly arise when we find ourselves in situations where we confront serious challenges going to the heart of our selfformation. From time to time, we are internally conflicted about how to respond, and if we are not to be frozen in indecision, we need some way of reintegrating our various beliefs, impulses, and desires. To act with integrity is to have adopted and act upon principles which define the roles and relationships in terms of which one identifies oneself, finds one’s life to be worth living, and one’s actions to be worth undertaking. The result of adopting these principles is the emergence of the kind of personal identity which is distinctive of human being (Korsgaard 2009). So people act truly when, whatever difficulties might be caused by external circumstances, there is no swerving in the intentionality of their actions. Their conduct consistently manifests their deepest commitments. In selecting amongst the range of potential actions available at any one time, they will choose to enact those which maintain those relationships. There are, however, significant differences between these two senses of “true”. In the sense of genuine, the adjective “true” has point when attributed to anything which admits the possibility of defective or illusory instances. That is, it makes sense to say that a thing is a true such- and-such whenever it is possible that something appears to be so, but ‘really’ is not, or when that something might be correctly called a such-and-such, but not manifest very well the characteristics to be found in an archetypal case. A counterfeit coin looks like a genuine coin, but is not one. A ‘fair weather’ friend acts like a friend, and indeed, when the going is easy, will generally be acknowledged as a friend, but fails to act as a genuine friend when adverse circumstances stress the relationship. Sometimes there is tension between the various nuances involved in non-linguistic uses of “true”. Some people say they are so happy with their false teeth that they wish they had obtained them earlier! Their false teeth work reliably and serve their function well, but are still called false because they are not genuine teeth.

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In this sense, the adjective “true” is essentially attributive; it qualifies a noun, but cannot be separately predicated of the same subject. That is, whereas being a female friend implies being both female and a friend, being a genuine friend does not imply being both genuine and a friend, any more than being an expectant mother implies being pregnant and a mother. Being genuine always means being a genuine something- or- other. (Of course, the adjective “genuine” can be used as a predicate – e.g., “His friendship is genuine” – but such a use only makes explicit its essentially attributive character.) That “true” in this sense is essentially attributive might well seem sufficient reason to abandon any further examination of non-linguistic uses of the word. After all, to describe anything as a ‘true F’, where “F” stands for any descriptive term, is just an emphatic way of describing it as an F; the qualification “true” does not add any new description. If that were all there is to the non-linguistic uses of “true”, they would not sustain a substantial conception of truth, to rival the linguistic conception. They could safely be dismissed as of little philosophical significance. By contrast, “true” in the sense of being faithful, steadfast, reliable, or dependable can be readily used both attributively and predicatively. A striking example of the latter occurs in Alfred Tennyson’s poem Princess: Bright and fierce and fickle is the South, And dark and true and tender is the North. (IV, 80) In this predicative use of “true”, its sense is clearly that of being steadfast; its opposite is “fickle”. And in the phrase “true to ...”, the adjective has a purely predicative use. Its sense is always that of being faithful, steadfast, reliable, or dependable – which precise nuance depends upon the context. This use is never merely emphatic; it always has a substantive sense. Sometimes a grammatically attributive use performs both the roles of emphasizing the noun it qualifies and adding an embedded predicate to it. On these occasions, the two roles shade into one another. This occurs where the idea of being faithful, steadfast, or reliable is part of the meaning of the noun qualified by “true”. Thus, as we noted, a true friend is both a genuine friend (the emphatic use) and a person whose friendship is loyal and steadfast (the substantive use). The fact that there are these differences in the logic of these two uses of “true” shows that the sense of being faithful cannot be assimilated to that of being genuine. And it shows that not all non-linguistic uses of “true” can be dismissed as merely an emphatic device – eliminable as the ‘disquotation’ theorists would have it. On the contrary, the analysis has highlighted how the word does have a significant use worth pursuing. Of these two senses of “true” – as genuine and as reliable or faithful – the latter appears to be the more fundamental. That is, it seems that the sense

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of being genuine derives from the sense of “true” as faithful and reliable. In general, any action raises an issue as to its accomplishment: it can fail, or it can be successful, and those which are necessarily successful involve other actions which can fail. As I have argued, actions which are true in the sense of genuine consistently succeed. This notion of success is what provides the conceptual linkage between the two senses of “true”. If something is a true such-and-such, in the sense of being a genuine one, it consistently fulfils its function, or consistently succeeds in behaving as a such-and-such. That achievement is what makes it possible to rely on its being a such-and-such. This is not just a linguistic remark; being trustworthy is a much more weighty matter than the correctness of a description. Indeed, the reliance might well involve non-verbal actions, even trusting one’s life. It is when something consistently succeeds in behaving as a such-and-such, when it reliably manifests that character, that it can be acknowledged as a genuine such-and-such. A true friend is a trusty friend. The sense of being reliable thus underlies the sense of “true” as genuine. Furthermore, reliable actions, and what they accomplish, are so because they have been performed faithfully. The conditions of true human friendship therefore reflect, in a heightened way, the senses in which we discerned, in §4.10, how truth could be found in the behaviour of a frog. Sometimes the use of “true” expresses yet another connotation. The notion of a true coin exemplifies this conceptual richness. Unlike a counterfeit coin, a true coin is one that has been made at the National Mint and put into circulation officially by the government. Likewise, an authentic CD recording is one that has been published by the record company contracted to make it. A ‘pirated’ recording might sound the same as an authorized one – but it would not be authentic. In such usages, the nuance of authenticity expressed by “true” derives from something’s being properly authorized. This might appear to be a quite different meaning from those already mentioned, but note: if a counterfeit coin is detected by the police or by bank officials, they will withdraw it from circulation; it can no longer function as if it were legal tender. In such cases, being properly authorized is a condition of authentic functioning. While the sense of “true” as genuine is explicable in this way, as an extension of its sense as reliable or faithful, the latter cannot be explicated as a metaphorical extension of truth-ascorrectness. That is a matter not only of logic, but also of etymology. Faithfulness is the ancient sense of the word deeply embedded in its meaning, as the dictionaries testify. In fact, the English words “true” and “truth” are derived from the same linguistic root as “betroth” and “truce”.7 The original idea is ‘characterized by good 7. To betroth is to plight one’s ‘troth’ = ‘truth’, that is to pledge one’s faithfulness and loyalty (especially in marriage). Likewise, “truce” comes from the plural, used as a singular, of the Middle English word “trewe” = “true”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the reference is to the pledges or engagements given by both parties to keep good faith.

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faith’, and is related to a verb meaning “to trust, confide”. That is why a true fiend is a trusty friend. Nor is that etymology simply a peculiarity of the English language; in many non-Indo-European languages, the same conceptual linkage between truth and reliability (or faithfulness) is manifest in the etymologies. These linguistic facts show that the sense of truth as the correctness of statements is not the root meaning of the word, for all that philosophers in recent times have focussed upon it to the exclusion of any other. But the case for maintaining that the sense of truth as reliability or faithfulness is the primary meaning of the word does not rest only upon etymology. It also derives from the manifest inadequacy of the linguistic conception of truth, examined in Chapter 3, and the ontology explored in Chapter 4. That is, on its own terms, the linguistic conception needs to draw upon the richer conception of truth offered by these other uses. Etymology and philosophical analysis both point in the same direction.

5.4

Consistency in action

Now, when people are reliable and faithful, they are so, in part, in virtue of how they consistently act. Let me now try to deepen this observation. What does it mean to say that a person acts consistently? We know what it means to say that a set of propositions is consistent: they generate no contradictions. That is a formal matter. But how could one action be consistent with another? Or with the disposition of the person acting? Clearly, the consistency involved is not simply an analogue of formal (propositional) consistency. It is not enough that the set of propositions describing what the person is doing on different occasions does not generate contradictions. On that basis, if I kissed my wife this morning and bashed her this evening, those two actions would be consistent, since the propositions describing them are not contradictory. So would my kissing her this morning and my reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet two weeks ago, two actions which are entirely independent. When we say that someone is acting consistently, we are certainly meaning to claim that that person’s actions are related in a stronger and closer sense than formal consistency could explain. Nor would it suffice simply to stipulate that two actions are consistent if they are similar. For there is much more to Jack’s being a true friend to Fred than his regularly performing the same kind of action, for instance, often drinking in the same or a similar bar with Fred. Trying to rescue this suggestion by tightening up the constraints on the similarity between actions does not seem a very promising strategy. I suspect that no purely behavioural criteria will adequately capture the idea of consistency in action. Rather, that idea seems to have its roots in the notion of someone’s ‘acting in character’. There is an internal relation between a person’s actions and character, despite their being in different categories: the actions express that

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person’s character, and people’s character is made manifest in their actions. The relation of expression, or manifestation, involved here is different from what is usually understood by causation. This is particularly so if, following Hume, we insist that causes and effects are distinct – that is, we can think of some object or event which is a cause without necessarily thinking of the object or event which happens to be its effect, and vice versa. The relation between someone’s character and their actions, however, is not contingent in the way we usually understand causal relations to be. Someone’s character does not cause its own expressions. The sense of ‘expression’ involved here is not that in which we might speak of something expressing or instantiating an impersonal ideal. Rather, it is the sense in which I express my feelings in my face, or I express my opinions in what I say or write, or painters express their vision of things in works of art. In all these cases, something is made manifest, and in each case in an observable medium with its own specific qualities which are distinct from what is being expressed in that medium. Although there are these differences between an expression and what is thereby expressed, the two are internally related. When I express my opinions in what I say, usually much more is involved than simply vocalizing a string of words which I have fully formulated in my mind beforehand. Sometimes, of course, that can be what happens, as when I carefully rehearse what I am going to say, and then say it. But usually, making manifest involves doing something significantly different from that. We are all familiar with the experience summed up by the little girl who, on being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, replied “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” (Wallas 1926). Generally, until thought is expressed in words, it is inchoate and only partly formed. I can know the general gist of what I want to say, but until I formulate it, my thinking is no more than an inclination, an orientation, a tendency yet to be definitively developed and rendered determinate. No sharp distinction can therefore be drawn between the expression and what is expressed, between the medium and the message. The two are intimately linked, in that we can infer one from the other, despite their being in different categories. Now, like thought in this respect, a person’s ‘character’ is generally inchoate and not fully determinate until it is expressed. While babies are born with genetically determined capacities, dispositions, and tendencies, how they develop depends also on the social influences they experience, and on the choices they make throughout their lives. The rather fruitless ‘nature versus nurture’ debate is irrelevant here; the point I am making is a different one. It is this: while I undoubtedly arrived in this world with a particular genetic make-up, and am subject to a complex range of social influences and opportunities, I do not have a predetermined character. Who I am, and am becoming, is a lifelong project of self-formation, involving both discovery and invention, as I progressively delineate my character.

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That character would be misdescribed as an Aristotelian potentiality, dependent only on the right conditions for its actualization (as an acorn grows into an oak tree). Rather, as I realize my character through my actions, I progressively define it, both in the sense of formulating what it is and in the stronger sense of thereby giving my life its definite shape and qualities. My character is fashioned over time through the interaction between my inclinations, dispositions, and choices, on the one hand, and the actions by which I give them expression, on the other. Character is indeed an emergent phenomenon, both in the sense that it is an attribute of selfconscious persons, and in the sense that each person’s character emerges and becomes more definite over time. These reflections enable us to return to the question of what it means to talk of actions being consistent. That idea seemed to have its roots in the notion of someone’s ‘acting in character’. The rich notion of expression fills out what that means: some particular action of a person is ‘in character’ when it expresses the same personal qualities, values, and sense of identity as that person sincerely maintains and has been manifesting to date.8 If that is right, it follows that a series of actions is consistent when each action in that series express the same character – the same personal qualities, values, and sense of personal identity – even though those actions might have taken place in significantly different circumstances.

5.5

The historicity of human being

That a person’s character is not predetermined, but is delineated ever more distinctly through a lifelong project of discovery and invention is one manifestation of the differences between human being and the life of the bacteria, frogs, and rats previously discussed. Like them, we have to interact with our environments in order to maintain our existence. And like them, each of us is born with a particular genetic make-up. But what we can do is not wholly determined by those factors. Humans, like most mammals, are flexible learners, and capable of self- directed actions. But more than that: we are selfconscious, and capable of reflective action. As new circumstances arise over time, we deliberate and choose what to do, and thereby progressively shape how we shall be. This is self-maintenance of a sort, but in a more refined and vastly extended sense than what we have been discussing thus far. With candle flames, self-maintenance is a matter of continuing to exist by keeping on 8. A more complicated case along these lines is the person whose character is weak, or is seriously self-deceived. Such persons might find that they consistently act in ways which fail to express the values they sincerely hold. Clearly, they are conflicted. We might say that they only want to hold those values, or (mis)believe that they do, but actually do not, because they are not evinced in their actions.

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burning. With bacteria, frogs, and rats, it is a matter of staying alive. We humans also have a strong drive to stay alive, but way beyond that, my actions are truly mine when they contribute to maintaining and developing further the kind of person I am set on becoming. This is a stronger form of autonomy than the kind of recursive self-maintenance which non-human organisms evince, and aims at goals which exceed basic survival. The question – how shall I be? – is not, however, one that I can ever answer once and for all in my life. Rather, it repeatedly arises for me in each new circumstance in which I find myself. As long as I am alive, I cannot avoid realizing (i.e., making real) one out of the range of possibilities open to me in each situation; I always have to do something or other (which, of course, can include doing nothing much). Consequently, the answers required by this question are necessarily practical; time and again, I have to act somehow or other, and how I act renders my very being ever more determinate. That is, no legitimate distinction can be drawn between human being and human acting. Actions are always performed within our natural and historical situation (Fackenheim 1961). In part, like any other kind of living thing, the situations in which we humans find ourselves are natural. Not only do we have a given body, with idiosyncratic characteristics, dispositions, capacities, and disabilities, but we also are surrounded by an array of naturally produced processes, things, and events. These givens both limit what we can do and present a range of possibilities for action. What is distinctive of humans is that, through our life- experiences, we acquire over time a growing understanding of these natural influences, and of what we can do with them, in pursuit of our chosen goals. And if we want to understand better how they happen, and the processes which constitute them, we need to turn to the physical sciences (physics, chemistry), the life sciences (biology, zoology, physiology, psychology), and the environmental sciences (geology, geography, meteorology, ecology). But the situations in which humans find themselves are not only natural; they have also been formed historically. That is, we are always located within a particular milieu which is the outcome of specific human actions: both those of our own past and those of other people. Like our natural situations, these historical situations both limit what we can do, and afford us new opportunities for possible action, which may be routine and unimaginative, or novel and creative. We first acquire the conceptual equipment (including a language) to understand the world around us from the immediate social context and historical tradition into which we were born and initiated. As we grow and develop, we can modify, extend, and transform our historical situation. But since understanding is a historical phenomenon, whenever we understand something, or come to know another person, or interpret a text, we always do so in terms of some historically formed point of view.

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This inescapable contextuality of understanding has often been misunderstood – both by some who accept the inference, and by some who take it as reason to deny contextuality – as implying that we are inevitably locked into a predetermined point of view. But that does not follow; as I will argue in §9.5, there is good reason to reject the defeatism of a historical sceptic. The correct inference is that understanding another person, or another culture, is always interactive and dialectical. Unlike knowledge of some fact, which we either have or lack, understanding something or someone admits of degrees. Initially, we understand a little, and later come to understand better. Through endeavouring to understand, one enters into a dynamic relation with the other, at once questioning the other and having one’s own intellectual horizons challenged and extended. Because we are finite and situated in the world, we can never, strictly speaking, be self- creators. Some scholars, especially some literary critics, have seized on self-making, or self-fashioning, as a key explanatory concept (for example, Greenblatt 1980). But such talk always has to be qualified. What we can do, and therefore how we can become, is limited by the practical possibilities afforded by situations in which we find ourselves. How we are, and will be, is not an issue wholly determined by our own choices. Our freedom to choose is not sovereign. But neither are we wholly determined by our natural and historical situations, as an alien otherness imposed upon us. Unlike the more primitive organisms discussed in the previous chapter, we are not merely the products of our diverse natural and historical circumstances. For it is characteristic of human beings that we choose some, but not all, features afforded by our changing situations to appropriate and incorporate into our selfhood – some we accept as part of the character we are progressively developing; others we resist and try to change. Accordingly, we are always engaged in a continual dialectical movement between these two poles. Nor is our choosing what to do confined to selecting amongst a given range of possibilities; we can also work towards making possible certain ways of being which are not possible at present. That is, from time to time we can, and do, create our own opportunities. The possibility of novelty is inherent in historical situations. Any free and creative act enlarges the scope of subsequent acting, since it presents later historical agents with new possibilities which they can appropriate and re-enact. If no firm distinction can be drawn between human being and human acting, it follows that humanity is manifested differently from one historical situation to another, and from culture to culture. The human way of being is not fully determinate; it is a determinable (its logic is like that of colour, not like that of red) which is rendered determinate through what we do. This understanding of ourselves as partly self- determining means that we are essentially historical beings, not in the trivial sense that we have a past, but in the sense that, for each of us, our very being – who we each are – is

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concretely constituted by how we project ourselves ahead, out of our respective pasts, into our futures. ‘Historicity’, thus understood, describes one of the universal traits of being human. It characterizes our life form. Indeed, there is growing evidence that human brains are not fully formed at birth. Our early experiences, including the sounds of the language we hear and learn to speak as infants, powerfully influence how our brains mature. Continually repeated experiences strengthen relevant neural pathways in the brain, while those neural connections which are not (much) excited tend to wither and disappear. Our historicity consequently affects how our body functions and develops. But just as there are universal biological processes involved in the constitution of our bodies, so there are universal determinables in our historical existence which, despite cultural differences, enable us to transcend our natural and historical situations. This will prove significant when we come in Chapter 9 to consider whether our relativity entails sceptical relativism. This insistence that the primary human phenomenon is a naturally and historically situated way of being is consistent with our analysis of all biological organisms, including humans, as cohesive far-fromequilibrium systems which can continue to exist only through their interactions with their environment. That account shows why any understanding of a human being has to be contextual and reflexive. And the identity of each human being is not determined by the properties of persisting constituents – our bodies have none – nor of some unchanging core of properties. The orientation to the future intrinsic to any organism’s action is, however, radicalized in the case of human beings. While historicity, in the sense described, is a universal trait of human life, how each of us, through our actions, realizes our character – both by formulating what it is and by giving our lives its definite shape and qualities – is an issue for each individual person. Other kinds of organisms, including other animals, do not in the same way define who they each are. How their lives go is largely determined by their natural situations. Even those animals which are flexible learners, and are capable of self- directed action, do not appropriate features inherited from their situation and incorporate some into their being, nor do they accept or reject them as part of their individual identity. In the case of humans, our reflective actions not only serve the function of basic self-maintenance, but also serve to constitute who we become, as we project ourselves out of our past, ahead of ourselves, into a yet-to-berealized future.

5.6

The temporality of truth

A corollary of radical significance immediately follows from this analysis: truth, in the sense manifest in faithful action, is essentially temporal. Of course, every action, whether human or not, occurs at some particular time

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and place, and is in that sense temporal, but the meaning of “true” we are considering here is temporal in a stronger sense. Being reliable and faithful are attributes which have to be manifested over an extended time. To ascribe truth to a person, or to a human action, is both to make a comment upon that person’s past behaviour, and to predict that his or her future behaviour will continue to exhibit that same loyalty and steadfastness. Being true to someone or something requires both continually reaching back to reaffirm past commitments and projecting them ahead, whether they were explicitly or only implicitly made. Truth in this sense has to be enacted in the temporal dimension of promise and fulfilment. It is not simply an instantiation in time of some atemporal ideal or concept; on the contrary, its very structure is essentially temporal. This last proposition might sound unremarkable. Yet, it is utterly at odds with the traditional Platonic conception of truth, some of whose nuances continue to resonate in contemporary usage. Plato, as we have seen, had an ‘objectual’ conception of truth, as a state of the Real. It therefore shared in the characteristics of the Real. Reflecting his debt to Parmenides, Platonic alētheia (truth) was changeless, the same from all points of view, and admitted of degrees (i.e., something could be truer than something else). Most importantly, Platonic truth was timeless. The idea that truth is eternal, in the sense of timeless, has become so entrenched in Western thinking that it comes as a shock to learn that it was one of Plato’s special inventions. This conceptual innovation first appears in his Timaeus. There he describes how the world-maker (the Demiurge) used an everlasting (aidios) Living Being as his model in order to make the world. Since the nature of this Living Being is eternal (aiōnios), the Demiurge could not attach it in its entirety to what is generated. So, he made an ‘image of eternity, moving according to number’, which we call Time, and which has as its parts days, nights, months, and years. So, he writes, “was” and “will be” are generated forms of time, although we apply them incorrectly, without noticing, to everlasting being. They are said properly only of the realm of becoming, which consists of processes. Plato concluded that true speech – that is, speech which clearly and without distortion picks out the Real – must be tense-less, since what is real is eternal. Indeed, to make it crystal clear that the concept of eternity he was invoking here was different from that of being everlasting, Plato invented a new adjective, diaiōnios, a word which previously did not exist in the Greek language, to mark this new sense of the eternal as describable only in a tense-less language. This novel sense of the eternity of truth came to be thoroughly incorporated into Christian thinking through the esteem accorded to the fourth century neo-Platonic theologian, Augustine, who had internalized Plato’s Forms within the divine intellect. From Augustine, the notion of eternal truth passed into the philosophical and theological traditions of the West.

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That way of thinking of truth continues to exert its influence over contemporary thinkers, even those who have no truck with theology – witness the attempts of many analytic philosophers to ‘translate’ the tensed statements of ordinary discourse into ‘eternal sentences’, as well as the attempts to redescribe our historical identity-through- change in terms of a timeless four- dimensional space-time.9 Indeed, it could well be that the profound lack of interest on the part of contemporary philosophers in truth-as-faithfulness is explained by the lingering influence of this Platonic tradition. Those who have not reflected critically upon the connotations of the everyday use of “true” in nonlinguistic contexts will be inclined to regard that use as irrelevant to truthas- correctness. While they might concede that truth-as-faithfulness has the essentially temporal structure for which I have been arguing, they will insist that that sense has nothing to do with truth-ascorrectness. Surely, they will say, while the meaning of many ordinary statements often includes a reference to some particular spatiotemporal context, the truth of those statements (if they are true) is itself timeless, precisely in Plato’s special sense. Anyone operating with such a mindset will make no sense of any claim that truth is essentially future-regarding. But that is too quick; meaning and truth cannot be separated so easily, as the common way of explaining what a sentence means in terms of its truthconditions shows. And it is quite implausible to claim that statements made by using sentences containing temporal references, including tenses, are timelessly true, in Plato’s sense. After all, he introduced the concept of the eternal by excluding the use of tenses! To be consistent, anyone who wants to invoke Plato’s sense of the timeless will have to show that the program to translate ordinary statements into ‘eternal sentences’ is viable. But we saw in §2.3 reason to believe that that program is not feasible. However, if the idea of truth – even of the truth of statements – is grounded in the notion of reliability, as I suggested in §4.10, we have to hand a viable alternative to the lingering enticements of the Platonic conception of truth. This is not to deny that there may be some contexts where we recognize that once an issue of truth is determined, it is not liable to change. Such cases can be accommodated within an essentially temporal notion of truth; the changeless and the everlasting are still temporal concepts. In sharp contrast to this Platonic conception of truth as atemporal, the idea of truth as reliability, or faithfulness, has its root in the understanding of humanity as rendered determinate through a series of consistent historical actions, an essentially temporal process. Being steadfast and reliable in

9.

Arguably, this way of understanding space-time profoundly misunderstands the significance of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (Capek 1961), although many other philosophers disagree.

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one’s adherence to someone else, or to some principle or cause, or to one’s promises, has to be demonstrated over time. Consequently, while such demonstrations can only become evident through a past pattern of consistent action, maintaining one’s loyal adherence necessarily manifests the futureregarding character of all action. Being true, in this sense, therefore provides a striking instance of the historical structure of human being.

5.7

Acting faithfully: Objectivity and openness

Our discussion thus far has emphasized the centrality of autonomy, commitment, and personal integrity involved in acting truly. These traits focus upon the subjectivity of the person acting. While these traits are necessary, they are not sufficient; being true, or faithful, to another involves more than the subjectivity of the agent. What else is required? Various nuances are conveyed by the idea of faithfulness, depending on the particular context, but they include being loyal, being devoted or dedicated, being trustworthy, and being dependable or reliable. The last couple – being dependable or reliable – seems best to capture the central meaning. If someone or something is true in this sense, others can rely upon that truth. Should their trust be put to the test, it will be vindicated. Others can therefore safely take it as a given in their own decision-making. This reflects a central feature noted above: truth, in this sense, is essentially temporal. Obviously, faithfulness is not to be confused with faith, neither in the sense of a set of propositions believed, nor the attitude of believing them. Similarly, it is to be distinguished from faith in the sense of believing in, or trusting someone (although it does imply being trustworthy). In this connection, it is perhaps worth remarking that faithfulness is not necessarily reciprocal. We can be loyal to a superior, or a partner, but that person might not show loyalty in return. One spouse in a marriage might be faithful, while the other is not. Jack might be Fred’s trusty friend, but Fred might not, in fact, trust him. Because our actions are observable by others, loyalty and reliability are objectively discernible. Being true is not purely subjective, not simply a matter of mental attitudes, intentions, or feelings towards the other. Nor is a commitment, even if made with great sincerity and self-knowledge, by itself enough. To be genuine, being true requires overt expression, and that means it has to be manifest in actions. No matter how fervently a wayward husband might claim to be true to his wife, if his actions belie the claim, then she is right to reject his protestations. Just as a series of actions is consistent if, and only if, they express the same personal character, so (reasonable excuses for some particular lapse aside) avowals of our intentionality are not bona fide, and have no claim upon credence, if that alleged orientation is not consistently expressed in action. While the commitment required of the true and faithful friend, or lover, or whoever, is necessarily future-regarding, any

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judgement of that person’s faithfulness is necessarily retrospective. The question then turns, in part, on whether the person’s actions are consistent with the avowed commitment. The other part of the question is also a matter of consistency, but in a different sense. Judgements of faithfulness necessarily encompass an extended period. To be adjudged faithful, the series of one’s actions must exhibit loyalty and reliability consistently, in the sense analysed above. That is, they should each express the same character – the same personal qualities, values, and sense of personal identity, sincerely maintained – across a variety of circumstances in which they have been tested. Furthermore, because commitments of the kind involved in being true are usually without any temporal limitations, most judgements of faithfulness are at best provisional. Nevertheless, significant relationships eventually come to a natural end, for reasons other than a lack of faithfulness – for example, one of the persons has died, or the relationship has come to its predetermined end, or an appointed period of service has been completed. Then, a definitive (although, of course, still defeasible) judgement of faithfulness can be made. Even in these cases, however, the judgement has to encompass a significantly long period. Just how long is significantly long depends on the specifics of the case. That judgements of faithfulness take into account behaviour over an extended period still applies when a single action is being so described. For example, suppose Jack agrees to be a guarantor for a bank loan which Fred is negotiating. It can be said that Jack’s acceptance of this responsibility is an act of true friendship. Although just one act is being evaluated in this case, it is being appraised against the backdrop of an extended series of actions in which that friendship has been evident. On the negative side, someone’s being unfaithful similarly occurs against the backdrop which has given reason to support an expectation of faithfulness. Faithfully honouring one’s commitments requires openness, in at least three respects. Firstly, commitments of this kind are typically open- ended, not only in time, but also concerning which kinds of action would fulfil them. In order to be faithful, actions must be fitting, that is, appropriate to the circumstances as they arise. That requires working out which of the many possibilities for action would best express that commitment. That implies always being alive to the possible novelty intrinsic to historical situations. New kinds of situation call for new responses. No specific criteria can be laid down, in advance, as to which actions are necessary and sufficient for persons to act faithfully in a particular relationship. There can be no recipes prescribing what will be the appropriate ways of conducting oneself. This is what distinguishes commitments of this kind from promises, which typically are specific. Unlike a promise to return to someone her copy of Hamlet next Friday, a commitment to be true does not specify any particular action, or particular kind of action, which someone undertakes to perform

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in the future. Being faithful is a generic norm, that is, faithfulness does not determine a unique task-specification to be enacted. An indefinite number of deeds might satisfy the concept, depending upon the circumstances. Thus, the concept of faithfulness, like most empirical concepts, is opentextured (Waismann 1951). That is, most empirical concepts, even if they are not vague, do not prescribe in advance precisely which situations fall under them; the meaning of those concepts does not exhaustively determine how they are to be correctly applied in all possible circumstances. Historical situations share in this general open-texturedness, but, in addition, because the possibility of novelty is part of the essential structure of historical situations, they typically present historical agents with new possibilities which they might appropriate and enact. Consequently, there is no escaping this doubly open-textured character of historical situations. Having to work out at the time what is the fitting action in particular circumstances means that we have no option but to face the future, in our committed relationships, with openness. Faithfulness is therefore something we enact in each new situation, so long as the relationship obtains. This is why being a true friend, for example, is not a matter of certain actions according with the concept of a friend – as Hegel characterized the phenomenon. Rather, a true friend is someone who proves to be loyal and dependable, both in enjoying experiences with the other person and in providing apt support whenever the other should be in need. Being true is not so much a matter of conforming to a concept, but of performing in ways which express one’s commitments, fittingly and consistently, in novel and testing situations. Secondly, working out what is fitting in some novel situation requires that we conduct ourselves in ways which are open to apprehending others, as they are, in their situations. That calls for insight and discernment into the character of the situation and into the needs and desires of the other person. Because people and situations change, what has been an appropriate way of conducting oneself towards the other might no longer be appropriate. Being true to another requires understanding both the other person and the other’s situation, each of which is constantly changing. Understanding others therefore involves insight into their self-formation: how they have appropriated aspects of the natural and historical situations of their past into their self-understanding, and have identified themselves with particular attitudes, values, and projects. Further, even in a very close relationship, the other’s situation is not the same as one’s own. Understanding the situation of others involves discerning the complex pressures at work in their situation, and what possibilities their situation offers them. Our ability to discern another person, and that person’s situation, is governed both by the reach of our understanding, and by how open we are to how the other is. To the extent that we project our own perceptions, needs, desires onto others, and then ‘read’ their situation in that light, we

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will fail to discern how they are, in their own right. When we do that, it is likely that our actions towards them will not be fitting. Furthermore, since we are finite, we can never be entirely open to the otherness of the other. Consequently, from time to time, to some extent, we err in our judgements as to what is the most appropriate thing to do, with more or less disastrous consequences for the relationship. Occasional errors of this sort do not necessarily imply that one is not being true to it, nor need they so disrupt the relationship that it fails. Whether either of these consequences flow from such errors of judgement will depend on many factors: for example, the seriousness of the particular error; how it sits with respect to all the other actions through which the relationship has been constituted; and what each party is prepared to do to overcome the breach. Knowing another person is logically different from knowing some fact, a difference marked in many languages other than English by quite different verbs. I call these ‘interactive knowledge’ and ‘factual (or propositional) knowledge’, respectively. The latter is on/off; either I know that p, or I do not. In contrast, my knowing another person admits of degrees; I know my wife now better than when we first met, and my knowing her better now does not imply that I did not know her then. Nor is my knowing her more now simply a matter of having accumulated more facts about her, although I have done that too. Rather, over the years she has revealed more of herself, both deliberately and without necessarily meaning to do so, and I have been involved in her own process of self-making, and in generating the possibilities through which she has constituted her being. The soundness of my judgements as to which actions of mine would be fitting towards her in any particular situation depends, in part, on how well I have come to know her, on how open and discerning is my insight into how she is, and is becoming. A third respect in which faithfully honouring commitments requires openness follows from this. Faithful action towards another respects that other person’s integrity. Heidegger has a helpful distinction here between the two positive modes of Fürsorge, concern or solicitude.10 One way of expressing concern for others is to ‘leap in’ to take away from them what they properly have care of. I can intervene in the matters that someone else has care of, putting myself in his or her place, and taking over from the other responsibility for the task at hand. When I do that, all

10.

In everyday German, Fürsorge usually means ‘welfare’ in the sense of welfare services or social security. Its basic sense is ‘care’ in the sense in which one might take care for another’s welfare. In their translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Macquarrie and Robinson (Heidegger 1962) translate his use of the word as ‘solicitude’, whereas Joan Stambaugh (Heidegger 1996) translates it as ‘concern’. The passage is on H122.

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the other person can do is step back and let me take over. If I do that, I disburden them of their own autonomy, so that they become dependent and disempowered, even if this dominance is only tacit and remains hidden. Afterwards, when the matter has been attended to, all the other person can do is decide whether to take the task back as something finished and at his or her disposal, or to disavow any responsibility for it. Alternatively, Heidegger writes, I can express concern by ‘leaping ahead’ of others, not to take over their proper cares, but to help them clarify what they have to do and how they might go about it. That is, I might engage with someone (for instance, a colleague), not in order to do her job for her, but rather to explore with her its possibilities, so that she can genuinely own and deal with it herself. Instead of taking over her task, and doing it myself, I help her work out what needs to be done, and how best she might do it. I do not do it for her, nor do I tell her what to do; rather I assist her in discovering for herself how to do it. My focus is not on what needs to be done, so much as on enabling her to do it. ‘Leaping ahead’ is helping others to become more transparent to themselves in whatever is a matter of concern for them, and to become free for it. Of these two, only ‘leaping ahead’ fully respects the integrity of the other person. ‘Leaping in’ has the appearance of caring for the other’s welfare, and those who act in that way might believe that they are showing how much they care. Those helped in this way might even be grateful on occasion – for example, if they were pressed for time and could not see how they could manage to do everything that needed to be done in the time available. Nevertheless, because ‘leaping in’ focuses upon the tasks to be done, rather than upon enabling the other person to do those tasks themselves, it displays, in fact, a lack of openness. By taking over the other’s possibilities for being, acts of ‘leaping in’ close off and thereby diminish the other. That is no way to be true to the other. These three aspects of openness – to respond appropriately in novel situations, to discern others as they are, and to assist them in ways which respect their integrity – require a double insight required in acting faithfully: insight both into oneself and into the other. Being true, in this sense, is a social virtue. I noted above that this insight into how someone has become, and is becoming, requires the kind of knowledge I am calling ‘interactive’. The factual knowledge we have acquired about others no doubt plays an important role in our ability to discern which actions would be the most appropriate. But factual knowledge, no matter how extensive, does not amount to interactive knowledge. I can know a great deal about someone I have never met, in the sense of knowing many facts, but I have no direct relationship with such a person. By contrast, interactive knowledge arises from direct, one-toone interactions. The degree of its depth is a function of the extent to which others have revealed themselves, either deliberately or unwittingly, and of

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how insightful I am. People can share quite a lot of their lives, even live together, but one might still keep aspects of him- or herself hidden from the other. Furthermore, we are never completely transparent to ourselves. Our own self-knowledge can be quite variable, and it can happen that a major crisis reveals aspects of ourselves of which we were previously unaware, as we work out how to respond. So truth, in the sense of faithfulness, depends both upon the degrees to which we interactively know ourselves and the degrees to which we interactively know others. Complete knowledge of either end of a relationship is neither necessary nor possible, and the occasional error of judgement need not be seriously damaging. But a reasonable degree of such knowledge is required, because otherwise it would be quite unclear whether someone’s conduct towards another is faithful, that is, whether those actions are indeed autonomous, whether they consistently express commitment to the other, and whether they respect the integrity of both. When, in a relationship, these three aspects of openness are satisfied, one person can find the other trustworthy and dependable. We can go about the business of our lives, in the confidence that we can rely on the other, that the other will be there for us, as the occasion requires. Just which actions are fitting will vary from person to person, and from situation to situation. But by consistently showing one’s care for the welfare of others in ways that respect their own autonomy and integrity, being true has to do with treating them as they are. The conception of truth which has become apparent through analysing the non-linguistic uses of “true” to portray human behaviour is much richer than the three senses we found to be grounded in the actions of simpler organisms. Humans are more complex than frogs! But the subtleties we have highlighted in considering human actions are refinements of the senses of “true” as successful and as reliable. That is not so surprising; we too are emergent, autonomous beings who constitute ourselves through our actions. But there is more to it than that. Becoming a person involves much more than the biological interactions occurring within our bodies. Becoming mature with a well- developed character involves the human traits exemplified in being true, which we have examined in this chapter. Since constituting ourselves is a lifelong project, our emergence as fully fledged persons is not a single event which occurs at birth, but rather is a process extending throughout our personal histories. This process of self- constitution is effected through our actions. Because human actions are goaldirected, like the simpler actions we reviewed in the previous chapter, they can go wrong. But unlike them, we are capable of regulating what we do with sensitivity to many competing norms which impinge on what it would be appropriate to do in a given situation. Consequently, we are aware of many more ways in which what we attempt to do can fail. The possibility of error is an imminent risk in all we do, and

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the limitations inherent in being human ensure that cleaving to the truth in all our actions is extraordinarily difficult. Not only can single actions be a breach of faithfulness, but also failing to act authentically and faithfully can involve persisting in error. My thesis is that it is this concept of authentic and reliable or faithful action which is invoked not only in descriptions of some person’s behaviour as true, but also in descriptions of statements as true. The latter context is where truth-ascorrectness has application. Just as whether we show ourselves to be true, in the sense of faithful, is an objectively discernible issue, so the truth of any statement, in the sense of correctness, is, in principle, objectively discernible. Therefore, understanding the latter sense as derived from the former does not open the door to treating it as subjective. How we can consistently hold to the objectivity of truth-ascorrectness while recognizing that the statements we make are inescapably imbued with temporality and relativity remains to be shown. There have been a number of philosophers who have argued that truth is a richer conception than is provided by such truisms as “it is true that p if and only if p” and the like, but their proposals have failed to win general acceptance. That, I submit, is because they have restricted themselves to the linguistic conception of truth. The thesis of this book is that a richer conception of truth is indeed required, but satisfying that requirement calls for a more radical response, one which looks beyond any account of the correctness of statements. What has been missing is any exploration of the original meaning of the word “true” as reliable and faithful, which takes the issue into the domain of actions. In this chapter, I have begun to rectify that deficiency. Showing how the ascription of truth to statements draws its sense from the considerations we have canvassed above will occupy us for the rest of this book.

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6 The Genesis of Representations

It is never easy to liberate thinking from the mind- closing assumptions of prevailing orthodoxies. Yet thinking expands when radical alternatives are explored. That is why it is salutary to be reminded that the linguistic conception of truth is relatively recent, and to explore other significant uses of “true” which that conception fails to acknowledge. Our examination of these non-linguistic uses of “true” revealed that it has a substantial sense – being faithful, reliable – located within the category of action. Independently of that, we have now seen that action plays a central role in the life of biological organisms, and that it makes sense to attribute truth to their actions. These results suggest that the sense of beingtrue which is manifest in actions might provide just what is needed to give a more satisfying account of the correctness of statements. If that is right, a major thesis would follow: the primary locus of truth is not in the linguistic domain; its proper use there is derivative, borrowing its sense and force from its use in the category of action. Countless human actions involve an immediate engagement with items in one’s environment. I kiss my wife, I put on my shoes, I walk in the rain, I grasp a hammer, I dig the ground, I drive a car, etc. But one of the evolutionary achievements of humans is being able to relate to reality in less direct ways. Typically, we speak about processes, situations, things, and other people. When we do, our engagement with them is mediated by language. It is as if we take a step back from the immediate interaction with them which practical action requires, and talk about them. The very notion of talking about something implies a certain distance between our talk and what it is ‘about’. Indeed, from its earliest usages to the current vernacular the English word “about” carries the nuance of being around: from ‘the moat about’ (= around the outside of) a castle to ‘hanging about’ (= lingering in the vicinity of) some place. From that sense, the word came to mean a non-spatial relation, as in: to speak, think, ask, dream, hear, know about; to be sorry, pleased, perplexed about; to give orders, instructions, information about; to form plans, have doubts, feel sure about. The 125

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word “about” in these contexts indicates a gap which the speaking, thinking, etc. seeks to bridge. How talk manages to be ‘about’ something else is the source of the puzzlement which the philosophy of language tries to dispel. It is usually said that, in some sense, the words used in speech and writing function as representatives for the things themselves. But in what sense? Representations are often taken to stand in for what they are about. Alternatively, sometimes it is said that a representation re-presents what it is about. So how are we to understand the phenomenon of representation? That has to be clarified before we can go on to elucidate the ascription of truth to statements. The question of how representations represent arises not only with respect to language. Since the seventeenth century, a whole literature has been devoted to the topic of mental representations. So, let us begin this chapter by considering one of the main themes in that literature, and then, in keeping with our approach to action, reflect on the emergence of the phenomenon of representing in relatively primitive creatures. These issues will occupy the rest of this chapter, and in the next I will begin to address the question of how representation works in humans’ use of language.

6.1 Representation as correspondence Nowadays, the dominant models of representations treat them as items of some sort, established by past experience, which somehow correspond to what they represent. The usual assumption is that representations encode what caused them, and they function as representations by virtue of this correspondence with their causal origins. The passive reception of information is, of course, the classic picture of perception, which has entrapped the imaginations of philosophers for centuries. According to that picture, the external world impinges upon sentient creatures, like a stylus marking a clay or wax tablet (the dominant metaphor, from Plato and Aristotle to Locke’s tabula rasa), and makes ‘impressions’ upon it. This crude metaphor has become fossilized in our very language! Theories along these lines have gained a new ascendancy in developmental psychology as well, with computer and information processing (including connectionist) models becoming increasingly popular. In these theories, meaning is ultimately ‘cashed out’ in terms of perception, and perception is reduced ultimately to sensory impressions. The usual story is that an object in the world is detected by the bodily sense- organs and the stimulation received is then transmitted via the central nervous system to the brain, where it is encoded, thereby producing a representation which corresponds to that object. This story is attractive because, being strictly causal, it sounds suitably scientific. But that claim is counterfeit. To assume that scientific explanation has to involve mechanical causation is to operate with an

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inadequate model rooted in the seventeenth century, when the endeavour to model all physical interaction on the colliding of corpuscles was in vogue.1 A few philosophers, attempting to avoid such alleged correspondences, have instead developed theories emphasizing the conceptual role of representations. They propose to analyse representativeness in terms of the role played by a given concept in inferential and other conceptual/cognitive processes: roughly, a concept is about whatever it is used to make warranted inferences with respect to. By itself, this proposal is not very helpful, since it does not explain how such inferential webs connect with anything external to them. So, unsurprisingly, some theorists try to combine these two approaches. How effective are correspondence theories of representation? Even in the case of visual perception, they are in trouble. For a start, they are unable to explain well-attested perceptual phenomena, such as the Muller-Lyer optical illusion (where two equal lines, each with arrowheads, one pointing inwards and the other outwards, are perceived as unequal). As Maurice Merleau-Ponty has pointed out (1962, 5–6), such examples show that our perceptual experience cannot be reduced to bodily stimulation, nor is it fully determinate. Moreover, causal models cannot explain how perceptual experience is structured in terms of figure-and-ground. If experience were simply a causal effect of stimulation, there would be no explanation of the fact that a perceiver selects some figure to focus upon, with the rest of the visual field as background. To cite a familiar example, the same drawing might be seen either as the profiles of two faces in silhouette looking at each other, or as a white vase against a black background. Which way the pattern is seen depends on what is perceived as figure, and what as ground. While these examples are obviously contrived, the perceptual processes upon which they draw are operative in all cases of perception. Yet the causal story, because it portrays perception as passive, contains nothing which could explain these phenomena. Even more seriously, correspondence theories are unable to explain the detection of error. To be cogent, any account of representations must be able to explain how anyone could discover that some of their representations are false. Unless there is some way of determining whether representations are true, there would be no use for the concepts of truth and falsity. If checking the reliability of representations is not in principle possible, those concepts would at best be idle – more likely, disappear. Indeed, I will argue that on 1.

Even in the seventeenth century, it was recognized that the model of colliding corpuscles could not explain all physical phenomena. The great exception was gravity, about which Sir Isaac Newton famously commented “Non fingo hypotheses (I do not invent hypotheses)”.

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a causal- correspondence account, we would not even know whether a supposed representation is one. Furthermore, autonomous learning would not be possible, since learning from mistakes could not occur if mistakes could not be detected, and actions appropriately modified. The only possible sort of learning would be conditioned reflexes. (This would deny the possibility of autonomous learning not only to humans, but also to the many animal species which are flexible learners.) It follows that, to be worthy of serious attention, a theory of representations must contain a plausible response to this question: how could those who have some representation detect the veracity or otherwise of that representation? Any theory which lacks an answer is not even a starter. This requirement imposes a strict discipline on any theory, since it implies two constraints: (a) The theory must be able to accommodate the possibility that some given representation is not true. That is, if R is a representation which is supposed to represent X, any account must provide for the possibility that R is indeed a representation of X, but in reality X is not as it is represented as being. (b) The theory must provide for the possibility that whatever or whoever has representations can check the reliability of those representations against what they are supposed to be about. These two constraints prove very powerful. For example, Berkeley could demolish Locke’s theory of ideas because it debarred us from detecting representational errors. To check whether some idea reliably represented some object, we would have to compare that object with the idea. But to make that comparison, we would have to perceive the object directly, and according to Locke’s theory, we only perceive objects by having ideas of them. So, all we could do is to compare one idea with another idea. In that way, correspondence theories collapse into coherence theories. Because checking has been rendered impossible, his theory violates the second constraint. Most latterday theories, structurally similar to Locke’s, try to get around this difficulty by positing elementary correspondences. For example, sensedata were supposed to be incorrigible. Representational error was then explained in terms of mistakes in the mental processing of the primary data. But if the primary data are supposed to be representational, that violates the first constraint. This model of perception also falls foul of the ‘homunculus’ problem. Correspondence accounts of visual perception typically take the retina as a kind of screen on which the image falls. Positing the eye as like a camera at the end of a nerve cable which transmits the image to the brain requires

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a little man, a homunculus, who can look at the physiological image and process it. But as the psychologist James Gibson (1979, 60) points out, The little man would have to have an eye to see it with, of course, a little eye with a little retinal image connected to a little brain, and so we have explained nothing by this theory. We are in fact worse off than before, since we are confronted with the paradox of an infinite series of little men, each within the other and each looking at the brain of the next bigger man. What legitimizes these two constraints is that a representation must be of something. Otherwise, it is not a representation. How that “of” is to be understood is precisely the question. Immediately, however, we strike an ambiguity – an ambiguity which disguises the problem. We sometimes say that a representation is ‘of’ something in the sense that it portrays a certain sort of object, as a painting might depict some house – which might be a real house, or an imaginary one. That is, saying what a representation is ‘of’ is how we characterize the representation. On the other hand, we sometimes say that a representation is ‘of’ something existing in the world. That is, it is ‘of’ something real – for example, my actual house. This second usage is clearest in the case of photographs. We say a photograph is ‘of’ something or someone: for example, Parliament House, or the Prime Minister. In these cases, what the representation is ‘of’ exists. (Now that it has become so easy to manipulate images digitally, it cannot be so readily assumed that what a photograph is ‘of’ is a real scene or person!) To avoid this ambiguity, I will hereafter impose some linguistic regimentation. I will say that a representation is ‘of’ some object when characterizing the representation that way does not imply either that that object is real, or that it is not. Whether it is real is another question. On the other hand, to say that a representation is ‘about’ some object it is to characterize that representation in terms of what in external reality it purports to represent. Now, it is not enough that there be some sort of correlation – causal, informational, isomorphic, or whatever – between one kind of item and another for the first to represent the second. Lightning is correlated with thunder, but does not represent it! Of course, if we discover a constant correlation between items of two types, we would be right to take the occurrence of one as a sign of the other. Discoveries like this presuppose that we have independent access to items of both sorts, and can observe their correlation. We can then use an occurrence of an instance of the first as a sign of what is typically correlated with it; in this scenario, our use comes into play as a third factor. But, in itself, a bare correlation is not representational at all. It makes no difference if one item in a correlation is mental. That the item at one end of a correlation is mental is not sufficient to constitute it as

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representing an item at the other end. Again, what is missing is some ‘third factor’ in virtue of which the mental item is a representation of something which it is about. Whatever the story about the occurrence of some representation, its being a ‘representation’ involves its being of something which it allegedly is about. So, if my interaction with my environment is supposed to be mediated by representations, I have to be able to take account of the fact that they are of something, and (in veridical cases) about what they represent. In the following, I will follow common usage and say that what a representation represents, what it is ‘of’, is its content. A representation has some specific content whether or not that content identifies anything in the world. There has been no shortage of attempts by philosophers committed to correspondence theories of representation to explain the possibility of error. The problem has, however, proved intractable. That is so whether the correspondences invoked to explain error are asymmetric dependencies, or learning histories, or evolutionary histories – all of which have had their champions. In every case, the assessment of these conditions could be carried out only by a well-informed external observer – not by the agents themselves. Theories along these lines can sound plausible and suitably ‘scientific’, but only because of their implicit assumption of an Olympian standpoint, as they read in the kind of knowledge independently available only to external observers. In principle, ideal observers would have access both to a representation and to what it is about, and so could describe the correlation between the two. But that standpoint is not available to us humans with respect to our own representations. That is why taking truth as involving some kind of ‘agreement’ between representations and reality is fraught with the problems noted in Chapter 3. Whether any such ‘agreement’ obtains or not has to be detectable, at least in principle, by those who have those representations. We humans can generally check our representations by observation, but only from some ‘vital’ standpoint, from within our situation in life. Let us examine a simple model which initially looks appealing: the petrol gauge in my car gives me information about the level of petrol in its tank. When it is working properly, the needle on the gauge swings down as the amount of petrol in the tank reduces. This is uncomplicated causally based co-variance, and one can reasonably say that readings on the gauge represent the level of petrol in the tank. But now, suppose my car’s petrol gauge begins to malfunction: the needle becomes stuck halfway down. We might be tempted to say that the gauge is now representing badly; its indications are false. But saying that would be wrong. What has actually happened is that the gauge, which has been designed to represent the petrol level, is no longer representing at all. So long as the position of the needle corresponds to the petrol level, the representation exists. But now that the factual correspondence no longer obtains, the relation of representing has ceased to exist. The gauge represents the petrol level only when it is working accurately. Thus, it fails to satisfy our first constraint.

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This fatal flaw is endemic to all models of representation which rely on causal correspondences. The way those models work, it makes sense to talk of representation only so long as the causal correspondences obtain. When the correspondences fail, their representational function simply ceases. What is required, and what has been notably missing from the standard theories of representation on offer, is some explication of how we are able to make sense of representations, both when they do identify something in the environment, and when they do not. Any model of representation which cannot admit the possibility of misrepresentation must therefore be rejected. If simple devices like petrol gauges cannot serve as plausible models of representation, how is it that intelligent philosophers could be seduced into taking them as representations? The answer is that my car’s gauge (generally) works as a reliable representational sign for me. But the gauge itself knows nothing about such correspondences with petrol levels; it does not know that there are such correspondences, nor what they are with. It represents nothing to itself. Of course, when I am driving my car, I keep an eye on the petrol gauge in order to monitor the petrol level. But I am not part of the tank-gauge system; I am its external observer and interpreter. Should I suspect that the gauge is malfunctioning, I have a way of directly accessing the petrol level, independently of the gauge, and can discover whether the gauge is continuing to be a reliable sign, or has ceased to be so. Of course, the car’s manufacturer has built in a petrol gauge precisely so that the position of the needle does represent to its driver the petrol levels in its tank. But that representational relation is one constructed by the manufacturer using the simple co-variance, and drivers are right to interpret it as such. But we are now talking about different systems, not the mechanical system of the car, including its gauges, but the processes of car-making and car- driving. In these latter systems, we already have fully fledged intentional agents – the car’s designers, manufacturers, and drivers – as constituents of complex social systems. The covariance relation does not in itself constitute representational content. We do that to it. We are ‘third factors’ in this situation. The relation of the gauge to the petrol tank cannot serve as a model for the relation of my representations to my environment. I cannot get outside myself to check whether my representations still correspond with their relevant causes. Lest this example appear too simple-minded, it is worth pointing out that representation-ascorrespondence accounts fare no better when they are made to sound more sophisticated. One superficially appealing proposal borrows from electrical engineering the metaphor of ‘transduction’, briefly mentioned in §2.5. The basic idea is that system transducers – such as sensory receptors – receive energy from the environment in ways which correspond causally to relevant items in that environment. They then ‘transduce’ that energy into internal registrations, which thereby ‘encode’ the ‘information’ thus conveyed concerning those items in the environment. At the

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lowest level of transduction, these fresh encodings might be of relatively limited and proximal events, such as light stimulations of a retina. However, the claim is that these then serve, after appropriate processing, as the foundation for the generation of higher level and more important derivative encodings, such as of surfaces and edges, and (higher still) of tables and chairs. Experimental evidence can be cited in support of this notion: neurological investigations indicate that energy transformations like these do occur in the neural line (the axon). Similarly, transduction encodings can be constructed in designed systems which need, for example, internal registrations of temperature, pressure, velocity, direction, time, etc. These causal input and output relationships are then taken to match exactly epistemic input and output relationships. The claim is that this match of causal with epistemic relationships is what constitutes representation. This sounds like a suitably sophisticated story. Technically, however, transduction is a transformation of forms of energy, and has no epistemic meaning at all (Bickhard and Terveen 1995, 31ff.). There is nothing in the model which could possibly inform the system itself that the encodings it registers are about any external item. Indeed, that is experimentally demonstrable. Persons whose brain has been exposed (by removing the top of the skull) will report experiences when electrical stimulation is applied directly to parts of the brain. Significantly, patients typically use representational language when reporting these experiences. Such experiments have often been taken to show that conscious experience is ‘just’ a matter of neural activity. In fact, they show precisely the opposite. For what they show is that the representational character of (most of) our experiences – their genuinely being ‘about’ something in the world – is not simply a function of the neural stimulation which causes those experiences, since those experiences can be caused without being about anything external to the brain. Purely causal stories, whether told in crude Lockean language or in sophisticated language of transduction, can at best only explain causal correspondences. But while transduction may produce correspondences, it does not produce any knowledge on the part of the agent of any such correspondences, nor of what those correspondences are with. The claim that such correspondences are constitutive of representation is a piece of unjustified dogma. The conclusion is stark: anything which relies on correspondence to represent something external to itself needs an interpreter external to that correspondence, for whom it can serve as a representation.

6.2 The interactive model of representation Clearly, we need a different account which will accommodate the detection of errors. (This does not restrict the investigation to human behaviour; even frogs can detect when they have acted erroneously.) If correspondence

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resulting from causal encoding will not do, is there another account of representation which fares any better? The basic problem with all simple correspondence accounts of representation, whether they be causal or invoke some other kind of co-variance, is that they admit only two factors: the representation and what it represents. The relation between the two is taken to be an external one. That is why such representations work only when they represent reliably. When that relation does not obtain, what was supposed to be a representation simply fails to represent. This consequence follows from the logic of any two-factor account. Whenever the external correlate is absent, there can be no representation at all: no false sentences; no erroneous ideas; no misrepresentations of any sort. But we need the notion of a misrepresentation, since errors in representing do occur. Only some representations are true; we need some way of allowing for the occurrence of those which are not. And there has to be some commonality between reliable and unreliable representations; otherwise, there would be nothing in virtue of which both sorts are nevertheless representations. No two-factor account can deliver that. Our two constraints imply that more than two factors are required. Any plausible account must include, in addition to the representation itself, the above distinction between what the representation is of and what it is about. Only if what representations are ‘of’ – their content – is clearly and explicitly distinguished from the external phenomena which some of them are ‘about’ can detecting erroneous representations make sense. It follows that what is needed is a three-factor account (Bickhard in preparation), consisting of: (a) the occurrence of something which serves as a representation; (b) its content: what it signifies, that is, what it is a representation of, and (c) the relevant external phenomena, which it purports to be about. Once these three factors are distinguished, the ability to check the reliability of representations can then be explained by the interactive model of representing advocated here – although not by other models. Detecting whether an error has been made turns on whether there is something in, or reachable from, the agent’s environment which the content identifies. In standard cases, there is an internal relation between the representation and its content, and an external relation between that content and the environment. (The qualification “in standard cases” is needed in order to accommodate the use of representations in cases which do not presuppose that what is represented is about anything currently accessible. For example, representations are invoked in the counterfactual, speculative, and fictional thinking of humans even though there is nothing in, or reachable from, the current environment.) Despite having fallen out of philosophical favour, internal relations, in the sense explained in §3.4, are precisely what

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are needed here. Just as the identity of an arc of a circle is a function of a geometric relation to its centre, and the identity of an action is a function of its telos, so the identity of a given representation is a function of what it is of, that is, its content. Often there is no way of identifying a representation other than by referring to its content. In those cases where an independently existing thing – for example, something on a car’s instrument panel – serves as a representation for someone, even when it malfunctions, it can only serve as such – as a petrol gauge – because that interpretation posits an internal relation between its readings and what they signify, what they are ‘of’. It is because the relation between representations and their content is internal that it makes sense to treat them as genuine representations, irrespective of their truth or falsity. On the other hand, the question of truth turns on the external relation between that content and a relevant external phenomenon. In keeping with our graduated approach to analysing action, it will be instructive to consider how a simple form of representing emerges in relatively primitive organisms, before considering the more complex character of human representations. Already in §4.5 we took note of the emergence of living things whose actions satisfy the criterion that they be liable to err. It is evident that, while a bacterium or a frog can be in error, and a frog can detect when it has erred, there is no basis for ascribing representational content about sugar or bugs to these organisms respectively. Research has shown that frogs cannot know anything about bugs. A frog’s brain is not complex enough to identify that what is flying nearby is a bug (Lettvin et al. 1965). Frogs seem not to see stationary parts of the world around them. They have four kinds of retinal detectors connected to four distinct sheets in their brains. This equipment allows them to detect visually local sharp edges and contrast, the curvature of the edge of a dark object, the movement of edges, and the local dimmings produced by movement or rapid general darkening. These detecting operations are ideally suited for being triggered by buzzing flies and other insects, and by the arrival of predators, but they respond equally to the movement of any other small curved object (such a pebble thrown nearby). Their visual capacity is manifestly insufficient to justify attributing to a frog any knowledge of bugs. That does not mean, however, that frogs’ representations do not relate to anything in the world. Quite the contrary! They do have representational content, but of a quite different kind. It is time to elaborate how this different kind of representational content emerges, how organisms can detect whether their representations are reliable, and how their doing so relates them to the world beyond. To recap, in order to survive, an organism must have ways of modulating – switching amongst, or otherwise regulating – its internal processes in order to direct its actions towards relevant goals, such as ingesting food and potable water. In order to do that, it must also have some way of differentiating

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those environments in which it is appropriate for it to engage in one sort of process, from those in which it is more appropriate to engage in some other. A bacterium living in some liquid containing a source of sugar, for instance, has to be able to differentiate ‘up a sugar gradient’ from ‘down a sugar gradient’. In conditions of ‘getting better’ (up a food gradient), keep swimming! In conditions of ‘getting worse’ (down a food gradient, or up a noxious gradient), randomize direction, that is, tumble! (Bickhard 2000). That is all the representing which is going on – no ‘pictures’ of the environment, no encodings of inputs, no content referring to the sugar levels in that environment. Nor does this interactive model require a bacterium to infer the appropriate action to undertake – a remarkable ability for a bacterium! More generally, organisms need to elicit (or minimally, receive) information from their environments, on the basis of which to select amongst, and control, their interior processes. As noted in §4.2, these differentiating and regulating processes require some sort of stable infrastructure, with a longer time scale than the processes of differentiation and regulating themselves require. Two aspects of the operations of this infrastructure are significant. In part, such systems exhibit an energy- directing aspect, in activating, regulating, or controlling the processes by which the system can adjust its behaviour. But they also exhibit informational aspects, in the sense noted in §4.10. For this infrastructure enables an autonomous organism to detect and differentiate between those environments in which it might engage in one process vis-à-vis those in which it might engage in some other. Mostly, this detecting and differentiating is an interactive process. Such differentiation can also occur, however, if the interaction with the environment is largely passive – if the system simply processes the inputs it receives without making any outputs in order to elicit them. This passive reception of data is a less powerful way of achieving the same end. But the beauty of this dynamic model is that it can easily embed such passively received differentiations within an explanatory framework which is fundamentally interactive. The basic question is not whether representations are received passively, as the effects of external causes impinging on sensitive receptors in an organism, or interactively, important though that issue is. The critical difference turns on the temporal reference embedded in the two approaches to explicating how representational content is generated. What a frog registers is an indication of a tongue-flicking-andeating opportunity. That is the functional predication implicit in its internal activity. What the frog has detected is an indication of what to do. Its future- orientated indications are what constitute its representations. It is important to notice that this relates to the future – not to the past, as the orthodox accounts of representation-ascorrespondence would have it. That functional indications of potential actions are oriented to the future is also evident in more complex cases of goaldirected behaviour, such as

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a mammal’s food-seeking. What we call hunger-signals differentiate blood sugar levels, and their detection by an organism indicates to it that foodseeking activity is now appropriate. But there is no need to posit representations of the food sought, nor representations of blood sugar levels. Rather, hunger-signals need only be understood as internal set points which modify a complex flow of processes and actions in ways which de facto achieve an appropriate outcome: eating. Even when such set points do correspond to something, they need not represent it. According to this interactive model, perception is not simply a matter of being on the receiving end of a causal chain of sensory inputs, sensations. Rather, perception provides information relevant to functional potentialities, potential usefulnesses (Bickhard and Ritchie 1983, 16 and 85). That infuses perception with an orientation towards the future. Perceiving even the physical properties of objects, such as their surfaces and edges, is subsidiary to perceiving what they functionally afford. As James Gibson argued (1979, 140), The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has yet been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a valuerich ecological object. A frog’s perception of a small dark speck moving in the air nearby is laden with functional significance, related to its need to locate and ingest food. Most times, perceiving that speck affords it an opportunity to eat. Humans too generally perceive things in terms of how they relate to their needs and interests; I will say more about that in §8.1. The great power of the interactive model comes from its providing for these internal states to be set by interactive processes, not just by passive one-directional processes (Bickhard and Ritchie 1983). In relatively primitive organisms, what are representational are those internal states, and what they represent are potential actions they might undertake. As we recognized in §4.6.1, actions have two internally related aspects: some bodily movement towards some goal, and a future situation towards which that bodily movement is projected. The former engages the energy-directing aspect of an organism’s representational infrastructure; the other constitutes its informational aspect, noted above. Both are encompassed in the functional indications of potential actions which form the content of such an organism’s representations. There is nothing in this which requires anyone to postulate that bacteria know anything about nutritious food. They just swim and tumble.

6.3 The term “representation” A few philosophers have been aware that something is deeply wrong with the orthodox account of representation as correspondences established in

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the past. Some American pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty, and German phenomenologists, such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, have mounted frontal attacks upon the very use of the term “representation”. In their view, it inextricably connotes correspondence, and should therefore be eschewed. Whether the term “representation” should still be used in the description of the patently different processes which the interactive concept provides is moot. Indeed, the question poses a choice. One option is to understand the interactive model as providing a non-representational account of what is going on, in place of all the false accounts – false because they characterize representing simply as information processing. Alternatively, we might understand the interactive model as providing an explanation of representational functioning radically different from the unsatisfactory correspondence theories. Which option to adopt is a question of intellectual strategy. There is a strong case for taking the first option. That is, we might well regard the word “representation” as so infused with the false metaphysics of the correspondence story that it is beyond redemption.2 On the other hand, the latter option takes the term “representation” as not necessarily implying a correspondence account. There are also good reasons for making the latter choice. The verb “represent” has plenty of intelligible and important uses outside the bad philosophical theories which have deployed it, and so the cognate noun is unlikely to die out of the English language. Furthermore, in the absence of a sounder theory of how representational content is generated, philosophers are likely to keep on promulgating ever more refined variants of the old story. So, on balance, probably the wiser course is to take the second option, to interpret the interactive perspective as offering a radically different understanding of how representational content emerges, and of what representations are. According to the interactive model, a biological system’s detectors, and their internal states which register significant differences in their environment,

2.

That is the option vigorously advocated by Richard Rorty in a series of books from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980) onwards. Rejecting all talk of representation as bad metaphysics, he takes it to require abandoning the philosophers’ quest for truth, in favour of the pragmatists’ virtues of expediency and utility. Nevertheless, for all that Rorty portrays his anti-representationalism as the logical development of pragmatism, he fails to accord sufficient significance to action. By arguing that meaning is grounded in the procedures for justifying beliefs solely in terms of their coherence, by taking over from Wilfred Sellars the view that all awareness is linguistic awareness, and by taking over from Donald Davidson the view that knowing our way around the world is a matter of arriving at passing theories which work, Rorty remains entangled in the discursive priorities of theoreticism. His philosophy is not pragmatic enough!

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are critically important emergent capacities, but they do not represent anything. They differentiate environments in an open- ended way, but they do not, of themselves, represent anything about those environments. Nor do they constitute, or convey, any sort of content corresponding to what has been detected. The organism’s detectors can exist without being used at all, but when they are, they are used to set up indications of potential interactions with that environment which this organism might undertake – not quasi-pictures, impressions, representations, or encodings which somehow ‘mirror’ it. Those potential actions are their ‘representational content’. The informational aspect of these indications is simply that the current environment is apt for these potential interactions. At bottom, in the foundational cases, what representations represent is what to do. And since we have found good reason to ascribe actions to non-human organisms, as well as to ourselves, this way of understanding what representations represent is not restricted to human behaviour. Let me illustrate what is at stake here anthropomorphically – and therefore, of course, in certain respects falsely. According to the correspondence theorist, when the frog’s visual scan differentiates a bug, it says to itself “That is a bug”. Next, the frog is supposed to infer that it would be appropriate to flick its tongue at it, and then does so. These are amazing cognitive abilities to attribute to frogs! In contrast, according to the interactive concept, the frog does not say anything about bugs, because it does not know anything about bugs. It merely says “Here is a chance to eat!”, and flicks its tongue. As a result of the frog’s visual scan, the representational content which it has internally registered is an indication of a tongue-flicking-andeating opportunity which it can realize by performing such an action. That indication, of course, is generated by its (past) detection of that dark speck moving across its visual field, such as could have been caused by a flying insect. But what that indication indicates does not refer to the past, as the causal story backing the orthodox representation-ascorrespondence doctrine would have it, but to the future.

6.4 Detecting misrepresentations This interactive model of representation not only explains how representations come to be constituted, and thus what they are, but also how an autonomous organism can relate itself to what it represents. The internal states triggered by its detectors indicate potential actions which, because they are goaldirected, necessarily anticipate some future situation, the implicit telos of the indicated action. There is therefore no difficulty in principle for an organism to relate itself to that representation: it can simply do what was indicated to be done. If performed, that action will either be successful or fail (either because of inappropriate or poor performance, or because of the intervention of

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unanticipated external factors). If what the organism does is successful, the potential action which was indicated achieves its telos. In the case of our frog, the representation is an indication to flick its tongue and eat. If it does so act, and succeeds in eating a bug, that representation has proven to be reliable, and in that sense true. On the other hand, if the action is unsuccessful, the frog is in a position to detect that it has failed. It will continue to be hungry, and will be aware that it is. Since any action is identified by its telos, towards which it is directed, indications of potential actions refer to some possible future situation. The frog has detected and differentiated an environment which offers it a chance to eat. So, when a frog performs the action indicated, and does eat a bug, the information it has elicited has turned out to be correct (although the frog cannot articulate that). That is, when the potential action is successfully enacted, the future situation which was anticipated by the representational content is identical with the external aspect or property of the world which the representation purported to represent. There is then no ‘gap’ between what was anticipated in its representation and what was enacted. Actions thus relate their agents to external realities, the situations they can bring about. By appropriately flicking its tongue, the frog relates itself to whatever triggered the internal processes which initiated its doing so. It will soon discover whether its action was appropriate in the circumstances. Not only that, but thereby it also discovers something about the world. While the frog knows nothing about bugs, it has found out whether the future situation encompassed in its action was what the indicated potential action anticipated it would be. That is, it has found out whether its situation did afford an eating opportunity. Provided the frog has executed its tongue-flicking effectively, its ingesting food confirms that there was a bug nearby. As we saw in §4.10, the functional indications registered inside the frog will turn out to be reliable or unreliable, according to whether the indicated tongue-flicking-andeating opportunities were in fact so, and the dynamic presuppositions of its actions will be correct or false. The fact that even a frog can discover, through its actions, something about the world will be important once we come to investigate how humans relate themselves to external realities through their acts of assertion. The interactive concept of representation satisfies the two constraints noted in §6.1. It expressly accommodates the possibility that its representations are not true. And since both the content of a representation, and what that representation is about, are accessible to the system itself, it is able to check the reliability of its representations. Therefore, it provides an explanation of how error, and therefore normativity, emerges in a way which is in principle detectable by the agent itself. Still, we need to meet a possible objection. Is the failure of an indicated action enough to solve the problems we have been emphasizing about error-

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detection? Surely, it might be said, checking the reliability of a representation requires the agent to stand somehow ‘outside’ it, in order to compare it with reality. How else could it check some content against what it purports to be about? This objection shows how hard it is to abandon old and misleading models. When an organism performs the potential action indicated, externalization of a sort does occur: the motor sections of the brain activate the movements indicated. Performing an action, whether successfully or not, changes the world somewhat. But there is no ‘standing outside’ the representation thus enacted; the agent is fully engaged in the action it performs. And once the agent has finished enacting the relevant movements, the situation produced will have fulfilled the telos of that action, or it will not. In either case, the action will have related the agent to its external reality. The thought that there has to be some independent standpoint, from which to compare the content of a representation with external states of affairs, is a hangover from the ideal- observer model. The ability to check the reliability of a representation requires only that the organism be able to perform the potential action which was indicated, and be able to determine whether that action was successful. No other ‘comparing’ is required. A sceptic might not be wholly persuaded. What exactly is this ‘content’, which might or might not be reliable? How could there be an internal relation between some representation and its content, yet that content never exist? Put like that, this talk of content might well seem puzzling. But recall again that, on the interactive account of representation, fundamentally its content is a potential action. Since each indication of a potential action refers to a possible future situation, when an action fails because the environment was not in fact appropriate for that action – the indication was unreliable – the informational aspect of that action has been proven false. In terms of the three factors of the interactive model, what has failed is the representation’s external relation to some property or aspect of the environment, which it purported to be about. But the internal relation between the action and its telos still remains, even though this action failed to attain its objective. Is it so puzzling that some action is performed, yet that action fails to fulfil its telos? A child can be building a sandcastle, but the castle is not built; I am writing a book, but the book might never be finished. A potential action might be indicated, but the future situation it anticipates might not be fulfilled. Anyone who finds that puzzling will find puzzling the very concept of unsuccessful action, any talk of unrealized possibilities, any suggestion of alternative futures. Contrariwise, anyone who can happily contemplate possible worlds can understand alternative futures in which actions are successful, and tasks satisfactorily completed. A sceptic might press the question further. How is the appropriate content to be identified? Since misrepresentation is possible, how does the right object of the internal relation come to be picked out? This puzzle arises,

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however, from prevailing assumptions, which I am explicitly opposing here, being read into the interactive account. The confusion thus generated can be illustrated by considering again our frog on its lily-pad. Although, as we have noted, the visual capacity of frogs is very limited, it might seem harmless enough to suggest that they have bug- detectors. The sceptic could concede that our frog’s detectors can misrepresent, as when it identifies a pebble as a bug. But now, suppose that swallowing an occasional small pebble is not necessarily fatal to frogs. Why not say that what the frog has is a bug-andpebble detector? In that case, why is the detector not doing the right thing when the frog tries to swallow the pebble? Here again, it is important to emphasize that, on the interactive model, neither a biological system’s detectors, nor those of its internal states which register significant differences in its environment, represent anything currently in the world. So it is quite misleading to say that the frog’s detectors are misrepresenting when it identifies a pebble as a bug. That way of describing the situation is seriously misleading because frogs cannot identify pebbles, or bugs, as such. Their neural capacity is much too limited to enable them to do any such thing. One strength of the interactive model is that it does not attribute to frogs capacities to identify external objects; the evidence is against their possessing any such capacities. Given what we know about the visual and neural capacity of frogs, to go further and attribute to them a capacity to detect bugs (or even food) is quite unjustified. In fact, to say that the frog has a bug- detector, or a bug-and-pebble detector – or even a food- detector – betrays a way of thinking about representation incompatible with the position being advanced here. What it has, if we must speak this way, is an ‘eating- opportunity- detector’. When it stimulates the frog to swallow pebbles, whether doing so proves fatal or not, it has not performed its proper function. Eating pebbles yields no nourishment. I have been working through how the interactive model deals with representations in a relatively simple case, where the agent’s goal-seeking serves its self-maintenance. In the case of those more complex organisms whose goals are not always functionally related to their self-maintenance, the same interactive model applies. That model of representation requires only that an agent be stimulated to perform some potential action, which anticipates some future situation as its telos, and can find out whether that action was appropriate by trying to perform it. Just as in the case of frogs seeking food, the reliability of the content of the representations involved in their goalseeking turns on the success or otherwise of those actions. Non-human organisms are not so alien that their goals are utterly opaque, so it is still usually possible for observers to discern what goal an organism is pursuing. Only in the case of humans does this pattern become particularly complex. But then, since humans use language, they can be interrogated, and in case of doubt, the content of their representations can be clarified. In all

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cases, the possibility of misrepresentation is ever-present, and beyond the most primitive organisms, actual occurrences of error can be detected by the agent itself.

6.5 The biosemantic model The difficulties ensnaring any causal model of representation are so intractable that in recent years some philosophers have sought a quite different approach. Proponents of the interactive model have not been the only ones to turn to biology in search of a more adequate account. One of the more promising investigations along these lines has been Ruth Millikan’s invoking of biological functions in order to work out a naturalistic account of representations. In particular, the fact that bodily organs have a ‘proper function’, but nevertheless can fail to serve that function, suggests a way of explaining how representations – in particular, linguistic items – acquire ‘proper uses’ which nevertheless admit improper uses. This analogy takes seriously the need to explain how error is possible, and thus professes to explain how representations are normative. On Millikan’s ‘biosemantic’ account, as she calls it,3 a representation represents falsely if its established mapping functions fail to identify currently a relevant representational target. Turning to biological functioning in order to explain representing – an approach this biosemantic account shares with the interactive model – is a significant advance. Its appeal to the conditions for the proper performance of a biological system allows for the possibility that the relevant function might be ‘proper’ even if it is performed only rarely, and for the possibility of the system’s becoming dysfunctional. So it looks as though the biosemantic approach might be able to solve the problem of misrepresentation. Unfortunately, Millikan’s way of developing this vital clue fails to fulfil its promise. The problems stem from how the biosemantic model continues to characterize representational content in terms of a representation’s corresponding to items in the world. Admittedly, this is no longer the crude correspondence posited by causal theories. Rather, representations are said to be produced by a system whose proper function is to make that representation correspond to the world in accordance with a rule. And what the rule of correspondence is – what gives definition to this function – is determined entirely by the representation’s ‘consumers’, that is, by those who interpret it (Millikan 1993, 88–89).

3.

Alternative labels in the literature for her approach are ‘etiological’ and ‘teleosemantic’. Her explanation of ‘proper function’ was discussed in §4.3 above.

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Stated so abstractly, this way of characterizing content seems plausible. This initial impression is reinforced when one contemplates cases where it seems to work well. Millikan discusses at length the instinctive behaviour of beavers, who signal danger by smartly splashing the water with their tails. Their splashing has the function of causing other beavers to take cover. A splash like this, at some time and place, means danger nearby, because only when it corresponds to danger does the instinctive response of the other beavers, who interpret it as such, serve its proper purpose. That the splash corresponds to nearby danger is a normal condition for the proper functioning of the other beavers’ instinctive reaction, selected by evolution, of diving for cover. Applying this reasoning, the proper functioning of a frog’s tongue-flicking behaviour enables it to feed on bugs flying above its pond. So, the biosemantic model would ascribe to a visual representation of a small dark moving object above the ponds the content of ‘bug here now’. (The reference to the speck as moving is crucial (Lettvin et al. 1965).) That correspondence would be the normal condition necessary for frogs’ tongueflicking behaviour to serve its proper function: enabling them to eat nourishing food. The fact that frogs do not distinguish between flying insects and small pebbles lobbed above them can be explained by this theory as their misrepresenting one of the latter as one of the former. It is a misrepresentation, on this model, because the normal condition for the proper functioning of the frog’s behavioural response, flicking its tongue – which made it adaptive and resulted in its selection – is not met. Nevertheless, this account of representational content will not do. For a start, it lets in too much. The evidence about frogs’ neural system does not support attributing to frogs any reference to bugs. Rather, the fact that frogs will also flick their tongues at thrown pebbles and similar small, dark moving objects shows that the situation is rather that frogs have no way of identifying bugs, or even food, as such. We have seen that we do not have to attribute the content ‘bug here now’, or even ‘food here now’, in order to explain this occurrence of error. True, frogs’ tongue-flicking evolved to serve the function of catching bugs to eat, but more than this is required in order to justify attributing bug-representations to frogs. The biosemantic model is excessively generous. Furthermore, according to this account, the meaning of some piece of behaviour is supposed to be fixed by the proper function which behaviour of that type evolved to serve. That is, its reference is fixed by the present relevance of past events. This insistence has a counter-intuitive consequence which Millikan herself ‘stubbornly’ [sic] embraces. She herself points out this oddity. Suppose, she says, that by some cosmic accident a collection of molecules formerly in random motion were to coalesce to form the exact physical double of some animal. That being would have no ideas, no beliefs, no intentions, no aspirations, no fears, and no hopes – because its evolutionary history would be wrong. On this model, it is not a thing’s present

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constitution, but rather its evolutionary history, which makes it have proper functions. Likewise, this being would have no liver, no heart, no eyes, no brain, etc., because all these designations are proper function categories, defined in the end by reference to evolutionary history (Millikan 1984, 93 and fn. 2, 337). So, presumably, any simulacrum of a frog, formed in this way, which also flicks its ‘quasi-tongue’ at passing bugs, would not have any representations at all! Now, this insistence that functional categories cannot be explicated simply in terms of present constitution is certainly right. But such strange consequences are symptoms that Millikan has misinterpreted her genuine insight. The trouble stems from her taking ‘serving a function’ as dependent upon the concept of ‘proper function’, which is then explained by reference to evolutionary history. The alternative approach, advocated in §4.3, is to define these concepts the other way around. ‘Having a function’ is better defined in terms of ‘serving a function’, which in turn is explicated in terms of the contribution which some component of a system (or the system itself) makes to the self-maintenance of the system’s far-fromequilibrium condition. Millikan’s model is certainly an improvement on all two-factor theories. Because it is a three-factor model, it can handle the possibility of error. But it still cannot account for detectable error because representational contents in this model are constituted in past evolutionary histories and these histories are not accessible in the present by the organism itself. Not only is that why a frog-simulacrum could not have the representation of ‘food here now’, but it is also why such a thing could not detect when it has acted in error. But not only frogs, but also other more complex organisms (including us humans) can detect when they are in error. Since detection of error occurs, any model which cannot account for it is at best incomplete, and more likely refuted. The interactive account of representational content thus proves to be the more adequate. It avoids attributing implausible content to non-human behaviour. In particular, its way of exploiting biological analogies leads to a more modest and more cogent account of representational abilities. It allows the current state or current process, operating of course in the light of evolutionary history and previous experience, to be sufficient to specify function, and thus to be causally efficacious. And it meets the constraint that creatures be able to check the veracity or falsity of their representations.

6.6

Representations in human consciousness

In relatively simple organisms, the phenomenon of representation concerns indications of potential action anticipating some future situation. That is their content. Like the ability to engage in minimal action, the ability to form such forward-looking representations emerged in quite primitive organisms.

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Once creatures had evolved with both of these related abilities, further evolutionary developments could build upon them. Just as goal-seeking behaviour became increasingly more self- directed and more generic, with a broader range of goals than basic survival, so the ability to form representations became more sophisticated. This is not the place to trace those evolutionary developments in detail. Let us simply note some of the decisive steps in this scaffolding. In bacteria, which action to perform (swim or tumble) is indicated automatically. As we noted in §4.7, frogs instinctually select between representations indicating alternative potential actions – flicking their tongues or diving into the water – if they simultaneously detect both a small dark speck and a larger dark shape moving over their pond. Those animals which are flexible learners can profit from their experience and acquire skills, adapting their behaviour to the circumstances in a more self- directed way. For example, rats can learn which of the perceptual cues they elicit are salient to potential actions they might select (e.g., turn left instead of right at the first intersection in a psychologist’s maze). Even greater flexibility is required of cheetahs. They have to select which prey to stalk and chase, taking account of the facts that they can be injured by large and dangerous animals, that different potential prey deploy different flight-and-fight strategies, that they have a limited amount of energy to expend, etc. In stalking and chasing an antelope, they have to anticipate the antelope’s movements as it tries to escape, and tailor their own actions accordingly (Christensen and Hooker 2001). Eventually, homo sapiens evolved, with even more complex sensory, cognitive, and linguistic abilities. Although the reach of our capacity to form representations is much more extensive, and refers to the past and present as well as the future, interactions remain crucial, as we will see. The notion of representational content relevant to the selfconscious language-users which we are is, of course, much more complicated than in the simpler cases we have mostly been discussing. But how the human case should be handled builds upon those simpler cases. For a start, the reflective actions humans perform satisfy the three criteria of minimal action, although they are more skilful and wide-ranging, and our activities serve a wide range of ends. Indeed, many of our motivations are what social psychologists dub ‘intrinsic’. That is, the satisfactions they yield come directly from engaging in the activities themselves, not from some further extrinsic end which those activities might make possible (contrast working for the sheer satisfaction of accomplishing such tasks – e.g., climbing a mountain – with working solely to earn enough money to pay for other pleasures, after work). Again, we have noted that most of our actions are directed towards generic norms, rather than performing fixed task-routines to attain specific goals. Relatively few of our responses are automatic. Our determining what to do

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can be quite complex, involving considering what is achievable for how much effort, balancing competing priorities, anticipating the satisfactions they might deliver, and working out how those potential actions might accord with all the generic norms we have adopted. Our deciding what to do typically involves evaluating the likely outcomes of the different actions possible in the situation in which we find ourselves. That includes reflecting upon our own possible reactions, which brings reflexive self- consciousness into play. Now, reflexive self- consciousness requires at least two levels of representations: a basic representational system relating to the external environment, and then higher levels of consciousness which interact with the lower or more basic levels (Bickhard 2005). Let me elaborate. The potential actions indicated by a representation are often connected to further potential actions. When a frog detects an opportunity to flick its tongue, that potential action in turn indicates a possibility of eating. As I will explain in the next section, more complex organisms store vast webs connecting indications of interactive potentialities. The more immediate indicate more remote potentialities, should those first interactions be engaged in and proceed as anticipated. These webs are organized in terms of how some interactive possibilities could be reached via various intermediary interactions. To operate efficiently and effectively, the organism has to update and continuously maintain its web of potential actions. Parts and aspects of it will change with various interactions in which the organism engages, and other changes will occur depending on whether the organism engages in specific interactions. There seems every reason to say – and I cannot think of any good reason to deny – that these webs constitute the organism’s knowledge of its current environment. They constitute a simple form of immediate awareness, what for present purposes we might call primary consciousness. Clearly, consciousness in this primary sense is not the exclusive preserve of humans. All animals have it. What, then, of Descartes’ famous argument that what I am essentially is ‘a thinking thing’? The implication of that thesis is that consciousness is the distinctive characteristic of humans. Although these days few adopt Descartes’ view that consciousness is a substance, his way of setting up the issue continues to dominate the philosophical scene. Today, it is called ‘the problem of consciousness’, and even virulent antiCartesians accept that they need to address that problem. But there is no such single problem. The very grammar in which Descartes expressed his meditations on this topic suggests the only sensible answer, one which nevertheless eluded Descartes himself – and has been overlooked in much of the subsequent debate. His argument turned on his inability to doubt that he is thinking. Thinking that one is thinking, which is what Descartes was actually doing, has to be a second- order operation. Primary consciousness, which we

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share with the animals, is simply a contentful flow, an experiential stream. However, if (and only if) the overall system of consciousness contains second- order cognitive operations, the qualities of that primary experiential stream can themselves be experienced. This second- order sort of experiencing is interactively, contentfully, experiencing that awareness I am calling primary consciousness. And there is no intrinsic reason why such iterations of experiencing should stop at the number two. We humans have multiple metalevels, or orders, of experiencing. We can be aware of what we are conscious of in the simple, primary flow of awareness; we can be aware of our having those cognitive contents, and can represent them to ourselves, and so on. We then can use those higher- order representations to direct attention towards what they are about. For all that any person’s knowledge has been built up through past experience, that use involves the towardness characteristic of any action. The interaction between these orders of consciousness is what we call self- consciousness. The distinction between them is a functional distinction. It is a distinction concerning what interacts with what, with what functional organization, and what functional norms. These distinctions are what explain the phenomenon of self-reflection, as we explicitly recognize ourselves as the ones having certain experiences. It is because we humans have evolved higher orders of awareness than primary consciousness that we are able to form many more ways of representing than the future-orientated indications of potential bodily actions. The latter is the primary and foundational form of representation. But over and above responding to differentiations in our environment, and acting accordingly, we are consciously aware of our doing so, and consequently can form representations both of something we are experiencing, or have experienced, and that towards which we direct our actions. Drawing upon our experience and the learning we have gained from it, we can remember something from our past. We can imagine situations not currently present. We can refer to actions we might perform, and to the entities with which we interact. We can formulate representations which stand in for other phenomena, such as relationships, and both past and future situations. We can envisage the goals we will strive to attain. We can construct abstract objects, such as numbers, from the operations we might perform with them. And so on. Nevertheless, as I will argue in the next section, these sophisticated abilities are still grounded in the indications of potential action which are more clearly discernible in the simpler cases. All of this involves higher- order kinds of representation, formed within our self-reflective consciousness. Because this human capacity to form representations occurs within the field of self-reflective consciousness, it no longer necessarily refers to the future. Some of our representations refer to the present, or the past, or what is currently absent, or is an abstraction. But this flexible capacity retains one of the intrinsic features of simpler bodily actions: towardness. The

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directedness (technically called ‘intentionality’) of our mental acts, and of our linguistic practices, has its genesis in the actions of the simpler organisms from which we have evolved, for all that it has emerged beyond them. That towardness, so clearly manifest in the foundational cases of representation we have been considering, continues to be an essential characteristic of acts of assertion, as we will see in the following chapters. But the very fact that human representations exhibit so many flexible forms can be turned into an objection. Thus, to take the most salient counterexamples to this interactive account, does not human memory involve representations of a kind which it cannot accommodate? Since memory is orientated to the past, it could easily be taken as seeming to exemplify the model I have been arguing against, of an impression caused by and corresponding to some phenomenon. Well, human memory takes many different forms; the kind of memories which seem to conform most closely to the model assumed in this objection is what is usually called ‘episodic’ memory. It is not difficult to think of memory as a store of snapshot perceptions of past scenes and incidents, in something like a mental filing cabinet. Episodic memory, however, is not as straightforward as this simple metaphor suggests. For a start, not only do I have memories of what the Parthenon in Athens looks like, but I also remember my being at the Parthenon two years ago. That is, I explicitly include myself in those memories. How could I do that if episodic memories are like snapshots? (Unless they are using the delayed-timing mechanism on their cameras, photographers are always absent from their images.) So, explaining such simple autobiographical memories as this requires more complex mental processes than the correspondence model allows. Moreover, we are able to compare how long remembered phenomena lasted, and whether they were static, moving, or accelerating. Yet snapshots of past perceptions provide no intrinsic indications by which we could make such judgements. Furthermore, memories are not fixed; they can be reinforced, augmented or altered, or reclassified as mistaken, in the light of subsequent learning. If remembering a particular scene or incident were the paradigm of memory, we would expect that episodic memory would be the first to occur in a child’s development. But that is not right. Children learn how to perform simple activities, and elementary linguistic skills, earlier than episodic memory. And if particular and discrete memory traces were fundamental to human cognition, it is not at all clear how general concepts could be generated from them. The empiricist literature is replete with debates about this well-known difficulty. The references to learning in the above are significant. We remember those representations we have learnt. And the many kinds of learning result from interactions of many different kinds. This anchors memory in interaction. But then the functional distinction between orders of consciousness comes into play. To take some of the examples of memory we have been

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considering, autobiographical memory poses no difficulties for the interactive concept of representations. My climbing the Acropolis to reach the Parthenon was a bodily action I performed two years ago. I am now selfreflectively aware of my direct experience of having visited Athens. I have learnt from pictures what the Parthenon looks like, but that learning has been enriched by my visiting it. So, through a high- order interaction within consciousness, not only can I remember how it looks, but I can also remember my having been there. And the duration of primary experiences can easily be monitored once meta-orders of consciousness are in play. That enables comparison of how long different phenomena lasted. I can remember being in Athens for longer than being on top of the Acropolis. Nor are there any principled difficulties in verifying past experiences. Once self- consciousness is acknowledged to be a complex field within which reflective interactions occur, those interactions enable us to form representations of what we have experienced and learnt, and then seeking confirmation of their accuracy. There may be practical difficulties in obtaining relevant evidence by which to verify the accuracy of those memories, but the possibility of doing so is no longer ruled out by the model of representation. Indeed, the functional distinction between orders of consciousness means that the interactive model can accommodate cases of representation where straightforward correspondence does occur. Interactions within the field of consciousness make possible a form of representation whose content is not directly a matter of potential bodily action. Accordingly, we can take some item of which we are conscious as a representation of another of which we are also conscious – for example, as a symbol, or as an abbreviation. In this way, some of our representations can indeed be encodings, but only those which result from activities within the field of reflexive self-consciousness. But encodings of this sort are not fundamental, and cannot provide the paradigms of representation.

6.7 Representing objects Most philosophical discussions of representation focus immediately on human perception and language. Correspondence-talk seems most credible in cases of visual perception of objects and their features. So our account needs to show how an interactive concept of representation can accommodate such cases before we can even begin to discuss how the use of language expresses representational content. Before launching into that, however, we need to overcome an argument which draws upon human perception to dismiss any attempt to explain representational content in terms of possible action responses. This objection is simply that the same percept of the world might be used to guide any of very many and diverse activities, practical or theoretical (Millikan 1993,

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92). For example, my perceiving a chair in a room (and forming a representation of it) might lead me to move it, to sit on it, to remove a cat from it, to make judgements about it, etc. So, the objection goes, the range of possible actions I might perform with respect to the chair is far too broad and indefinite to serve as the content of my representation of it. Rather, it is alleged, what is important is that the percept must correspond to environmental configurations in accordance with the same correspondence rules for each of these activities. If the actual position of the chair does not correspond to my visual representation of its position, that will hinder me equally in my attempts to avoid it when passing through the room, or in performing any of the potential actions just mentioned. Is this objection sound? It is certainly the case that the objects we perceive afford us many different opportunities from which to choose what to do – unlike primitive organisms, whose representations generally indicate an automatic response. But it does not follow that representations have no connection at all with the category of action. The argument does not justify any such conclusion; it claims too much. In the background of this objection is the assumption that the proper function of representations is to correspond by virtue of some rule to something in the world. But we have already criticized that assumption. At most, the objection shows that some representations indicate a wide range of potential actions. The richer some agent’s representation, the wider will be the range of possible actions which that representation will indicate to that agent. An agent’s representations grow richer as a result of the experience gained through interacting with processes and things of the types represented (Christensen and Hooker 2001, 44). If it be countered that a wide range of possible actions is not determinate enough to count as a representation of, say, a chair, it should be pointed out that it is the concurrence of all those possible actions which informs our understanding of chairs. Let us see how the interactive model might apply to the more familiar cases of representing the kinds of objects we regularly encounter in the world. Consider a toddler playing with a toy block, whose sides have been painted different colours. Even something as simple as this block affords the child countless possible ways she might interact with it. Many possible visual scans and many possible manipulations are available (Bickhard 1993, 314). Some are directly available to the toddler as she holds the block in her hand. Some of them are available conditionally, in the sense that she might have to engage in some intermediate interaction in order to make some particular interactive potentiality directly available. The child might need to rotate the block, for example, in order to enact some particular visual scan – for example, to see its red side. Because there are many alternative potential interactions contingently available to this toddler in the given situation, the interactive indications presented to her branch into different series of possibilities. She can turn the

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block around and see its different colours; she can put it in her mouth and taste it; she can throw it on the floor and watch it bounce, she can use it in building a tower of blocks, etc. Many of the potentialities afforded by the block remain, even if it is put away in the toy-box, or buried in the sandpit, or if the child walks into a different room. Furthermore, once she has become disengaged from direct interaction with something like this toy block, some of the potential interactions it affords will only become possible provided she completes certain other interactions first; she might first have to take it out of her toy-box. That has the effect of embedding the potentialities it affords within a wider network of conditional interactions. These mediating interactions will have to be performed before direct interaction with the block can again become available – perhaps walking back into the original room, or opening the toy-box – but the sub-web of potential interactions generally remains invariant. Such conditional indications iterate to form vast and complex webs of interactive potentiality (Bickhard, in preparation). The different sub-webs constituting these complex webs of interactive potentiality, such as those which the toy block affords, have two crucial features: (a) every possibility in the web of potential interactions can be reached from every other part of the web, perhaps contingent upon particular intermediate interactions; (b) certain patterns of interactive indications in the overall sub-web and its internal accessibility remain relatively invariant under other significant interactions and happenings. If we did not discover through experience that the world exhibits these relatively invariant patterns, we could not learn anything, nor could we operate effectively in the world. Indeed, these invariants are vital for our survival. A great deal of scientific investigation is directed towards discovering under what conditions, and how, phenomena vary, or remain unchanged. The invariant patterns we discover exhibit interesting and potentially useful properties. For example, some sets of potential interactions indicate each other reciprocally, in the sense that the potentiality of any member of the set inclusively indicates the potentiality of the rest of the set. A visual scan of a manipulable thing indicates in this reciprocal manner the potentiality of all of the other potential visual scans of that thing, linked by appropriate manipulations of it to bring those other aspects into view. Learning to recognize these invariants proves very useful. For instance, I have discerned many invariant patterns in my web of potential interactions. So long as I have detected no indications which would destroy them, I can reasonably act on the basis that these patterns remain available, perhaps linked to my current situation by various intermediate interactions. When

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I am at the shops, I can reasonably assume – unless I obtain information to the contrary – that my home is still accessible, even though I would have to go home somehow to access it (by driving my car, riding a bike, taking a bus or taxi ride, or a long walk). Invariant patterns, in other words, expand our interactive networks beyond immediately available perceptual environments. In general, invariant nodes within conditionally accessible webs of interactive potentiality, despite movements or manipulations, are what constitute our representations of simple objects. From a phenomenological perspective – although not from the kind of theoretical or metaphysical perspective philosophers usually adopt – what we call ‘objects’ just are such invariant patterns of reciprocal indications of interactive potentiality. Representational content, in general, is constituted as indications within an action-system of potential interactions in which it might engage. Representations of what we call ‘objects’ are anticipations of such stable nodes in our webs of indications of potential interactions. Just as representations in general are future-orientated, so are our representations of objects. While our discovery of invariances in our past interactions indicates the appropriateness of those anticipations which constitute our representations of objects, their objective sense pertains to future potential actions, precisely because they are anticipations. These sub-webs of anticipated interactions do not remain invariant under all possible interactions, however. If the child’s block is crushed or burned, the potentialities it used to afford disappear. In this connection, philosophers usually have forgotten that the sense of the word “object”, as used here, is relatively modern. Originally, it meant something ‘thrown’ before the senses or the mind, as in the phrase “object of thought”.4 Alternative meanings of “object” were a goal, purpose or aim, or else something towards which a specified action, thought, or feeling is directed. Only after Descartes had elevated to the centre of philosophical attention himself as a ‘subject’, expressed by the pronoun “I”, did the word “object” shift in meaning to refer to material things which exist external to and independently of any mind. Thomas Hobbes was a powerful influence in bringing about this semantic shift. Although he declared that a body ‘without us’ is commonly called an ‘object’,5 in fact that usage only became common parlance following the metaphysical upheavals of the seventeenth

4.

Indeed, modern readers of Descartes’ Meditations are initially puzzled by his talk of the ‘objective reality’ of an idea, by which he means no more than the kind of reality posited in something thought of, which might or might not exist independently of his thinking of it. 5. In Leviathan, I, i, 3, and even he, in the same passage, wrote, “The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediately, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling”. That preserves the connections between ‘objects’ and the senses.

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century. The interactive account, by insisting that objects just are invariant nodes of reciprocal indications of interactive potentiality, makes sense of this use of the word “object” to refer to external things, since their invariance is discovered through our directing our actions towards them. It is making use of a meaning of the word which it has had for centuries. The original phenomenological characterization of ‘objects’ is warranted only by our discovering invariant patterns in our webs of potential interactions. Human infants spend large periods of the first two years of life, and indeed thereafter, constructing and elaborating their knowledge of such invariant patterns, and their interrelationships. Later, as adults, we may reflect upon such invariances and seek to develop theoretical explanations of what makes them possible. Sophisticated scientific and metaphysical theories have been constructed by thinkers adopting the Olympian standpoint. These theories reverse the cognitive order by which we have come to the very idea of something being ‘objectively present’ prior to our discovering them. Thereby, ontological priority has been accorded to such objects, with the interactive contexts through which we came to posit them in the first place forgotten. Clearly something odd has occurred as a result of this reversal in priority in how we think of objects. It involves not just a distinction, but a dichotomy between the order of discovery and the order of being. Now, experience shows that we are often right to distinguish between the temporal order of the steps by which we come to learn about something, and the order of the processes involved in its coming to be. But the perspective commonly assumed by philosophers takes the original phenomenological characterization of objects to be totally irrelevant to their ontology. Reflecting on the toddler with her toy block does not support this stronger claim. Rather, such experiences show that, having gone through a series of interactions, we discover something whose potentials for interaction remain relatively unchanged when we subsequently access it by other interactive routes. Such facts, however, provide no basis for dismissing altogether the relevance of interactive contexts. Recognizing the constitutive role of interactions in the very concept of an ‘object’ provides no support for some latterday version of Berkeleyan idealism. The distinction between the temporal order of the steps by which we come to learn about something, and the order of the processes involved in its coming to be is enough to ward off any such misinterpretation, should anyone be tempted to ascribe it the position advocated here. On the contrary, as I will argue in §10.2, this position is a modest form of realism. These reflections call attention to the fact that a scientist’s objectivescientific lines of inquiry, projects, and accomplishments always presuppose practical engagements with elements encountered within the life-world. Indeed, while the word “empirical” is often used nowadays to mean “based on observation”, it derives from a Greek word meaning “trial” or

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“experiment”, that is, practical operations. Of course, when we are engaged in scientific theorizing, we usually abstract from the contexts within which we encounter invariant objects, leaving out of account the interactions by which we come to posit them, and attribute to them distinctive properties. But we should be clear that that is what we are doing: abstracting from these interactions. It is pertinent that the relevance of the phenomenological priority of interactions is implicit in the role played by empirical data in modern science (i.e., since the seventeenth century). Whereas for medieval science, observation provided illustrations of scientific principles, in modern science empirical data (usually obtained by experimentation, and always by means of some kind of interaction) play a constitutive role as evidence. Experimental evidence confers empirical meaning upon theoretical terms (Foster 1934). Strictly speaking, it is only when some phenomenon with which we interact is re-interpreted as cut off from any practical engagement does it become reconstituted as an ‘object’, in the modern sense. Since the seventeenth century, there has been a pervasive tendency to understand the world as simply furnished with such objects, describable in theoretical terms, occurring within a spatiotemporal framework, as if this were the primary mode of understanding. In order to achieve this stance of theoretical objectivity, so characteristic of the ‘modern’ world-view, we have to disengage from the everyday action- contexts in which we first become aware of the practical possibilities they afford and instead adopt a detached, ‘objective’ view of the items we were previously concerned with. And that requires an ontologically loaded projection (indeed, the mathematical projection of nature). That mode of understanding has its uses. But it is not how we normally engage with the world, nor is it how we have initially learnt how it works.6 The model of representations as built up out of passively received ‘impressions’ caused by such ‘objects’ is nothing but an application of this ‘objective’ mode of understanding. By adopting the viewpoint of someone who merely ‘looks on’, this model cuts perception and representation off from the interactive basis of all learning and cognition, and imposes a dichotomy between representation and action which is unjustified. It misrepresents representation. In contrast, even everyday perception of objects presupposes conditional indications iterated to form webs of interactive potentials. For instance, in any visual scan, only one side, or one aspect, of an object is actually given. This is not just a mere fact (although it is a fact); it is inconceivable that a perceptual object could be given in the entirety of its sensuously intuitive

6. The implications of maintaining that thinking of objects in this modern sense is a secondary mode of relating to them are worked through most thoroughly in Heidegger’s Being and Time of 1927. I comment on this further in §8.1.

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features – literally, from all sides at once – in a self- contained perception. As Edmund Husserl put it in 1921, “external perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature, it is not in a position to accomplish” (Husserl 2001, 221). As he analysed this peculiar character of perception, he noted how each particular perceptual act intends, in the sense of ‘reaches out to’, more than what is immediately given in it. In a continual course of momentary scans of a table, for example, each such act posits “a constant substrate of actually appearing table-moments, but also of indications of moments not yet appearing”. As he says (p. 223), Seeing the front side of the table, I am also conscious of the back side along with everything else that is non-visible, through an empty pointing ahead, even though it be rather indeterminate. But no matter how indeterminate it may be, it is still a pointing ahead to a bodily shape, to a bodily colouring, etc. And only appearances that adumbrate things of that kind and that determine more closely what is indeterminate in the framework of this prefiguring can be integrated concordantly; only they can stay the course of an identical x of determination as the same, being determined here newly and more closely. The same applies to the visible side of the table; it invites a viewer to come closer and see more, to inspect details which previously were only viewed indeterminately and generally. In this way, in our perceptions of objects, both what is hidden from view and what is already seen are “laden with an anticipatory intention”. These anticipations of what is not immediately given in our interactions with stable objects, when fulfilled by subsequent experience, are what provide our perceptual acts with their ‘objective sense’. But, strictly speaking, when we perceive objects, in the anticipatory manner already mentioned, only aspects of them are immediately open to sight. Although Husserl was the first to realize the significance of this for understanding perception, relating it more generally to an interactive account of representing objects is due to Mark Bickhard, who develops it from certain insights of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (Bickhard 1980; Bickhard and Ritchie 1983; Campbell and Bickhard 1986; Piaget 1954, 1977). On Bickhard’s account, the invariants in a sub-web of anticipated potentialities permit a goaldirected system to update that web even when it does not currently have explicit interactive grounds for doing so. Any such system has to be continually engaging in interactions with the environment which are dependent upon, and can be modified by, indications it detects about that environment. The structure of such indications must be updated and kept current, both in terms of the passage of time and in terms of the outcome of its previous interactions. On this view, perception is the process of interacting with the world insofar as such interacting participates in the updating of the situation image. Similar action-based models, inspired by Piaget’s

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approach, can be given of other familiar forms of representation, such as of abstractions and mathematics, but it would take us too far afield to pursue them here. Our discovering significant invariances in our interactions with our environments is what enables us to identify what we call ‘objects’, and to expect that if we act in certain ways we will encounter them again. Given our capacity for language, we have found it useful to label these relatively invariant patterns so that we can point linguistically towards them, to identify and re-identify them. But those linguistic abilities still relate to potential actions we might perform. Of course, sometimes those anticipations are disappointed; the objects might have been destroyed, or gone elsewhere, in the meantime. But if they are still around, in much the same condition as when we last encountered them, we usually have no difficulty re-identifying them. This, as I shall explore in the next chapter, is what enables us to use language to refer to individual objects. Our interactive concept has provided us with an alternative way of understanding the genesis of representation, and of grounding a richer conception of truth. We now turn to ponder how this approach might illuminate the truth of statements.

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7 Acts of Assertion

We humans engage in many activities, some of which we appraise for truth. The linguistic practice of making statements is one of those. We regularly assert about a vast variety of matters that they are thus and so, and in each case the question can be asked: is what was asserted true? Although we have found the linguistic conception of truth narrow and inadequate – because it took truth to apply only to statements and similar linguistically structured items – it is incontrovertible that many items in the linguistic domain are appraised for their truth. Our guiding idea is that truth in this linguistic domain derives from truth in the domain of action. What connects the two domains is the fact that speaking (and writing) are also human actions: speech-acts. Accordingly, now that we are ready to consider what truth means when language is used to make statements, the appropriate starting point is those human actions which promulgate them. So let us approach the question of what is meant by calling statements “true” by first exploring what is going on in speechacts of assertion. It might seem pedantic to insist that making a statement is a human action, a speech-act. But we have now seen how the interactive model of representation implies a novel understanding of how they represent, an understanding which resolves difficulties endemic in the standard accounts, and gives a credible account of how representations operate in the behaviour of non-human organisms. So, we can reasonably expect that this model will illuminate how representation works in human speech too. Of course there will also be differences, since we humans are able to reflect upon what we are doing, and that ability is manifest in our linguistic practices. But approaching the issue of the truth of statements by investigating speechacts of assertion will prove illuminating. Accordingly, this chapter will be devoted to considering what a speaker is doing in performing an act of assertion. Then, in the next, I will address the question of how the results of our investigations thus far apply to the truth of statements. 157

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7.1 Assertions as speech-acts Any consideration of the truth of statements comes down to one of two alternatives. One is typified by the paradigm of ‘eternal sentences’, where sentences (amplified if necessary) are taken to have clear and determinate meanings, independently of the context of their use. The other way insists on starting from the actual use of language in real world settings. I have argued, in §2.3, that the reflexive and perspectival character of such uses blocks any comprehensive program aiming to paraphrase all statements as eternal sentences. Any viable way of thinking about truth must now come to terms with the fact that context and perspective cannot be analysed away. And any sound characterization of the truth of statements has to show how it is accessible to the human speakers who make those statements, and their audience, so that, in principle, verification and falsification are possible. In short, it calls for an alternative metaphysics. That is why I examined in Chapter 4 how the emergence of detectable error can be discerned even in non-human organisms. That investigation not only revealed action as a metaphysically deep category, it also yielded principled reasons for taking context and perspective seriously, and for requiring a conception of truth which does. Of course, when our interactive model is applied to relatively primitive organisms – such as bacteria, frogs, and non-human mammals – it has to characterize their potential for error basically in terms of the success or failure of their actions. In these cases, the only analogues of statements are the theoretical predications implicit in those actions, and their dynamic presuppositions. Yet the errors can be real, and the consequences of such errors disastrous for the organisms who commit them; a bacterium which keeps swimming towards a source of saccharine, rather than sugar, will starve to death, as will a frog which keeps swallowing pebbles. It is with the emergence of self-reflective humans that the possibility first arises of rendering such predications explicit, and of articulating such presuppositions. The emergence of human beings with functional distinctions between multiple orders of consciousness, noted in §6.6, was a precondition of language. We not only experience phenomena in our environment directly, through our interactions with them, but we also are aware of that primary consciousness. Our awareness is selfconscious. In their early years, children develop, at yet higher levels of consciousness, the ability to evoke particular forms of lower-level consciousness. Memory and imagination come into play. At these higher levels of selfconscious awareness we can recall memories and imagine scenarios, without what is remembered or imagined being directly experienced at that time. The flow of mental processes does not depend upon there being a relevant current and direct awareness of external phenomena.

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The use of language interacts with all this. Part of children’s development is their acquisition of linguistic skills. Language itself is a social reality; it is through our interaction with other humans that each of us learns how to use language. We learn through social interactions how to produce particular sounds and marks as effective ways of communicating with others. Producing appropriate linguistic items as a response to some stimulus is a kind of action, the linguistic analogue of a frog’s flicking its tongue. And just as the frog’s actions ‘nest’ – it flicks its tongue in order to catch a bug, in order to eat – so we produce sounds and marks in order to perform many kinds of speech-act, in order to communicate. One of those kinds of speech-act is assertion. The appropriate use of language invokes the webs of interactive potentiality the speaker has acquired, anticipating those invariant patterns of reciprocal indications of interactive potentiality which we call ‘objects’. By activating our growing linguistic repertoire, embedded within appropriate grammatical forms, we can refer to and describe those objects. Producing appropriate sounds and marks thus serves to direct our own selfconscious awareness, and that of others, towards phenomena which might, or might not, be present.

7.2

Identifying assertions

When in the 1950s J.L. Austin drew attention to the significance of speechacts, he focussed on those by which we bring about some new state of affairs – such as marrying, or naming a ship, bequeathing a watch, or betting sixpence [sic!] (Austin 1980). These, which he called ‘performative utterances’, he initially contrasted with what he called ‘constative utterances’. The latter were those utterances by which statements are made. He soon recognized, however, that a comprehensive theory of speech-acts has to include acts of assertion, since making a statement is also a case of performing a speech-act.1 1. A terminological clarification. Unfortunately, as we noted in §2.3, philosophers use “statement” and “assertion” in many different and confusing ways. So, for the sake of clarity, I have chosen to use the word “assertion” to refer to a kind of speech-act, and, in the first instance, a statement is what is asserted. The term “statement” is not, however, entirely felicitous. A simple argument of the form modus ponens, for example, is propounded by uttering three sentences in the form: p; if p then q; therefore q. In the first, p is asserted, and so, given this terminology, is a statement. But in the second, p is not asserted; it occurs as part of a longer statement. Yet for the argument to be valid both occurrences of p need to be of the same kind. It seems that we have to admit unasserted statements. For this reason, some writers on philosophical logic prefer to use the term “proposition” instead of “statement”. But there is no consensus on the use of the term “proposition”. Faced with this terminological mess, I am prepared to admit unasserted statements. If p is a statement, then occurrences of p, with the same sense and reference, in logically complex statements containing p also count as statements. With that recursive extension, my choice of terminology seems harmless enough.

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Questions, commands, pleas, warnings, etc. are kinds of speech-act which do not have a truth-value (although their sense sometimes relies on presuppositions which do). We might hope to invoke that difference in order to distinguish assertions from other kinds of speech-act. But immediately there is a problem: as Austin soon realized, there are no linguistic markers, the presence or absence of which suffices in every case to distinguish cleanly between what is expressed in acts of assertion and what is expressed by other kinds of speech-act. In particular, it cannot be assumed that what a simple declarative sentence expresses is, clearly and unambiguously, a statement; depending on the circumstances, it might be expressing the content of some other kind of speech-act. One way of calling attention to the kind of speech-act being performed is to use some explicitly performative phrase. Derivative cases like play-acting aside, when I say “I promise to ...”, I generally perform the speech-act of promising. Likewise, bets are typically made by saying “I bet you that ...” and warnings by saying “I’m warning you: ...”. The presence of such phrases is not, however, necessary; I can make a promise without using any explicitly performative locution. Nevertheless, it is not always obvious what kind of speech-act is being performed. My saying “You will have your book back next Friday” might be an assertion predicting a future event, or it might be a way of promising to return the book, and would rightly be interpreted as such by the book’s owner. There are countless cases where uttering a simple declarative sentence does not, in the circumstances, constitute an assertion making a statement at all, but is both meant and rightly interpreted as some other kind of speech-act. If the kind of speech-act being performed is not necessarily marked by the presence or absence of explicitly performative phrases, how then do we distinguish those speech-acts which are assertions? Austin himself seems to have given up on this question, and moved to a generic form of assessment, “happiness”, for all kinds of speech-act. But the fact remains that, in ordinary everyday conversations, we do generally recognize and distinguish assertions from other kinds of speech-act. While occasionally an audience will misidentify the kind of speech-act being made, normally a quick question or two suffices to sort out such confusions. To look for linguistic markers by which to distinguish assertions from other kinds of speech-act is to look in the wrong place. It must be that we recognize, on the basis of various cues (including, of course, the words uttered), what the speaker is doing. It follows that any satisfactory account of the truth of statements has to take off from the question: What am I doing when I am making a statement, as distinct from promising, betting, pleading, warning, etc.? What has made it possible for so many philosophers to avoid this question is our having ready to hand a way of individuating assertions which seems to get around any need to take actions seriously. For one act of

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assertion can be distinguished from another quite simply, in terms of the statements they make. Those statements, in turn, are standardly identified by means of the sentences used to express those assertions, although whether the sentence expressed is usually enough to identify the statement made is problematic. So it can seem that philosophers do not need to attend seriously to the fact that assertions are speech-acts. It then seems quite straightforward to proceed to characterize statements purely in terms of the systematic connections of those particular sentences with other linguistic items – for example, by providing a truth- conditional analysis of what they mean. This philosophical attitude goes along with a widespread tendency to understand language simply as an interpreted formal calculus. In this way, the need to consider language as an intrinsically expressive mode of human activity is neatly sidestepped. The latter view can then either be dismissed as of no serious philosophical interest, or, more tolerantly, left aside for some other branch of philosophical inquiry to address. While superficially attractive, such an approach is quite inadequate. It rests upon a conceptual break between the meaning of a sentence and what a speaker means to say, a distinction marked in other languages by quite different words for the two senses of “meaning”. While there is a valid distinction here, the effect of the argument just rehearsed is to cut sentence-meaning entirely adrift from the intentionality of speech-acts. When explanations of sentence-meaning take no account of what speakers might be doing, the usual move is to turn to truth- conditions. But when our ultimate interest is in understanding what it means to call statements true, accounting for the meaning of statements in terms of truth- conditions would involve a vicious circularity. We need to take the role of acts of assertion more seriously. Now, if our identification of some speech-act as an assertion turns on recognizing what the speaker is doing, that must be because, like any action, we recognize the telos inherent in that speech-act. An assertion shares with any action the logical feature of being individuated in terms of its telos, its target, the achieving of which would constitute the successful completion of that particular action. Our explication of what is meant by the truth of statements will have to take this teleological character of assertions into account. That is not the same as recognizing the speaker’s intention in performing that act. As we saw in §4.8, the telos of an action is not simply a function of its agent’s intentions. That applies to speech-acts as much as to other kinds of actions; the telos is inherent in the act performed, and is not to be reduced to a subjective state of the speaker, somehow projected onto external behaviour. To see clearly how this distinction between the intentions of agents and the telos of their actions applies to assertions, consider the fact that often people make statements in order to achieve some ulterior objective. Suppose I tell someone “That lecturer is boring” with the prime intention

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of deterring my hearer from attending a talk which that lecturer is about to deliver. In this case, whether the lecturer in question is boring, and whether I sincerely believe it, are beside the point; I simply utter those words in order to persuade my hearer not to attend the lecture. This, of course, is a straightforward case of manipulation. Although what I said has the form of making a statement, my primary speech-act is what Austin called a ‘perlocutionary’ act, where one achieves certain results by (in the instrumental sense of “by”) saying something. These considerations led him to distinguish perlocutionary acts from the action of saying something (the ‘locutionary’ act) and the action performed in saying something (the ‘illocutionary’ act). Typically, whether saying something constitutes the performance of a particular illocutionary act is a matter of linguistic conventions and context – that is why its telos is inherent in the act performed, and is not simply a function of the speaker’s intentions. In contrast, in perlocutionary acts the speaker is seeking to bring about certain results which are extrinsic to the conventions of speech governing both locutionary and illocutionary acts. Austin himself offered a helpful comment on the issue raised here. He observed that there is no perlocutionary objective specifically associated with stating (i.e., asserting), as there is with convincing, intimidating, etc. He attributed this to the conventional character of illocutionary acts. Further, it is characteristic of perlocutionary acts that the desired response, or their sequel, can be achieved additionally or entirely by non- conventional means. So, rather than saying that assertions are communicative actions performed without any perlocutionary aim, it is better to say that acts of assertion have no perlocutionary objective specifically and by convention associated with them. The point of acts of assertion is simply to make a statement, nothing else – although we have yet to elucidate what is involved in that. As with other kinds of action, any further intention which a speaker might have in making a statement, over and above the illocutionary force of the speech-act itself, is irrelevant to identifying the statement made, the telos of that assertion. In this way, we set aside from our identification of assertions all strategic uses of language, by which one might try to bring about some extrinsic result (Habermas 1984, I, 295). Even if my personal aim in using words is to manipulate others into doing what I want, that has no bearing upon what constitutes an assertion. Many kinds of speech-act invite some other kind of action as a response or sequel. Non-assertive speech-acts, such as questions, orders, promises, apologies, etc., have built into them a distinctive kind of openness to the future: a question invites an answer; an order anticipates compliance; a promise commits the speaker to fulfil it; an apology seeks acceptance. By their very structure, they all point ahead to some other action co- ordinate with them. That is not the case with assertions. They crucially differ from other kinds of speech-act in precisely this regard. Unlike questions, orders,

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promises, etc., assertions contain within their own structure a certain kind of closure. They simply purport to state what is so, and do not, in the same sense, necessarily invite some other kind of action as a sequel or response. But do not assertions seek agreement from their audience? Not necessarily; that is too strong. Of course, sometimes a statement-maker is looking for agreement, but that is a matter of the speaker’s intention, not the telos of the act of assertion itself. On other occasions, a speaker’s assertion might serve simply to inform an audience. These are perlocutionary issues, and I have just been arguing that they are not intrinsic to the act of assertion itself. Again, an act of assertion aims at securing what Austin called ‘uptake’ from its audience, but that holds for all speech-acts. They all presuppose that an audience will understand what is said. There is, as I will argue in §7.6, something which an assertive speech-act seeks to do with respect to its audience. But the response it seeks to elicit from its audience is not a different kind of action from that which the speaker is performing in making that statement. But more of that shortly. Coming at the issue in this way, we can see why Austin was initially inclined to contrast ‘performative utterances’ with ‘constative utterances’. On this basis, performative speech-acts are designed to bring about some new state of affairs: to elicit an answer, an obedient act, a favourable response, etc. It seems that constative utterances are not designed to bring about any new state of affairs – at least, not in the same sense. That, however, is not a very satisfactory way of articulating the point; assertions do standardly seek ‘uptake’ from an audience, and often do inform them of something of which they were previously ignorant. That is, as communicative acts, assertions too are designed to bring about new states of understanding in their audiences. Nevertheless, there is point to Austin’s contrast. Assertions standardly describe some state of affairs, not bring it into being. In making a statement, a speaker is saying how certain matters are. If the speaker gets that right, the statement made is true. If there is one item of universal agreement on this topic, it is this: what acts of assertion aim to do, in the contemporary slang phrase, is to tell it like it is. That this is the point of assertion was recognized in ancient times, as we noted in §3.1. Plato expressed the point in a phrase remarkably similar to our own colloquial slogan. To speak the truth, he said, is legein ti hōs esti: ‘to speak of something as it is’.2 Not that this is a Platonic doctrine; he was simply articulating a variant of a locution commonly found in ancient Greek, as far back as Homer, who often used the phrase, “it is as [he] says”.3 That 2. This phrase underlies many of Plato’s comments on true speech (or discourse). See, for example, Cratylus 385b: “hos to onta legē hōs estin alēthes: [that speech] which tells realities as they are, is true”. Cf. also Euthydemus 284b–d and Sophist 263b–d. For a discussion of these passages, and how Plato eventually worked out an explanation for how false speech is possible, see my Truth and Historicity, 43–56. 3. Homer’s use of alētheia (truth) is discussed in Truth and Historicity, 32–36.

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locution does nothing more than articulate the veridical sense of the verb “to be” in the ancient Greek language; it is no weighty philosophical theory. The difference between the ancients and the moderns – and that difference is vast – lies in how that dictum has been understood.

7.3 The function of linguistic representations By asserting something, I am making a claim about how it is. If what I am claiming is true, my speech-act genuinely and faithfully presents what I am talking about to a putative audience. Note that I say that my assertion presents that matter to my audience, not that it represents it. Neither assertions nor statements are themselves representations; they are presentations, produced by using linguistic representations. If I am wanting to draw attention to some worldly phenomenon which is directly manifest, I might simply point at it. Or I might ask my audience to look. That is, I present it to my audience. Likewise, making a statement is a way of presenting (not representing) something to my audience, albeit less directly. Because statements are standardly made by uttering appropriate sentences, they present something in a linguistically structured way. Standardly, I perform an assertion by uttering a declarative sentence (although the converse is not true). That sentence might be spoken or written, and my utterance might be elliptical, but to save overly cluttering the exposition let us continue focussing upon speech, where communication with an audience is more immediate. The sentence uttered consists of words strung together in a way which is syntactically correct (or close enough to correct for my audience to work it out) in the language I am speaking. Applying our analysis thus far, this sentence serves, in those particular circumstances, to identify a state of affairs, to say how things are. That is its function. As explained in §7.1, it is humans’ capacity for self-conscious awareness which enables us to take a step back from immediate practical interaction with phenomena , and use words to refer to and describe them. When we make statements to present those phenomena to an audience, the sentences we use serve as representations for them. They are being used to represent those phenomena, serving as indications of how to identify them. In the previous chapter I argued for an interactive model of representations by investigating how they can plausibly be attributed to relatively simple organisms. Avoiding the absurdities which would follow from attributing to them improbable cognitive skills, we saw that this interactive model provides a plausible account of the kind of representing of which those organisms are capable. Because the linguistic practices of humans are grounded in higher- order levels of consciousness, the relation between their representations and their speech-acts manifests interesting parallels with, and differences from, the analogous relation in simpler organisms. In simpler organisms, a representation is an internal physiological state, the

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outcome of the organism’s interactions with the environment, which serves the function of indicating a potential action implicitly referring to some future state of affairs. The content of the representation encompasses both aspects of the potential action indicated: (a) a bodily movement towards some goal; and (b) the future situation towards which it is projected. In assertion, there is an actual action which is explicitly projected towards some putative state of affairs, past, present, or future. Since actual speech-acts are involved in assertion, the import of representations also differs somewhat from the foundational cases. Rather than representing what to do, in acts of assertion what is being done is identifying the situation towards which that act is being projected, the second aspect. That there should be these differences between representation in frogs and in articulate human beings is not remarkable. What is more striking are the parallels between the two. Firstly, they highlight the appropriateness of beginning our investigation of how representing works by considering its genesis in relatively primitive creatures. In those cases, the deficiencies of explanations in terms of causal correspondences are glaringly obvious. And it is also clear how the interactive model of representation meets the two requirements of explaining how the organism’s representations relate it to external situations, and explaining how errors in representing can occur, and can be detected by the organism itself. Secondly, these parallels highlight the need to take seriously the fact that linguistic representations occur as expressions of a certain kind of action, of speech-acts. We can reasonably expect that our approach will enable an account of statement-making which likewise meets those requirements. It was not mere pedantry to emphasize that making a statement is a human action. Whilst in this way the declarative sentences uttered do indeed serve the function of representing in acts of assertion, given the prevalence of misguided views about representation, such talk has to be treated with considerable care. In §6.2, we saw that any satisfactory account of representations needs to be a tripartite account, comprising three factors: (a) the occurrence of something which serves as a representation; (b) its content: what it signifies, that is, what it is a representation of; (c) the relevant external phenomena, which it purports to be about. In the case of assertions, there is a parallel tripartite pattern. The particular sentence uttered serves as the representation; its ‘content’ is the particular claim made by uttering that sentence in an act of assertion in some particular context; and the statement so made typically purports to be about something in the world. Standardly, identifying the content of an act of assertion requires attention both to the lexical meanings of the words uttered and to the context of that act. Likewise, in order to be understood and appraised, sentences have

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to be interpreted in context, but the issue of interpretation is complex. We will consider in the following section the role of some aspects of context in identifying what is being spoken about, but adjourn exploring some of the more subtle issues of interpretation until the next chapter. Just as there is an internal relation between a representation of any kind and its content, so the relation between a sentence uttered in an act of assertion and the content expressed in that context is internal. In this respect, the relation between the sentence and its content is like the geometric relation between an arc of a circle and its centre, or an action and its telos. Indeed, I shall be arguing that there is no mere analogy to the latter case; rather, the internal relation between the statements made and the acts of their assertion are specific instances of the internal relation which obtains in general between an action and its telos. Just as the identity of a given representation is a function of what it is of, its content, so the statement made on any occasion is a function of the lexical meaning of the sentence uttered, together with the context of its assertion. There is no need to posit anything else. That is why the contents of those linguistic acts can still be recognized as genuine statements, irrespective of whether they are true or false. What pertains to their truth is literally another question; in each case, their truth is a function of the external relation between that content, that statement, and the relevant environment. Both relations are necessary if we are to be able to understand what is being asserted irrespective of its truth (the internal relation), and to verify or falsify it (the external relation). Statements are not pieces of language. Nevertheless, because the relation between acts of assertion and the statements made thereby is logically an internal one, and the only way statements can be made is by uttering a suitable sentence, statements retain a linguistic structure. Once we acknowledge this consequence, it becomes immediately clear why the ‘linguistic’ conception of truth should have been so attractive. Statements derive their structure from the sentences which express them. And so do beliefs, judgements, and utterances, which on some analyses are not strictly speaking linguistic. The widespread failure to recognize that what is needed is a three-factor account, one which includes this internal relation, has resulted in the many futile attempts to account for the fact that some statements are false. If one will admit only external relations between statements and the environment, inevitably some sort of third factor has to be smuggled in somehow to explain how false statements are possible. The literature abounds with negative facts, states of affairs which do not ‘obtain’, alternative possible worlds in which false statements are decreed to be true, etc. There would be no profit discussing these hopeless theories in any detail. It is enough to note that all theories are driven to introduce some sort of third factor by the simple fact that every theory has to contain at least three (not just two) elements: linguistic representations; the statements – whether true or

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false – made by uttering those representations; and something which distinguishes true statements from false ones. The fact that we can, and do, refer to things not immediately present is what lends a superficial plausibility to the standard philosophical theories of representation. For example, it is tempting to explain referring to absent things by proposing that both speakers and hearers entertain some mental items – be they Lockean ideas, or mental images, or words in ‘mentalese’ – which serve as surrogates for the absent things. So, when a statement is false these surrogates can be invoked to supply the content of the statement made. This is yet another way of providing the missing third factor. Such theories do so, however, by interpolating these surrogates as intermediaries between speakers and what statements are about. That cannot be right. These surrogates were supposed to explain how referring expressions could be ‘of’ their referents. That is what has been thought so puzzling. But the same issue recurs: how are those intermediaries ‘of’ those referents? An infinite regress threatens this supposed ‘explanation’. Also, these intermediate entities – be they Lockean ideas, or their modern counterparts – have been posited as something to which speakers and hearers can relate directly, whether or not the statement is true. But the effect of this manoeuvre is to cut language users off from things themselves. So how could we ever ascertain whether the supposed intermediary is ‘about’ some particular reality? When we talk about things, what we relate to are the things themselves, not surrogates for them. But how else are we to understand the content of a representation: what it signifies, that is, what it is of ? Are we not driven to posit some sort of ideal content, since there are many different ways of making the same statement, and statements are usually intelligible even when they are false? Not so, if we attend carefully to how the interactive model construes what is involved in making statements. Rather, different acts of assertion are identified by the sentences used. The sense of those sentences indicates ways of projecting ourselves along a network of potential interactions, as described in §6.7. In different acts of assertion, performed on different occasions or by using different sentences, we can project our understanding towards the same target. Doing so will certainly involve the use of cognitive skills, and call upon previously acquired knowledge, but does not require the postulation of ideal entities as intermediaries between speakers and what their statements purport to be about. The actual assertions already indicate what is to be done. That different linguistic representations can point along different interactive pathways towards the one target recalls the distinction, first clearly drawn by Frege, between the sense (Sinn) and the reference (Bedeutung) of a referring expression. This distinction is required in order to explain how an identity statement, such as “The Evening Star is the Morning Star”, is

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informative and not an empty tautology. The two expressions, “the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star” refer to the same thing (not a star at all, but the planet Venus). But the identity statement is informative because those two expressions have different senses. Frege’s useful distinction in fact supports the thesis that the function of a referring expression is to point towards something; Frege himself explained the difference between the senses of those two phrases in terms of their different manners of signifying the one thing. Allowing for different ways of signifying is consistent with insisting that the proper function of referring expressions is to point out some actual thing which can be identified by both the speaker and hearer as ‘fitting’ that expression. Frege also pointed out that a referring expression can be understood – it has a sense – even when it fails to signify any reality. This, however, is a case of error and we have yet to consider how a plausible account of assertion can accommodate making false statements. Let me here simply anticipate a point for which I will later argue, that we should not build our understanding of assertions upon cases involving error, although it must be able to accommodate their possibility. If a teleological account of the truth of statements can encompass the possibility of error in general, it should be able to deal with this particular kind of error. Having cleared up those confusions, we can now begin to consider what a speaker is doing in making a statement.

7.4

Simple acts of assertion – referring

I have pointed out the striking parallels between the functional role played by the sentence uttered and the functional role of representations in simpler organisms. In assertion too there is an action which indicates some situation as its telos – only now that telos is explicitly described. Like all actions, assertions involve projection, the exercise of targeting capacities. And the speech-act performed might or might not succeed; the actual situation might or might not be as the representation indicated. Finding out whether that assertion was successful – verifying it, or detecting that it is erroneous – is also a future event. I said that when I make a statement my assertion presents what I am talking about to my audience, not that it represents that matter. That, however, is still very vague. Just as in §6.4 we had to address the question of how the appropriate content of a representation is picked out in the case of the frog, so now we have to address the question of how the appropriate content of a particular assertion is identified. Let me begin to address this question by focussing upon the paradigm case of an assertion performed by uttering a simple declarative sentence: a noun phrase plus a verb phrase. It will be helpful to consider a quite simple, indeed banal case. Suppose I gesture towards a cooking pot sitting on the

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stove in my kitchen and say, in a quite straightforward way, in a normal conversational setting, and without any ulterior objective, “that pot is black”. I have been insisting that in general we must inquire into what I am doing. So, what precisely am I doing in this case? Well, my speech-act has three aspects: picking out something to talk about; saying something about it; and sharing my interest in it with my audience. In more technical terminology: referring; predicating; and communicating. Each warrants further elaboration. In the first instance, I am orientating myself – and my audience provided the referring expression I have used is understood – towards the thing about which I am talking: a particular black cooking pot. The referring expression I used, “that pot”, already has an established sense; it standardly serves in an intelligible way to point out something, a cooking pot, which can be differentiated from amongst everything else in the kitchen, and can be identified by both the speaker (myself) and my audience as ‘fitting’ that expression, namely, this particular pot. This referring expression is apt for that use. That might seem unremarkable. For this to happen, however, I must already have differentiated the entity about which I am speaking – a particular pot – and be directing my attention towards it. Just as action, in general, necessarily involves projecting oneself towards some end, so the speech-act of assertion involves towardness. The speaker is projecting him- or herself towards whatever is the subject of the statement. That is the proper function of referring expressions: to serve as a means of projecting oneself, and one’s audience, towards what one is talking about. Consequently, referring exhibits the intentionality of all actions, their essential directedness. Using a referring expression directs attention towards the thing itself – in this case, the actual pot, used for cooking – not some idea or mental surrogate for it. There is nothing in this account which interposes anything else between either the speaker or the hearer and that pot. In particular, we have been able to describe what is going on without invoking any talk about some correspondence allegedly established by causal history. Palle Yourgrau is one of the few philosophers who have spotted what is wrong with the latter sorts of account. The leading idea behind it, he says (1990, 109), seems to be that we can pick up the use of a name at a bar the way we can pick up the flu there: by being in the right causal context. Thus, acquiring the use of a name is likened, on this account, to catching a disease. ... A truer picture, I would suggest, comes from the very root of the word ‘intentionality’ (making something an object- of-thought, referring): intendo arcum in (I draw a bow at ...). ... To refer to something is to strike it, wherever in the universe it might be, with the arrow of the mind. The good archer strikes what is, while the bad catches illusions. ... What is important for our purposes here, however, is that the ability to refer is

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a linguistic capacity, a competence or skill in getting to objects; it is not something passive, acquired simply by being a descendant in a historical causal chain. To refer means to have certain future directed capacities – e.g., to re-identify the object. So, when I refer to that cooking pot, contrary to causal theories of reference, what I am doing is not invoking some past causal connections between the word “pot” and particular pots. I must, of course, have learnt in the past how to use the word “pot” – and must also have learnt how to use the demonstrative “that”. Nevertheless, while I am employing skills learnt in the past, what I am doing on this particular occasion is orientated towards a goal in the immediate vicinity: identifying that particular pot. The projecting of oneself towards that about which one is speaking does not engage with it as immediately and directly as, for example, picking up the pot to partly fill it at the tap with water. When we interact practically with things, that is always ‘for the sake of’ some further objective. I pick up the pot in order to partly fill it with water, in order to cook some vegetables, in order to provide dinner, and so on. On the other hand, speaking about things is a less engaged way of orientating oneself towards them. As we saw in the previous chapter, the word “about” introduces a certain ‘distance’ between a speaker and the world. It is as if one has ‘stepped back’ from active involvement with things and the web of potential interactions they afford, in order to focus attention upon the things themselves and their features. (Of course, those interactions are still accessible; indeed, they are what make the language meaningful.) In that stepping back, one abstracts from the sequence of potential interactions which the item affords – the series constituted by “in order to” – to single out the item for description. This ‘distance’ is misunderstood, however, if it is taken simply as a difference of theoretical level, as if discourse were not also an occurrence within the world. Insofar as a philosopher takes language, thought, and statements to operate on a ‘higher’ level, over against reality, linguistic items can at best only mirror reality. Any philosophies of language – and more narrowly, any theories of truth – which presuppose such a picture fail to take seriously the fact that thinking and speaking are themselves processes within reality. The use of language involves intra-worldly relations. Once that patent fact is taken seriously, however, it transforms our approach to the problem of how the use of language relates to other phenomena. That problem now becomes one of articulating how those processes within reality which are acts of thinking and saying connect, in a way mediated by language, with those parts of reality which are complex, changing occurrences. Making statements now has to be understood as a way of appropriating some feature of one’s situation and sharing it with another, albeit in a way different from those practical ways of appropriating and sharing it, such as using a cooking pot to prepare dinner. Nevertheless, making

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statements remains a way of interacting with that situation, and involves all the essential features of actions in general. For that reason, although making statements involves ‘stepping back’ from active involvement with things and the web of potential interactions they afford, it retains a practical dimension.4 Making statements is still a practice which has to be learnt and enacted whenever we open our mouths to speak about things, latching onto the appearances they furnish. Although it is a less hands- on way of interacting with things, it does still engage with them. In that regard, this practice builds upon, and extends into the linguistic domain, the structure of representing whose genesis we investigated in the previous chapter. The fact that the function of referring expressions is to point towards something for an audience reflects the way children standardly learn how to use such expressions: adults point to things (or to pictures of them in books), drawing the child’s attention to typical examples again and again, telling the child what each of them is called, distinguishing between different kinds of things, and correcting the child’s mistakes. Eventually, the child also learns what properly to call such things. This teaching, however, involves more than just teaching the child an association between certain nouns and certain things. The teacher must first succeed in getting the child to select and focus attention upon what is being pointed out. The child has to learn how to discriminate, amongst all the distinguishable features present in that particular situation, precisely the one which the teacher is pointing out. That is, the teacher’s efforts to point the child towards that thing have first to be successful. Only then does teaching the child the right word to use to refer to that kind of entity become relevant. Eventually, the child learns not always to rely upon pointing gestures, but instead to use words to signify the things they want to talk about – although that is not because pointing has been dispensed with. On the contrary, the linguistic expression itself comes to serve that role. In this way, children learn that certain words – those often dubbed ‘count nouns’ or ‘sortal nouns’ – have a special role in differentiating amongst different kinds of things. When someone hears a referring phrase being used, that verbal stimulus serves as a functional indication to project one’s attention towards some relevant thing of the kind indicated by the noun used. In the simple case we are imagining, I have chosen to point, by using words, towards a cooking pot within visual range. Just as the functional indications achieved by a frog relate to some future action which it might perform, not to some past causal links, so my use of a referring phrase

4. James Gibson’s concept of affordances, introduced in §6.2, is highly relevant here. His account of perception anticipates the interactive model of representation, despite its also retaining, inconsistently, some encodingist features. For a detailed critique, see Bickhard and Ritchie 1983.

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presents my hearers with something they might do. When my hearers hear the sounds I make, and understand their conventional meanings, they have grasped an opportunity to identify the pot about which I am talking. Uptake is secured if and when my hearers orientate their own attention towards differentiating that same pot, scanning the visual field in order to locate it. Even if there should be two pots on the stove – say, one which is silver in colour and the other black – usually in practice there is no confusion. This is because my audience will call into play the standard presumption of anyone’s performing an assertive speech-act – that I am making a claim which is true – and so will look around in order to identify which is the one I am speaking of. Unless the context is such that this presumption is cancelled (for example, if the sentence is uttered as part of a lesson on English grammar, or as a philosophical example), the hearer will presume that a true statement has been made. So my audience will interpret the referring expression in whatever way best serves to render that statement true, and will identify the black pot. This account is at odds with Russell’s famous theory of definite descriptions, according to which the phrase “the pot” is not really a referring expression at all. I do not deny that Russell’s theory is an illuminating analysis of how definite descriptions work in mathematics, and in identifying the unique occupant of some role as such. However, it misdescribes the way such phrases work as referring expressions in the everyday use of natural languages. Quite obviously, I am not claiming that there is something which is a pot, and that there is no more than one thing which is a pot, and that it is black – which would indeed be false! Likewise, it is not incumbent upon any analysis of referring that it never be unclear or ambiguous what is being referred to. There might be two black pots in the vicinity. In that case, my hearer might have difficulty in identifying the one to which I am calling attention. But not necessarily! For example, if our immediately preceding conversation has been about one of these pots, and has been sufficiently clear to enable my hearer to recognize which of the two pots I am now speaking about, the conversational context serves to disambiguate this particular statement. For a speaker to succeed in securing uptake from the audience, it is not necessary that all theoretically possible ambiguities be ruled out, in advance. Philosophers find it tempting to suppose that the concept of truth requires that statements be completely determinate, and that therefore the context in which they are made should be exhaustively specifiable. But conversation does not work like that! Should a hearer find a speaker’s assertion unclear or ambiguous, a few moment’s questioning usually suffices to resolve the difficulty. Of course, it is always possible that a hearer has misinterpreted what a speaker has said, has not subsequently questioned it, and therefore remains forever after at cross purposes on the matter. That happens! There can be no

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guarantees of accurate identification of a reference, nor of success of uptake. But the flow of a conversation is ordinarily sufficient for participants to continue in the confidence that they are genuinely communicating. Their confidence is defeasible; there is no need for the statement to be absolutely determinate. Usually, having one’s attention directed towards something involves actually looking when that thing is nearby. But even when it is not, it is still the case that in talking about something, I am orientating myself – and my audience – towards that thing, not towards some surrogate for it. Only now, the orientation involves imaginative projection, rather than simply looking. The basic structure of how this works has already been outlined in §6.7. Whilst talking about things requires becoming somewhat disengaged from direct interaction with them, it still invokes the potentialities they afford within a wider network of conditional interactions. Just as a toddler has available many possible ways of interacting with a toy block, which depend upon other interactive potentialities being completed first, so more sophisticated speakers and hearers can project their understanding along complex webs of potential interactions in terms of which reference to absent items can be traced out. The objective sense of the referring expressions used pertains to future potential actions which might be undertaken with respect to them – namely, to re-identify them – whether those things be present or absent. How we imaginatively project ourselves towards something absent is no more puzzling, in this respect, than how we act to bring about some goal not yet attained (and frogs can do that!). It is because relatively stable nodes are found within our networks of accessible interactions that we have coined referring phrases – proper names, definite descriptions, demonstrative phrases – by which to represent and refer to them. In this, their serving as referring expressions is more important than their sense. This point can be appreciated most readily in the case of those definite descriptions which have ‘grown capital letters’, that is, have come to function more like proper names. The Morning Star is not a star; New College, Oxford, is not (any more) a new college; in Australia, the Queen’s Birthday holiday is not on the Queen’s birthday. The fact that those sentences are not self- contradictory is evidence that the referring function of the referring expressions overrides whatever descriptive import the sense of those expressions might have.

7.5 Simple acts of assertion – predicating Secondly, when I assert (in some conversation, in normal circumstances, etc.) that that pot is black, the predicate “is black” ascribes a definite feature to the subject, the pot. I am asserting of the actual cooking pot that it is black. When I ascribe to it such a feature, I select from amongst its many features just that one (its being black) for my hearer’s attention. By this selection,

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I am focussing attention upon a feature already evident to me so that my hearers may likewise recognize the pot as having that feature. This again is a matter of how we orientate ourselves towards the entity talked about. The verbal distinction between subject and predicate, within the sentence asserting the latter of the former, serves progressively to narrow attention: first to the pot, and then to its colour. The intentionality inherent in my speech-act is to take note of this feature, leaving for the moment all the other features of that pot in the background. Does the fact that some predicates are vague constitute a difficulty for this account? An argument for thinking that perhaps it does goes somewhat like this. The truth of a simple subject-predicate statement seems to commit us to holding that whatever feature is predicated of something is a property which it either has or lacks. But consider a vague predicate such as “is bald” – some men are clearly bald, and some others are not, but it is not determinate how many hairs someone has to have left to qualify for baldness. Yet a thing either has some feature or it does not, so “Charles is bald” would have to be determinately true or determinately false. But this statement is neither, as is evident if Charles’s head is missing some of its hair but not enough for him to have the shiny pate characteristic of those who clearly are bald. So, is Charles bald, or not? And if he is not, does that mean that the statement was false? The flaw in this argument is its assumption that features ‘in the world’ are fully determinate, so that any vagueness is attributable only to our language. That assumption rests on a confusion. At any time, a man does have a determinate number of hairs on his head. It does not follow from that fact, however, that being bald is not a feature ‘in the world’, for all that baldness is a matter of degree. That is, it is not only our language, but also some of the features manifest in the world which are matters of degree and therefore do not lend themselves to being described by ‘sharp- edged’ concepts. It is just as plausible to consider that the Yes/No character of “Does X have feature F” is a misleading projection from logic onto the world, as it is to believe that the vagueness of “is bald” is only a feature of language and that there is no indeterminacy ‘in the world’. So we do not have to say that “Charles is bald” is simply false; we can agree that he is somewhat bald. Even more accurately, we could agree that Charles is going bald.

7.6

Simple acts of assertion – communicating

Let us now consider the third aspect of simple assertions. There is more projecting going on when I assert “that pot is black” than my orientating myself towards it and drawing attention to one of its features. Since typically I am talking to an audience, part of the point of my assertion is to orientate that person, or persons, towards the same entity, that black pot, so that they notice the same feature as I am attributing to it. Just as it is the actual

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pot which the speaker is pointing towards, so it is the actual pot towards which the attention of the audience is being directed. In general, the point of speaking is to share my interest in some phenomenon with my audience. In speaking, I am laying claim to my hearer’s attention and seeking to draw it towards the same phenomenon as I am talking about. How this works is not fundamentally different from what we have already noted with respect to action in general. In this context, my use of that sentence has the function of presenting my audience with a pot-identifying opportunity. For my speech-act to be reasonable, I must presume that my audience has also acquired the skills involved in using the noun “pot”, the demonstrative “that”, and the predicate “black”. And we both must have learnt how to describe things. Those are general linguistic practices into which we both must previously have been inducted if my statement is to be effective as an act of communication. This aspect makes clear how statement-making exemplifies the futureorientation we noted in non-human cases of representation. Exercising linguistic skills acquired in the past, I am inviting my audience to scan their visual field and, on the basis of my words and other available contextual cues, to pick out from it the same thing as I am orientated towards, and to notice its colour. That is, in speaking of something, I am sharing my orientation towards that phenomenon with my hearers, so that they might direct themselves towards it as well. In pointing out this pot, I am pointing them towards it too. For this act of communication to succeed, my hearers and I must come to have a common orientation towards the same thing. And the same applies when I make statements about the past; I am still inviting my audience to perform, in the immediate future, an act of re-identification, although what they are being invited to identify is in the past. Of course, it can happen that my audience fails to identify what I am pointing them towards – not because they do not understand the words I used, but because they are confused as to which pot I am talking about (suppose, for example, no pots are visible, or there are a number of black pots in the vicinity). Usually, as I have already remarked, confusions can be sorted out through further conversation. But when that does not happen, have I failed to make a statement? No; this failure to communicate clearly and unambiguously is simply a case of an action (in this case, an assertion) which fails to fulfil one aspect of its telos, like any poorly executed action which misses its mark. Although that shows this particular act of assertion to be deficient, any story about any sort of action has to encompass the possibility of deficient actions. It does not invalidate the analysis I am offering. All too often, the communicative function of assertion is left out by those who believe that their theories of formal semantics cover all that needs to be said on the subject. No wonder that it has then become so difficult to

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give an account of the point of assertion! In the face of that, it is important to emphasize that underlying the practice of assertion is this shared directedness. As Heidegger has put it (in his typically idiosyncratic way), what is shared is our ‘being towards’ what has been pointed out. Communication is “letting someone see with us what has been pointed out in its definite character” (1996, 145). When the assertion succeeds, speakers and hearers come to have that directedness in common. But what if there is no- one present to identify what the assertion is about? The simple case we are considering has been couched in terms of a speaker and an audience. But in typical cases of writing, no audience is currently present. Perhaps this book I am writing is never published, and no one will ever read it! Since that is possible, how can communication be an essential part of what I am doing? Well, whether or not anyone ever reads this book, I am nevertheless writing it for an audience. I can only imagine who that audience might be, and I might be disappointed (or pleased!) at the audience range it actually achieves. But typically writers do have an intended audience in mind, even if it be just one person, as with private letters and many emails. They are still communicative acts. As I have repeatedly insisted, an act does not have to succeed in attaining its telos in order to be an action – quite the contrary, the possibility of going wrong is intrinsic to the very concept. Nor does the communicative function of assertion preclude such practices as writing private diaries, muttering to oneself, etc. But these linguistic performances are parasitic upon the practice of linguistic communication; as Wittgenstein rightly argued, they are not essentially private. In such cases, either the acts are purely expressive, or the audience is oneself. At this point, another clarification is required. What distinguishes assertion from say, inviting one’s audience to ‘consider’ something? That too has ‘shared orientation’, but does not make a claim to truth, because no assertion has been made. Does that indicate that something is missing from our analysis of assertion? No, because it would be a mistake to think that making an assertion involves first entertaining a thought (whether silently or out loud) and then doing something else with it. Rather, something extra is happening when someone ‘considers’ something, without asserting it. Standardly, as was pointed out above, in an assertion a speaker is pointing out, by way of a speech-act, how a certain matter is. But when one is considering something, one is imagining what it would be for it to be so. That is, one projects oneself beyond what is the case into the realm of possibility.5 An invitation to consider something cancels the claim to be presenting

5. As we will see in §9.1, Søren Kierkegaard argued that even when I am thinking of something which is real, I “lift this given reality out of the real and set it in the possible” (1944, 265).

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something actual. Rather, it is as if one has pointed along a web of potential interactions towards some relatively invariant situation, but then severed its connections with one’s current existence. The implication that reality is as it would have been had an assertion been performed has been suspended. How this is to be understood is not fundamentally different from the treatment of conditionals, which I will discuss in the next section. All this concerns the objectives involved in the act of assertion itself. Those objectives are not to be confused with the goals which a speaker might be seeking to fulfil in making a statement. The latter can be many and varied. The speaker might be wanting to elicit agreement from, or to inform, or to entertain the audience, or to show off, etc. But there is an effect on the part of the audience which is more intimately involved in the assertion’s being an act of communication. To anticipate what follows, let us suppose that the speaker’s assertion seems credible, and its content is a piece of information new to the audience. Then that audience’s grasping what the speaker has said will entail a transformation of some sort in their understanding. Even if that content is not news to the audience, their understanding it will involve certain changes: they will have their own (previously acquired) understanding of the situation reinforced, and provided they do not discern any dissembling on the part of the speaker, they will learn that the speaker believes it too. These transformations are what enables communication to progress. We can now see more clearly how what speakers are doing in making statements differs from what they are doing in performing other kinds of speech-act. There is, after all, something which an assertive speech-act seeks to do with respect to its audience, some kind of response which it seeks to elicit. In making statements, speakers are orientating themselves towards the thing or things which they are talking about, and are distinguishing some feature of that subject. Provided the assertive act secures appropriate uptake from an audience, the hearers do the very same. Whereas nonassertive speech-acts are orientated towards some other kind of action as a sequel or response, an act of assertion looks towards eliciting the same orientation from its audience as the speaker has performed in making that statement. (That is why an audience might simply respond by saying “Yes, I see that” or “That’s right”, or “I agree”, or some such.) This observation clarifies the sense in which an assertion, unlike any other kind of speechact, contains within its own structure a certain kind of ‘closure’. Its telos is to identify some feature of a certain phenomenon, and it invites its hearers to do the same. No other kind of action is implicated by it. That the proper function of statements is to orientate their speakers and hearers towards the same actual phenomenon, nothing else, is confirmed when we reflect on the experience of verification. Consider what is involved in a friend’s verifying my statement that that pot is black. She hears the statement, looks at the pot, and recognizes that it is indeed black. What is demonstrated is that it does lend itself to being described just as

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my statement did. In a simple case of verification like this, what seeing the thing referred to demonstrates is nothing else than that this state of affairs is what I had in mind in making that statement. What gets shown is an identity (not a correspondence): the phenomenon described in my assertion is the same as that we are now both looking at. That is, we both recognize that the phenomenon is the very one, the pot’s being black, that my statement directed us towards. For this reason, in verifying the truth of a statement, there is no relation of agreement between knowing and its object, nor between some ideal content and a physical reality. Nor is there any question of comparing representations, either amongst themselves, or with real entities. Rather, what gets shown is an identity: the situation described in my assertion is the same as that we are now looking at. I said that that pot is black, and we can see that it is black. What I asserted, and what is the case, are the same. The logic of this is no different from the case of a frog which has received a functional indication of an eating opportunity, flicks it tongue, and eats a bug. The action indicated to the frog encompassed a potential situation (eating a bug) as its ultimate telos, and that proved to be true. What happened when it flicked its tongue was the same as was indicated: it was an opportunity to eat. Likewise, in verifying an assertion, the audience is confirming that the situation is as it was said to be.

7.7

Complex assertions

The content of an assertion performed by uttering a declarative sentence can also occur unasserted in more complex contexts. For example, not only can I assert that that pot is black, I can assert that if that pot is black, then it is not mine. Indeed, from those two statements, it can be concluded that that pot is not mine, an inference which can only be valid if the antecedent clause of my second, conditional statement is an instance of the same type as my first statement. Learning to construct complex statements follows a recursive path; children first learn how to construct simple statements. Once they have understood how complex connectives like “and”, “or”, and “if ... then” work, they then try out using those connectives for themselves, with the help of competent speakers, until they master the practice. Accordingly, the very notion of a statement is recursive. Another complexity is that the most straightforward analysis of a ‘blind ascription’ of truth such as “What the witness said is true” is “There is some statement p such that the witness said that p and it is true that p”. Again, we need at times, especially in logic, to make statements which involve generalizing over an infinity of statements or propositions. According to a widely accepted philosophical doctrine, unless quantifying over them can somehow be paraphrased away, that involves admitting such entities as

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propositions into our ontology, as part of the ‘furniture’ of reality. Indeed, that alleged consequence follows directly from Quine’s slogan, that to be is to be a value of a bound variable. That is implausible. When operating at the high level of abstraction typical of philosophical reflection, it is convenient to be able to use generic words like “statement” and “proposition”. But these useful terms can also be misleading; they actually do mislead when they are taken to name some peculiar kind of entity which a speaker entertains in uttering a sentence and which is identifiable independently of any speech-acts. Although we speak of ‘making statements’, strictly speaking there are no such entities, and they cannot be manufactured. Pace Quine, philosophers who think that speaking of ‘some statement’ or ‘every proposition’ (or ‘the meaning’) amounts to admitting entities called statements, propositions, and meanings into one’s ontology believe in verbal magic. We have found no reason to posit such entities, and good reasons why we should not. I have been arguing that the truth of statements is to be understood, in paradigm cases, in terms of an act of assertion being directed towards an actual phenomenon. The assertion goes to the thing itself. How does that extend to cases where talk of ‘pointing out’ or ‘directed towards’ seems to be out of place? This difficulty might seem to arise most acutely with respect to statements involving quantified generalization, where there is no obvious use of demonstrative conventions. It is no part of the account being developed here that “Some pot is black” has to be interpreted as directing us towards some particular pot. Nevertheless, that statement is true if and only if some actual pot is black. The rules governing the operations whereby we understand quantified generalizations do direct us in this case to look for a black pot, if we are to verify what is asserted. Similarly, when we make the statement “All humans are mortal”, what we are asserting is the actual mortality of all humans, nothing else. The sense of that statement directs us towards each and every human; when we do so we will discover that each is mortal. To put the point more generally, acts of assertion direct our understanding by means of the sense of the names and descriptions used, in the context, and the logical rules governing the proper use of the other words uttered, towards whatever has to be the case if the telos of that act is to be achieved. We need to recognize nothing more than that in order to understand blind ascriptions of truth to statements, quantification over statements (or propositions), and how the same statement can both be asserted and occur unasserted within complex statements. Provided the role of these linguistic devices are not sundered from the psycho-social contexts of their actual use, no peculiar ontological consequences follow. What logical operators mean is a function of the operations which they license. Understanding sentences containing such logical operators requires the capacity to perform those operations; that too is a practical skill, for all that those operations exhibit

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logical relations. Logical quantifiers only appear to be ontologically loaded if language has already been cut off from its use, and reified. The most interesting case where statements appear unasserted are conditionals. Philosophers have often puzzled over the truth- conditions of such statements. In particular, there has been considerable controversy over efforts to find a logical operator which would adequately represent the connection between the antecedent and the consequent in the “if ... then” sentences of natural languages. It has seemed paradoxical to many that the truth-functional logic developed by Frege and Russell allows that a conditional sentence with a false antecedent implies the truth of any and every consequent. This has led some logicians to devise systems of formal logic which place restrictions on implication; the most plausible are systems of ‘relevant logic’. The kind of conditional sentences which have been found to be the most difficult to understand are those called ‘counterfactuals’ – sentences like “If it had rained, the famine would have been averted” – since these presuppose that the “if”- clause is false. Attempts to explain counterfactuals by defining some special kind of logical implication have all proved ineffective and unconvincing. The most satisfactory analysis of conditionals, including counterfactuals, however, comes from taking serious note of the systematic shifts in the tenses of the verbs used in the antecedent and the consequent clauses (Dudman 1984). For instance, a sentence like “if it were to rain, then we would get wet” is future-regarding, but the verbs (in the subjunctive mood) seem to be in past tense. This peculiar use of tenses, which most of the philosophical analyses ignore, in fact provides the clue to understanding how conditional statements work. Another clue, also usually ignored, is the fact that “then” is a temporal word, as is the word for “if” in German: “wenn”. Vic Dudman’s analysis of conditionals follows up these temporal clues. Typically, in any conditional, the speaker constructs, from some point along a timeline, an imaginative projection in which the “if” condition is satisfied. We saw in §6.7 how people acquire through experience vast interlocking webs of potential interactions, in which some potential interactions only become possible provided certain other interactions are completed first. The ability to project possible futures is intrinsic to the logical structure of any action. And it is by learning how to access some potential interaction by first performing some other interaction that we acquire the concept of something’s being conditional upon another. That concept is deployed when we project in imagination some state of affairs which would become accessible provided we first orientate ourselves towards some other state of affairs. The latter is what is described in the antecedent clause. From the time when that antecedent state of affairs is imagined to obtain, a possible future, often an alternative to some actual occurrence, can then be projected forward. Which tense is assigned to the verb in the antecedent clause depends upon the choice of

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a temporal point at which the acceptance of actual history gives way to imaginative construction. If the location of this ‘change- over’ point is the same as the moment of speech, the antecedent state of affairs is described in the present tense, and the consequent by using the future tense (“If it rains, we will get wet”). If, however, the ‘change- over’ point is located in the past, the antecedent is described in the simple past tense, and the consequent by using the present subjunctive (“If it rained, the road would be wet”). In the case of counterfactuals, a ‘change- over’ point is chosen which is in the past of some already past moment about which information relevant to the issue is presupposed. To see how this works, consider the example cited above, “If it had rained, the famine would have been averted”. This presupposes that a famine has occurred in the present as a result of the known failure of rain at some relevant time in the past. Call that past point in time Tp. To construct this counterfactual, a ‘change-over’ point is chosen which is earlier than Tp. Call that change- over point Tp-x. Then, from that earlier point in time Tp-x a possible future is projected forward, alternative to the actual sequence of events, in which it is imagined that the rains did come at Tp, with the result that now there is no famine. That is why this counterfactual describes the antecedent in the past perfect tense, and the consequent in the simple perfect tense. The logical grammar of conditionals, whether simple or counterfactual, therefore is inescapably temporal. They crucially involve the time when the assertion itself is made, imaginative projection taking off from certain points in time – either the same as that of the assertion, or some moment in its past – and temporally ordered sequence. So even such a logical relation as conditionality is essentially embedded within a temporal structure. This shows that, far from the temporality of the act of assertion being irrelevant to logic and semantics, it is indispensable. That the contextual features of acts of assertion – the identity of their speakers, their audience, their place and time – are essential to understanding the meaning of many sentences also follows from considering socalled ‘indexicals’: words like “I” and “you”, “here” and “there”, “now”, and “then”. For that very reason, some philosophers addicted to the Olympian standpoint have vainly tried to propose a language from which all such reflexive words are eliminated. But the occurrence of conditional statements shows that temporality is essentially involved, even if we set indexicals aside. The outcome of these analyses thus confirms our insistence on the indispensability of reckoning with the spatiotemporal character of statements, as the content of acts of assertion, for understanding how language is meaningful. And if the temporal character of statements is indispensable, it follows that truth also has a temporal character. Now that we have secured that conclusion we can turn to consider the truth of statements.

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8 The Truth of Statements

Not only are assertions – speech-acts of statement-making – appraised for their truth, so also are the statements made. Indeed, the word “true” is used more often in connection with statements than with the speech-acts which promulgate them. What makes a simple statement true has already been anticipated. I argued in the previous chapter that what speakers are doing in making a statement has three aspects: (a) orientating themselves towards what they are talking about; (b) ascribing to it some feature; and (c) directing the attention of the audience towards the same phenomenon. When a statement is verified, what gets shown is an identity: the situation which is currently being observed is the same as what was stated. And I claimed that the logic of this is no different from the case of a frog which flicks its tongue on receipt of a functional indication of an eating opportunity, and discovers that what was indicated proved to be true; the situation was an opportunity to eat. We have yet to consider how this account relates to the various senses we have found in the non-linguistic uses of “true”. And we have yet to explain how it accommodates false statements. But before we can address those issues, we need to reconsider this seemingly straightforward account of the truth of statements. For while this account is not wrong, it is not yet satisfactory. It leaves out a significant element, which inevitably complicates the story.

8.1

Understanding and interpretation

Missing from the account of simple assertions developed in the previous chapter is the role of interpretation, both in the act of speaking and in a hearer’s understanding. Any act of assertion expresses the speaker’s understanding of what it is about, and so makes explicit how the speaker is interpreting it. An audience’s understanding of that statement involves yet more interpretation. So it will be useful to revisit the simple example explored in the previous chapter and reflect upon how it involves interpretation. 182

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For not only does interpretation underpin our practice of making statements, but that fact also has significant implications for the question of their truth. The example we considered was my asserting in a quite straightforward way, in normal conversational circumstances, in the presence of a black cooking pot, and without any ulterior objective, “That pot is black”. It might seem finicky to contend that interpretation is significant in such a simple assertion. After all, nothing problematic seems to be involved in straightforward talk about such everyday equipment. But whenever a speaker makes even as simple a statement as this a lot of interpretation has already gone on. As a competent speaker of English who is at home in the kitchen, I have learnt about cooking pots; I have often used one myself for cooking, and have seen others do so. I already understand what one can do with such an implement. I have come to understand this particular object as something affording those potential interactions – that is, as a pot useful for cooking. It has proved to be a relatively stable, invariant node in a network of conditional interactions undertaken in kitchens and homeware shops, along the lines sketched in §6.7. My repertoire of potential interactions constitutes my understanding of this object as ‘a cooking pot’ – which is what I have learnt to call it. Understanding like this is grounded in ‘know-how’. When I then use the phrase “that pot” to refer to it, I am expressing that understanding, which speech makes explicit. Referring requires orientating oneself along those sub-webs of potential interactions which render meaningful the words used. How I refer to this implement, as a ‘pot’, articulates that interpretation. Likewise, if my assertion succeeds in communicating, my audience has understood what I have said, and thereby has come to understand what is being asserted. This comes about because what they have heard evokes their own understanding of the possibilities such an object affords, and that this thing is appropriately called ‘a cooking pot’. Their interpreting what I have referred to as a cooking pot enables them to appropriate the content of my assertion into their own understanding. Of course, in the normal flow of conversation, neither speakers nor hearers heed that what they understand and say already involves a great deal of interpretation. Since making statements is a practice which has to be learnt and enacted, the participants already have available a large range of linguistic skills which they simply deploy as they converse. Once they have gained mastery in the use of language, linguistic expressions embed selfconscious awareness so effectively that in daily conversations the words generally just flow; only occasionally are we self- consciously aware of selecting words and grammatical forms, as we ‘go searching for words’. Generally, we pay no attention to the way our use of language expresses an interpretation grounded in practical understanding.

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Nor generally, does an audience first apprehend some sounds and then go searching for some intelligible way of interpreting those sounds. Provided they too are competent speakers of the language, and are familiar enough with the kinds of matters being talked about, they understand straightaway what is being asserted. But not always. Conversation proceeds on the presumption that the various speech-acts of all parties, as well as the hearers’ interpretation of them, do succeed – that somehow they generally get them right. That presumption is always defeasible – as happens when, in the course of a conversation, it suddenly becomes evident to one or more parties that they have been talking at cross-purposes. It can, and does, happen that what they assumed were mutual understandings were, in fact, misunderstandings. It is when communication falters, and the participants become aware that they do not understand each other. Again, sometimes it happens that a hearer will become puzzled by the words spoken and wonder what was meant by them. In a more extreme case, one will hear the sounds (for instance, an unfamiliar name) and wonder what was said (for instance, whether it was a name which was uttered or some other word, perhaps mispronounced). Whenever these interruptions to conversational flow occur, the interpretations embodied in what is being said, and heard, require clarification. In saying that all acts of assertion articulate interpretations, I am not implying that speakers first apprehend some phenomenon they wish to talk about, and then impose some interpretation upon it. In this case, I do not initially experience an object simply there in front of me, and then understand it as a cooking pot. As Heidegger has emphasized (1996, 140), Interpretation does not, so to speak, throw a ‘significance’ over what is nakedly objectively present and does not stick a value on it, but what is encountered in the world is always already in a relevance which is disclosed in the understanding of world, a relevance which is made explicit by interpretation. From a quite different perspective, James Gibson (1979, 140) was making the same point in the passage quoted in §6.2, where he argued that perceiving an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has yet been able to agree upon. The object we perceive is already value-rich. It is remarkable how this concept of affordance, developed in the spirit of Jean Piaget, concurs with Heidegger’s insistence in Being and Time of the phenomenological priority of the useful over the objectively present. According to his analysis, our primary way of relating to the world in which we find ourselves focusses upon what we find ‘handy’ (zuhanden) in our environment. It is only when they obstruct our attaining practical goals – because they are in the way, or malfunction, or are missing – that we come

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to view them as ‘objectively present’ (vorhanden). This is a secondary mode of relating to them. It is through our practical interactions with useful things that we come to perceive their ‘affordances’. So, when we speak about them, the locutions used derive their meaningfulness from their representing those interactive possibilities. In referring to something as a such-and-such, we are making explicit that relevance we already understand them to have. In the example we have been considering, I am commenting on the colour of a certain cooking pot. I do so by uttering certain words. The referring phrase I utter – “that pot” – functions as a linguistic representation of that item of kitchen equipment. But it does so only in context. Just by itself, this phrase does not suffice to pick out the entity to which I am referring. I know to what I am referring, but my audience has to understand what I said in the light of cues present in the context: both in the linguistic context and in the real-life situation within which I have performed this act of assertion. As a speaker, I am relying on those contextual features to make clear to my audience what I am asserting. Perhaps this pot has already figured in the preceding conversation; perhaps I point with my hand as I speak; perhaps I look directly at it as I speak, etc., etc. Whatever the circumstances, one of the informal, unstated rules of conversation is that speakers should say just enough to enable their audience to pick out the intended reference. Context is crucial for understanding linguistic representations – and in more ways than one. Occasionally, the established meaning of the words used does suffice by itself to identify the referent: in mathematics, or when referring to people who are the sole occupants of designated roles, such as “the Prime Minister of Australia”. But these cases are atypical; despite their prominence in the philosophical literature, they are not the paradigm cases. And even in cases like these, where there is little room for ambiguity, interpretation is still involved. One must have learnt how to perform the relevant mathematical operations within the relevant formal system, and in the second case, one must know enough about political structures to know what it is for someone (at the time of writing, Julia Gillard) to be the Prime Minister of Australia. Nevertheless, as discussed in §2.3, many philosophers believe that all the contextual cues can be made explicit in an amplified sentence. This idea has obvious attractions to those who accept the linguistic transposition of the Platonic conception of truth. For such amplified sentences, if true, would be timelessly true, and what they mean would be unchanging and perspectivally neutral, independently of speakers and contexts. But as we saw, this ideal is an illusion. It is not possible to eliminate all self-reflexivity from language. Nor is it possible to understand conditional statements without attending to the tenses used. And it is not possible to eliminate perspectives altogether.

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Furthermore, for this ideal to be achievable, all references would have to be fixed by ‘rigid designators’ across all possible worlds. And for that to occur, all hypothetical possibilities would have to be settled in advance. But this requirement is absurd! It is quite unclear how one could settle – even in principle – every possible hypothetical relevant to fixing references, so that, once and for all, every referring expression would have a ‘rigid’ designation. As Yourgrau has pointed out (1990, 109–110): one can use a name like ‘Moses’, and get by in most contexts, without having decided yet how to answer certain crucial hypotheticals. (‘What would you say if the socalled Moses never did lead the Jews out of Egypt?’, etc.). Quite simply, speech is not like that. Most of it is open-textured; that is, what the words used mean is not fully determinate with respect to all theoretically possible conditions. Just as meaning is projective – grounded in future- orientated interactions – so it is not necessary to render fully determinate in advance all possibilities of naming and describing, under all possible circumstances. Most speakers would be quite nonplussed were they to be asked to rule on such outlandish hypotheticals. Back to our example. Because cooking pots are distinct, stable, and enduring items of kitchen equipment, we generally have little difficulty in differentiating them from their surroundings. So it seems easy enough for me (the speaker) and for my audience to identify the same thing, this particular pot, as ‘fitting’ the words I use to speak about it. But the apparent simplicity of this case is deceptive; often discrimination is not so straightforward and clear- cut. Taking simple assertions about pots as paradigmatic, without reflecting on the roles of understanding and interpretation, would overlook the fact that even the simplest discriminations have to be learnt. Distinguishing amongst things and features in one’s environment is a practical ability; it requires know-how. Infants have to become skilled at discriminating one thing from another. Just gazing around is not enough. Experimental work on human perception has now clearly established just how wrong the ‘imprinting’ model is, even for apparently straightforward seeing. Perception is not passive; it is interactive. In seeing, for example, we quickly scan the visual field, latching onto only some of the available information. We do not see everything in the visual field in front of us; often we literally overlook features which are not salient to whatever catches our interest in the scene before us. Even when we discern something of interest, it is not always clear to us what it is. Moreover, as we noted in §6.7, every perceptual act reaches out to more than what is immediately given in it; we interpret what we see in the light both of our previous experience, and of what we are expecting to see. One consequence, as the law courts regularly demonstrate, is that the evidence of

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an eyewitness, in the absence of corroboration, is often seriously unreliable. All perception, including visual perception, involves discrimination, selection, and interpretation. Whenever we discriminate something within the situation around us, we draw upon skills already acquired in order to recognize it as something or other. As Wittgenstein famously put it, “all seeing involves seeing-as”. Kant was making the same point when he insisted that nothing given us through our senses can be known unless it has been rendered intelligible, by being brought under concepts. Acquiring the practical skills of discrimination is the same as learning the relevant general concepts. Interpretation is inescapable. Even this is too quick. People have to learn how to produce the sounds suitable for serving as representations in a language which the audience is likely to understand. This too is a skill, which children typically take considerable time to learn, and even adult speakers can find difficult (witness the difficulties English-speakers have in producing the sounds of Chinese, and vice versa). And they have to learn which sounds are conventionally associated in their language with which kinds of items. The various human languages carve up worldly phenomena in different ways, so that items described by a single word in one language are often distinguished by different words in another (a familiar example: the Inuit have many words for snow). I utter a certain set of sounds because, in the language in which I am speaking, I know how to express certain concepts under which I have learnt to understand phenomena.

8.2 Interpretation and description The open-textured character of language also affects how predicates are to be understood. The predicate “is black” in our simple example seems uncomplicated. But that appearance is deceptive. For not only is the meaning of words not fully determinate with respect to all theoretically possible conditions, but also what they mean is often dependent upon how they are being used on particular occasions. I am calling the pot black, but what that statement means, and whether it is true, can vary. Consider the following possible circumstances: (a) the pot on the stove is made from cast iron, in new condition; (b) the pot is made from aluminium, but is now covered with soot; (c) the pot is made from aluminium, but has been coated with black enamel; (d) the pot is made from cast iron, but is now glowing red from excessive heat; (e) the pot is made from cast iron, but is now covered with brown grease stains.

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Whether it is correct to call this pot black varies with the circumstances. For instance, if I have just entered the kitchen and discover that the pot has boiled dry and is as described in (d), the appropriately true statement to utter, in alarm, is “that pot is red hot” – not “black”. Now, consider the situation described in (e) above. Suppose that what are relevant to the current conversation are the visible colours of surfaces. If in those circumstances I call the pot black, my statement would be false. On another occasion, in different circumstances, calling that same pot in the same condition black because it is made of cast iron would be true, even though its surface has become stained brown (for instance, if I am explaining why it is time it was cleaned). Usually, the conversational circumstances within which the statement is made enable a hearer to interpret how “the pot is black” is to be taken on that occasion, and thus to judge whether the statement made is true or false. With many indexicals there are general rules which allow statements to be translated salva veritate (with no change in truth-value) into another perspective (such as tomorrow saying “it was sunny yesterday” to make the same statement as saying now “it is sunny today”). But with the kind of perspectival content we are considering here there are no general rules which take the meaning of colour words as fixed and prescribe how to translate from one set of circumstances to another. Speakers and audiences have to be sensitive to the specifics of each context, and work out from them what the words used mean on that occasion – and thus what statements are being made. As Charles Travis has said (1997, 101): Perspectival thought is the normal and pervasive case. ... One might say: we relate cognitively to the world in essentially perspectival ways. It might seem tempting to claim that, in these five cases, the word “black” is simply ambiguous; stating the relevant truth-conditions suffices to fix the meaning of such descriptions, once they are disambiguated. But such a manoeuvre is not open to us when the concept of truth is precisely what is in question. To draw together the points for which I have been arguing thus far, there are five operations which contribute to the process of interpretation: (a) discriminating an identifiable phenomenon (the pot) within its environment; (b) recognizing it under an appropriate concept (e.g., as a ‘pot’); (c) noting salient features in the contexts, both linguistic and situational, which would enable my audience to orientate themselves towards that particular item; (d) uttering sounds, likely to be familiar and meaningful to my audience, which are appropriate in the context to serve as a representation of it; and

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(e) understanding the appropriate predicate phrase to use in that context. These five operations do not necessarily occur in that order; for instance, if one is searching in a supermarket for green apples, one’s having the concept ‘green apples’ already in mind (perhaps one has a shopping list) precedes one’s discriminating the fruit sought. In everyday life, working out how best to formulate an appropriate sentence is typically accomplished in a flash; we are not aware of having performed these five distinct operations. But not always; at times (as in writing this book!) clarifying one’s concepts and finding the right words can be a challenging task. Indeed, the history of science involves more than a series of discoveries; the most significant scientific developments have often turned on formulating more adequate ways of discriminating, conceptualizing, and describing phenomena than hitherto. What is important for our investigation is that this complex process of interpretation is shot through with contingency. That is, while it is necessary that each of these operations occur whenever someone succeeds in making statements about worldly phenomena, how they occur is rarely necessary. Stable, relatively cohesive things (like pots, dogs, and stones) can usually be easily discriminated, but sometimes it is not so obvious how to carve up complex interactive processes into their significant parts. And since everyone’s use of language draws upon their own experience, differences amongst people’s personal histories result in differences in how they perceive and understand what is presented to them. Our common experience is that the world affords more than one way of being understood. The possibilities projected in one person’s understanding might not be exactly the same as those projected in another person’s understanding. And how these possibilities are expressed in different cultures do not always map one-toone from one language into another (even such everyday words as “chair” in English and “chaise” in French do not have the same extension). That generates difficulties in translating from one language to another, with inevitable loss of subtle but significant nuances. Precisely because interpretation is necessarily embodied in our linguistic practices there often can be more than one appropriate interpretation of any given phenomenon. Of course, in many conversations, no serious differences in how people interpret phenomena occur to disrupt easy communication. Nor does this principle preclude the possibility that one way of interpreting certain phenomena might prove to be superior to others. But, in general, how the world is under- determines how it may be understood and interpreted. That is why we commonly hear claims to be telling the truth countered by “That’s just your interpretation”. Indeed, expressions like “It’s a matter of interpretation” and “That still leaves room for interpretation” are widely accepted nowadays as truisms.

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Nevertheless, because of the lingering influence of the Platonic tradition, analytic philosophers have been slow to take this consequence of our historicity into account, and to think it through. In this regard, popular consciousness has outstripped them. So pervasive has the awareness of cultural relativity become nowadays that it has spawned in popular opinion a crude sceptical form of relativism which threatens to devalue truth altogether, as we noted in Chapter 1. Whether acknowledging this kind of relativity inevitably leads to relativism is a question I will adjourn until the next chapter. I suggested in §7.3 that we could say that the sentences we use to make statements serve, in the circumstances, as representations of states of affairs, of how things are. We can now see how that way of putting the matter leaves out of account these interpretive processes which lie at the heart of our contemporary problems with truth. It ignores the many ways in which re-presenting phenomena by uttering declarative sentences involves interpretation. And it assumes that issues of truth are simply questions of which sentences are correct, overlooking the knotty issues of how some phenomenon is most appropriately understood, and which words most adequately articulate that understanding. The formulation of a sentence apt to be used in an assertion of some phenomenon requires the performance of those multilayered operations. The same applies to the use of the word “fact”. The question whether facts are simply true sentences, or are extra-linguistic, has provoked fruitless debates. Both sides have been seizing on something right. Those who maintain that facts are extra-linguistic are right to insist that, like talk of ‘states of affairs’, citing a ‘fact’ does present an external phenomenon. On the other hand, those who maintain that facts are simply true sentences have rightly recognized that citing a ‘fact’ presents that phenomenon in a linguistically structured way. That is, what is claimed to be a fact is some external phenomenon which has already been interpreted in being presented through the use of language. (That is why politicians are prone to preface their claims with “The fact is ...” and “The reality is ...”; those phrases insinuate their own interpretations under the guise of objectivity.) Since rendering worldly phenomena intelligible requires bringing them under general concepts, we approach each phenomenon with a battery of concepts already to hand. The process of interpretation begins with a preunderstanding of what we are trying to understand. Often that generates no problems, as when the talk is about everyday cooking pots. But when what is encountered is novel in our experience, or when it becomes evident that our pre-understandings are impeding understanding, or when it is controversial how something should be described (one politician’s ‘terrorist’ is another’s ‘freedom fighter’), the issue of interpretation comes to the fore. There is then no alternative but to engage in a dialectic of conceptual trial and error, or in a dispute about how to describe the phenomenon. We have to test and revise our concepts against what is given in experience. But

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this is not a straightforward process, since ‘what is given in experience’ has always already been conceptualized in order to constitute it in our understanding as an object. Kant was right about that (McDowell 1994). Whenever it becomes evident that our initial understandings are somehow inadequate, we have to modify those concepts, and then try out the revised ones to determine whether they fit any better. But this means that the object we have constituted through conceptualizing becomes itself reconstituted. And so round and round we go, revising the concepts and reconstituting the objects against which we test each revision, in a process which theoretically need have no end. This dialectical process whereby objects are constituted through being interpreted, and the interpretation is then tested against them, is the famous ‘hermeneutical circle’. Unsurprisingly, this is an interactive process; both the object and its interpretation modify each other as this interplay proceeds. Is the principle that there can be a plurality of interpretations consistent with the principle of the hermeneutic circle? One might think not. The difficulty has been put this way: “Why would interpreters modify the object of interpretation to fit their evolving interpretations unless they thought that different interpretations require different objects?” (Thom 2000, 17). But if different interpretations require different objects, one object cannot have more than one interpretation. This difficulty, however, only arises if interpretation is thought to involve only two components: the object and its interpretation. But our account acknowledges five interpretative operations in the formulation of a statement. It follows from this that there is no unique way of representing the original phenomenon being interpreted (the principle of plurality), whilst the object represented through this process is affected by how the phenomenon is interpreted (the hermeneutic circle). Of course, we cannot say what some phenomenon is without thereby interpreting it; any linguistic representation of the object already has an interpretation built in. That is what lends plausibility to the idea that different interpretations require different objects. But although no phenomenon can be identified in speech without thereby constituting it as a represented object under some description, that does not render phenomena somehow internal to speech. There is still something which is being interpreted, even if we cannot say what it is in an interpretation-free way. Nietzsche famously claimed, “All is interpretation of interpretation”. Does it follow from what I have been arguing that he was right when he said (1968, §560, 302–303): That things possess a certain constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity is not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing.

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Nietzsche has rightly discerned something here, but there are two problems with how he has expressed his insight. What is right is that identifying something as a such-and-such is to have already engaged in the process of interpretation. In that sense, a thing cannot be explicitly identified independently of some interpretation. But if some given phenomenon admits of more than one interpretation, it does not follow that what is being interpreted does not have its own constitution. Nor does insisting that things do have their own constitution presuppose that interpretation is not essential. The second problem with Nietzsche’s claim is that he couples interpretation with subjectivity. Whether that is justified is a major issue, which I have already promised to address in the following chapter.

8.3

Ascribing truth to statements

To speak the truth is indeed, as Plato put it, to tell something as it is. That was also the burden of Aristotle’s famous saying (Metaphysics 1011b26–27): To say that the real (to on) is not, or that the non-real (to mē on) is, is false; but to say that the real is, and the non-real is not, is true. Most writers on our topic who cite this passage call it the classical definition of ‘the correspondence theory of truth’. That is a serious anachronism; it reads Locke’s way of explaining truth back into Aristotle. Furthermore, if this passage constitutes a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth, then everyone holds a correspondence theory! Like Plato, Aristotle was simply making explicit the ancient veridical sense of the verb “to be”, explained in §7.2. His way of articulating that sense, however, is rather unfortunate, since it reifies (as to on) the verb “to be” (einai), a move I have highlighted by translating “to on” as “the real”.1 Any modern philosopher who calls this a theory of any sort, let alone ‘the classical version of the correspondence theory of truth’, manifests both ignorance of the language in which Aristotle was writing and extraordinarily low expectations of theorizing. Insofar as Aristotle has any ‘theory’ on the subject at all, he tells a story of ‘combining’ and ‘separating’ which reads like a simplistic variant on Plato’s account in the Sophist.2 Not until the

1. I translate to on this way to emphasize the reification of being thus introduced. This translation does have the disadvantage of obscuring the fact that what is being reified is the verb einai (to be), which arguably describes a flow, a process. But that obfuscation, so fateful for the Western metaphysical tradition, is precisely the point I wish to highlight. 2. In fact, Aristotle followed Plato in holding an ‘objectual’ conception of truth, as can be seen in passages such as Metaphysics 993b24–32. For a more extended discussion of his conception of truth, see my Truth and Historicity, 120–126.

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seventeenth century, with Locke, do we get a developed doctrine which warrants being called a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth, and we have found any such theory defective. So how does our approach illuminate the truth of statements? I argued in §4.10 that the senses in which truth and error are involved in a frog’s acting upon its detection of an opportunity for eating shows how truthas- correctness is grounded in two other senses which are more basic and more ontologically significant. Even in such primitive interactions as a frog’s catching bugs, an action is true when it succeeds in doing what is functionally appropriate and attains its goal, and an indication of a potential action is true when it is reliable. These two senses are also in play in the much more sophisticated practice of people’s assertions, of their statementmaking speech-acts. Of course, there are important dissimilarities, relevant to our enquiry, between the case of a hungry frog and a human speaker. We have already noted, in §7.3, the striking parallels and obvious differences between how representations operate in these two cases. The ends sought in the two cases are significantly different. The representations we discussed in the case of a frog were indications of potential actions towards objectives essential to its self-maintenance. In the case of human speakers, what is relevant to understanding the truth of their statements is simply the towardness which characterizes their acts of assertion – most of which have nothing to do with their basic survival. Despite these dissimilarities, the grounding of truth-ascorrectness in the other two senses of truth disclosed in a frog’s interactions is also evident in the human practice of making statements. When we take seriously the fact that statements are rooted in speechacts of assertion, it follows that their truth must likewise be understood as grounded in those acts. That recalls the non-linguistic uses of “true”, for there too truth has to do with human activities. In these neglected uses, being true does indeed concern how people conduct themselves over time; its primary locus is the domain of action. The analysis of what truth means when ascribed to humans’ non-linguistic activities confirms its basic meaning as revealed by our interactive model. That rich meaning carries over to our linguistic activities. Firstly, and fundamentally, someone’s assertive speech-act is true or false, depending upon whether that act succeeds in fulfilling its intrinsic goal. The function for which humans have evolved the practice of assertion is to enable them to draw another’s attention to specific features of phenomena without having to handle them directly. As we saw in the previous chapter, its telos is to draw attention to some feature which a certain phenomenon actually has, and it invites its hearers to do the same. That is what that practice is designed to do, and an act of assertion is successful when it does precisely that.

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But, it might be objected, how does picking out some phenomenon, and ascribing to it some feature “it actually has” advance our understanding of the point of assertion? Is not that phrase simply an alternative locution for “it is true that it has”? If citing that as the point of assertion is supposed to illuminate the concept of truth, how is it to be understood independently? That objection would indeed be devastating if talking about phenomena were the only form of access we have to them. But it is not. The process of verifying statements requires accessing the relevant phenomena in order to ascertain whether they are as they were asserted to be. We do that by looking, or perceiving with the other senses, or by conducting experiments, or checking with sources already known to be reliable. Of course, this reply will not satisfy a thoroughgoing sceptic, who doubts that we can ever verify what is asserted. A thoroughgoing sceptic is likely to deny that we have any independent access to the world. But that sceptical denial is simply not credible; as I insisted in §6.3, actions relate their agents to external realities. This is where the priority accorded to action in this account proves to be so important. Understanding something, I have argued, is first and foremost practical; it is a matter of knowing what one can do with it. We are always already in the world, continually interacting with phenomena in our environments. Because we are in a far from equilibrium state, if we had no access to ‘the external world’, we could not exist. While many of our actions are not directed towards survival, reminding ourselves of the necessity of interactions for our very existence is enough to show the hollowness of the sceptic’s claims. So, it is not trivial to say that the point of assertion is to draw attention to some feature which a certain phenomenon actually has. We do have access to phenomena, at least in principle, independently of statements about them, and can check whether they are ‘just as’ they were said to be. Nevertheless, there is a significant point embedded in this objection. The maxim that a true statement picks out some phenomenon ‘just as’ it is asserted to be has to be understood in the light of the previous discussion of interpretation. That “as” flags the fact that interpretation is inescapable. When we are trying to verify a simple subject-predicate statement, the interpretation embodied in its expression guides our perception of what it purports to describe. If the statement is verified, what is demonstrated is that a phenomenon can be identified as fitting the referring phrase, and that, in the context, the predicate does properly describe (one of) its features. Since all perception involves interpretation – “seeing involves seeing-as” – the question is whether the phenomenon can be properly understood in the same way as was expressed in the statement made. Does it lend itself to being so interpreted? If the phenomenon shows itself to have been faithfully described, the act of assertion has succeeded in achieving its telos. That is what is meant when we say that a simple subject-predicate statement is

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true when, and only when, it ascribes to something features it actually has. And more generally, that is what is meant when we say, using philosopher’s shorthand, that a statement is true when and only when what it says to be so is so. The normativity implicit in the practice of assertion can easily be made explicit. Since picking out some phenomenon, and ascribing to it some feature it actually has, is the telos of simple assertions, that is what any exercise of that practice ought to accomplish. Alternatively, when speech-acts of this type fail to fulfil their proper function (because what they purport to pick out is not so), they are in error. When such an act of assertion is successful, it is true in the sense of its actually doing what it ought. The normativity of truth follows from the normative constraints implicit in this kind of speechact. In recent times, philosophers have not shown much interest in explicating the role of this “ought” in accounting for the truth of statements.3 But when an assertion succeeds in attaining its telos, the statement made thereby is also properly called true in that sense. Secondly, an act of assertion is true, in the sense of reliable, when it is faithful to reality. Since the point of an assertion is to orientate both speaker and audience towards the same phenomenon, it does so faithfully if and only if it thereby focusses explicitly upon a feature which that phenomenon shows itself to have. When it does so, it is trustworthy. Therefore the act is, in this sense, true, and so, derivatively, is the statement asserted. Alternatively, such a speech-act is false – that is, unreliable – if it fails to pick out a reality in the way it purports to orientate attention. In terms of Yourgrau’s metaphor, the arrow of the mind is unable to strike the mark towards which the speech-act aims to direct it. Of course, a speaker can mis-take how that reality is, and an audience can be misled or deceived by such unreliable assertions; one can accept as trustworthy what is actually unreliable. In that case, reality is not how that assertion presents it as being. But when the assertion is true, the audience acquires some genuine information, which they can rely on in their own future interactions. Both these senses of “true” – success and reliability – are aspects of the concept of truth as faithfulness, which we saw underlies the non-linguistic uses of “true”. The statement made by a true assertion, in those two senses, can be also accepted as correct. This is the third, familiar sense of “true” which we identified in §4.10. Although recent philosophical accounts of truth have concentrated exclusively on this sense of truth-as-correctness, those accounts have overlooked the fact that it is a derivative sense, grounded in, and deriving 3. One of the very few philosophers to present a distinctively teleological account of truth – although different from the one being developed here – was Anselm in the eleventh century. In his De Veritate, he argued that a statement is true when it “does what it ought” (facit quod debet), that is, when it signifies to be so what is so. See Truth and Historicity, chapter 6.

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its sense from, the other two senses. But although correctness is a derivative sense of truth, there is nothing wrong in ascribing it to statements. We can even ascribe truth in this sense to a sentence – provided the latter use is always understood as doubly derivative, as abstracted from the statements made by the use of that sentence – which in turn leads us back to the act of assertion.

8.4

Evaluating the T-schemata

As we remarked, many philosophers recently have argued that all that needs to be said about truth are the simple logical equivalences expressed in the standard T-schemata: T1: “p” is true if and only if p; T2: It is true that p if and only if p. In general, I am not contesting these schemata.4 They can be understood as just another way of expressing Plato’s dictum. The question is: Do those schemata say all that needs to be said about the truth of statements? Even amongst those philosophers who would reply “Yes”, differences of opinion abound. For some, the T-schemata have the force of defining the meaning of “true”. For those who call themselves minimalists, these are substantive theses about truth. For yet others, they are trivial, such that their alleged triviality serves only to show how philosophers have been beating up a storm over something which is simple, obvious, and unproblematic. These latter often are in sympathy with the redundancy or ‘deflationist’ approach, which regards “true” as eliminable from sentences without significant loss. Giving the opposite answer are those philosophers who do not deny the T-schemata but insist that much more needs to be said in order to explain and clarify what the truth of statements consists in. For these latter, there is more to the truth of statements than just these schemata. To be told that “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white tells us nothing about why the truth of a certain string of words should turn on the colour of snow. What is it about that sentence, on the one hand, and the colour of snow, on the other, which settles the question of the truth of that sentence? And if nothing more than these schemata need be said about the topic, why should anyone think that questions of truth are so important? The contorted debates amongst advocates of the competing theories of truth, 4.

Robert Nozick has pointed out that both Relativity Theory and certain quantum phenomena can be interpreted as entailing that the truth of statements has to be relativized to points of space-time (2001, 26–44). His discussion is detailed and technical, but he argues that it follows that the T-schemata do not hold universally, and that regarding truth as timeless is an empirical thesis which is, in fact, false. These conclusions, if accepted, would strengthen the position for which I am arguing.

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which continue to loom large in the philosophical literature, take off from concerns like these. While important issues seem to be at stake in these debates, the controversies have become increasingly barren and scholastic, and have only resulted in a series of unsatisfactory standoffs. That suggests that both sides are missing something. And indeed they are. Because the T-schemata contain sentences describing the phenomena in question, those phenomena have already been interpreted. Those formulae avoid any consideration of whether the phenomena have been interpreted appropriately. Yet that question is precisely the site where the contemporary issue of relativism most commonly arises. That issue is generated by the intersection of truth and interpretation, and cannot be resolved simply by thumping the table while repeating those biconditionals. Seen in this light, it is no wonder that minimalist and redundancy theories seem beside the point. The inconclusiveness of these debates also suggests that each side has a point. There is something right in each position, which can be reconciled only by adopting a quite different viewpoint, right outside the field of dispute. The way to escape the sterility of these debates is to reject the linguistic conception of truth and its corollary, that questions of truth concern only the correctness of what is asserted. I have been at pains to insist that any satisfactory account of the truth of statements has to take off from the question: What am I doing when I make a statement? If that is right, it vindicates those philosophers who maintain that there is more to the concept of truth than what is expressed in the T-schemata. Truth, even when we restrict the topic to the truth of statements, is indeed a substantial concept, more substantial than the minimal notion expressed by those schemata. The latter offer no explanation of truth’s being a normative notion, nor of why it should matter, both to the practice of inquiry and to moral appraisals. But the concept of truth as reliability or faithfulness, precisely because it is grounded in the category of action, offers a ready explanation of its normativity, of why it does matter – indeed, of why it serves all the functions identified in §3.1. When “true” is used to appraise linguistically structured items, the concept thus deployed carries with it all the connotations we have identified in the non-linguistic uses of that adjective. On the other hand, when a speech-act of assertion is true both in the sense of being successful, and of being reliable, then we may properly focus upon the statement made in that act and call it true also. That shift of focus is licensed by the distinction between two different questions: (a) what statement is being made on some specific occasion; and (b) whether the statement thus made is true. Strictly speaking, issues of context, perspective, and interpretation relate to the first question; their relevance to the second is that questions of truth cannot be addressed unless it is clear what statement is being made. Accordingly, although these two questions

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are closely connected, when the truth of statements is the issue, it has to be presumed that the first question has a clear answer. On that presumption, the statement whose truth is in question can be identified simply by citing the sentence used. It is important to note that this procedure abstracts statements from the concrete acts of their assertion, as if that were unproblematic. (That is why philosophers are prone to quote in this connection apparently context-neutral sentences like “snow is white” – although dirty snow is brown.) But with respect to statements considered in abstraction in this way, with the issues of context, perspective, and interpretation bracketed, the necessary and sufficient conditions of their correctness are indeed given by the T-schemata. On that basis, no other conditions have to be satisfied. (Of course, those schemata need to be supplemented by an explanation of ‘blind’ ascriptions of “true”.) That is what the minimalists and the redundancy theorists have been maintaining. But it is another question to ask: does stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of sentences fully articulate the concept of truth? Those who maintain that there is more to truth than those biconditionals have been looking for that extra something in the wrong place. Typically, they offer some amplification of the biconditionals, when that is the wrong strategy. Accordingly, they either fail to give a non-vacuous account of this ‘something more’, or else fail to show what it has to do with truth. For example, some invoke ‘facts’ in order to maintain that a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to some fact. David Lewis has effectively debunked this theory (2001): More often than not, saying it’s true that cats purr is synonymous with calling it a truth that cats purr, and that in turn is synonymous with calling it a fact that cats purr, or with saying that there is such a fact as the fact that cats purr. In short: a fact on this usage is nothing other than a true proposition, whatever that is. ... On this usage, of course truth is correspondence to fact: each truth corresponds to a fact by being identical to that fact. On this usage, the correspondence theory is utterly vacuous. Any work done is done not by this vacuous theory but by the redundancy biconditionals that we have assumed to be joined in alliance with it. Alternatively, Lewis goes on to argue, if truths are supposed to be true because they correspond to something which exists extrinsically, then, applying the biconditionals, it follows that cats purr if and only if there exists something such that the existence of that thing implies that cats purr. This says nothing about truth. Any relevance to truth, he contends, is brought about by the biconditionals, not by this supposed extrinsic existence. My take on this dispute is this: although ascribing truth to linguistically structured items does indeed deploy a more substantial concept than the T-schemata express, what is required is not some expansion, or elaboration,

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of those biconditionals. Rather, the use of the word “true” invokes a concept from the domain of action, where its meaning is grounded. Truth is not a technical concept whose meaning has to be stipulated by stating the conditions for ascribing it to either sentences or statements – nor by complicating those biconditionals. Since “true” is already meaningful in non-linguistic contexts, the T-schemata cannot define what it means. Thus, it turns out that, far from the non-linguistic uses of “true” being metaphorical, or philosophically uninteresting, they provide its basic senses – as successful, and as reliable – which explain why the T-schemata are themselves (in general) correct. We can now see why both those who champion the T-schemata and those who insist that there is something more to truth, each have a point. The former are right to claim that no elaboration of those biconditionals is required in order to state the necessary and sufficient conditions for ascribing truth to a given sentence. But those who object that the T-schemata are not enough to explicate such a rich concept as truth are also right to insist that there is more to that concept than the conditions for ascribing it to a given sentence. Maintaining that those biconditionals say all that needs to be said is to ignore the issue of what is the point of the word “true” used in these biconditionals. It also fails to address the complex issues surrounding interpretation, since the T-schemata contain sentences on both sides of their biconditionals, taking the description of the phenomena in question as already settled. Nor do those schemata satisfy the other desiderata noted in §3.1. No wonder so many remain unpersuaded by redundancy and minimalist theories! So, we can accept those T-schemata, so far as they go, while recognizing that they fail to go the whole distance. They express well enough, in most contexts, the conditions for ascribing truth to (what seems to be) a determinate statement. But since those biconditionals use the very statement in question, that use presupposes that the statement, if true, does faithfully describe the phenomenon it presents. Far from minimalist and redundancy theories saying all that needs to be said about truth, their plausibility relies upon our prior understanding of truth as reliability or faithfulness. To ascribe truth to some statement is to invoke the latter concept – with all the nuances explored in Chapter 5. And that concept is firmly rooted in the category of action. It is the use of “true” with statements (and, by further extension, sentences) which is derivative – not the other way around.

8.5 Appropriateness and success That the truth of statements should exhibit the features evident in the ascription of “true” to non-linguistic actions should come as no surprise. Since, in general, assertive speech-acts are distinguished from one another by the statements they make, the features properly ascribed to people’s speech-acts can

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then be transferred to those statements, so that the latter can also be acknowledged as genuine and reliable. Transferences of meaning like this occur frequently in natural languages. So let us trace out some of the ways in which the connotations of calling actions true carry across to statement-making. There are (at least) three dimensions along which any action whatsoever can be appraised: as appropriate or inappropriate in the circumstances; as executed well or poorly; and as successful or unsuccessful in attaining its intrinsic end. My cooking dinner for some expected guests will be appropriate if I choose to cook something my guests are likely to enjoy; it will be well executed if I cook it skilfully following a reliable recipe; and it will be successful if the meal turns out to be tasty and appreciated by my guests. For my cooking endeavours to turn out well, all three conditions will have to be satisfied. They are not the same. In particular, while my culinary efforts might be appropriate to the occasion, that appropriateness is not sufficient, by itself, to ensure that my efforts will be successful. Since assertions are actions, the same dimensions of appraisal hold for them. Under what circumstances do we rightly appraise an act of assertion as appropriate, as well executed, and as successful? The obvious answers are: an assertion is appropriate when the circumstances warrant the making of that statement; it is well executed when it clearly, intelligibly, and unambiguously articulates how things are; and it is successful when it reliably describes how they are. Those answers seem quite straightforward, but they need some elaboration. In particular, that third point might seem as if I were stipulating that an assertion is successful if and only if it is true. How can anything substantial be gained by stipulation? But to interpret this point as a stipulation would be a mistake. To note that a darts player is successful when the dart hits the bullseye is no stipulation; that is the point of playing darts! Likewise, to say that an assertion is successful when what it states is reliable is no stipulation. That is the very point of making assertions. Distinguishing these three dimensions of appraisal has far from trivial consequences. Many philosophers have found it appealing to explain the truth of statements in terms of the circumstances which warrant their assertion, that is, in terms of their appropriateness. Indeed, some philosophers have thought the way around the difficulties besetting the linguistic conception of truth is to propose alternative accounts in terms of rationally motivated consensus, or warranted assertibility, or some such.5 Their views amount to running together appropriateness and success. For all their sophistication 5. Nozick proposes that truth is “what explains a person’s or group’s success in action” (2001, 57). While his proposal has rightly seen that truth is linked to the success of actions, the actions he is talking about are actions other than the act of assertion itself. He does not consider the latter at all.

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and initial plausibility, all attempts to explicate truth along these lines fall foul of two simple difficulties. Firstly, one way people express their agreement with the statement of another is by saying “True”; to signify agreement is indeed one of the uses of the word. It does not follow, however, that truth consists in consensus. The basic difficulty with any such theory is simply this: circumstances might be such – in terms of the evidence available, the expected outcomes, etc. – that a speaker is warranted in asserting that p, and a hearer’s agreement with it would also be rationally motivated, but it still be false that p. Even if a consensus is formed under ideal conditions, as Jürgen Habermas proposed (1984), we can still wonder whether the agreed statement is true. Indeed, that wonder can only ever be ruled out when the statement in question is itself necessary, so that it would be irrational to doubt it. But then for a statement to be necessary is for it to be necessarily true. So this appeal to agreement does not yield a plausible account of the truth of statements. Rather, responding by saying “True” is to acknowledge that the statement is reliable. Secondly, it is part of the meaning of “justified” or “warranted” that nothing is justified or warranted simpliciter. These participles require as a complement a phrase beginning with “as” (Kirkham 1995, 50–51). A punishment is justified as fair and deserved; a complaint is warranted as reasonable in the circumstances, and so on. So what are statements justified as? Or what is their assertion warranted as? The obvious answer is “as true”. But if truth consists in justification, or in warranted assertibility, that answer either renders the proffered analysis circular, or leads into an infinitely long piece of nonsense. Either the analysis leads us back to “The statement is warranted as true” or “warranted as” has to replace “true”, so that we arrive at “The statement is warranted as warranted as ...”. Alternatively, the question might be answered by saying that a statement is warranted as assertable. Of course, this answer is meant to be taken as claiming more than the sense in which someone could assert any well-formed and intelligible statement, no matter how outlandish or false it might be. The appeal is obviously to the idea of being properly or appropriately assertable, by which is meant something like “supported by the evidence”, or “rationally defensible”, or some pragmatic value like “has explanatory power”. That manoeuvre, however, only takes us back to the first difficulty. The basic trouble for all such theories lies in the logic of the word “true”. That logic provides that it is consistent to ask about any statement, “This statement is ... , but is it true?”, with the blank filled by almost any possible characteristic of statements. For example, this schematic sentence can be completed by inserting “rational to believe”, or “generally agreed”, or “justified on the evidence”, or “explains success in action”, without becoming inconsistent. The only exceptions to this test are those words which are near

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synonyms for “true” in this context, such as “accurate”, “correct”, and the like. A consequence of this logic is that there is a crucial difference between the following two questions: (a) The assertion of this statement is warranted by the circumstances (or is generally agreed, or is justified on the evidence, or explains success in action, etc.), but is it true? (b) What this statement claims to be so is so, but is it true? Unless the statement in question is necessarily true, it is always coherent to ask the first question, whereas the second is absurd. This suffices to show that it is a mistake to run together the appropriateness of an assertion and its success, as if they meant the same. If on certain occasions they happen to coincide, that always remains to be shown. To this objection, the pragmatist Richard Rorty (1989) has a reply. Unlike many other philosophers, he does accept that the word “true” functions as a normative notion. His proposal is that its normative force is ‘what it is good to believe’. For him, “true” is a compliment paid to sentences which seem to be ‘paying their way’ and which fit in with other sentences which are also doing so. He readily concedes that any attempt to analyse the meaning of “true” in terms of warranted assertibility will not work. A pragmatist who is wise, he says, will not succumb to the temptation to specify the conditions under which some statement is properly assertable. Rorty happily accepts that Tarski has said all that can be said about the predicate “true”, but then justly comments that that is not very much. For the rest, he resorts to polemics. A pragmatist, he says, sees no point in wanting to preserve the notion of ‘correspondence with reality’. He has no notion of truth which would enable him to make sense of the claim that if we achieved everything we ever hoped to achieve by making statements, they might still be false, by failing to ‘correspond’ to something. According to Rorty, to say “What is now rational for us to believe might not be true” is simply to say that somebody might come up with a better idea. This, no doubt, articulates part of the force of such remarks. But ‘coming up with a better idea’ is no more than a vague gesture. What would make some later idea ‘better’? Presumably, it would be better either because it explains the present evidence more satisfactorily, or because new evidence has become available which the older idea has difficulty in accommodating. The earlier idea would now no longer be justified; that status would move to the later idea. But justified as what? To say, “as true” would be to run around in explanatory circles, as we have already seen. If it means “as assertable”, Rorty’s proposal amounts to explaining truth in terms of warranted assertibility, which he has disavowed.

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However, this pragmatist riposte is not to be dismissed altogether, for reasons we shall explore shortly. Nevertheless, its slickness is discomforting – on two grounds. One is its including that disparaging word “simply”. The force of that adverb is to brush aside, as of no consequence, the thought that the reason why some later idea would be ‘better’ than what is now rational to believe is precisely because it is true. His riposte is far too quick. Secondly, to gloss “true” in terms of “coming up with a better idea” is to remain within the circle of words and ideas; it cuts off the orientation towards reality which we have seen is inherent in the very act of assertion. To express the point in a more traditional philosophical vocabulary, it cuts off the ‘convertibility’ of truth and being. The trouble with socalled ‘pragmatic’ theories is that they remain locked within the linguistic conception of truth. A pragmatist might retort, in turn, that this kind of objection to his riposte adds nothing of any consequence. Rorty assumes, however, that the only alternative to his reduction of truth to ‘what it is good to believe’ is the correspondence theory, which he presents as committed to the belief that Truth is ‘out there’ (always qualified by “whatever that might mean”). But that way of sketching the dialectical territory is itself a muddle. A careful reading of the history of philosophy would soon locate what the view that Truth (with that honorific capital letter) is ‘out there’ means; it is the ‘objectual’ conception of truth underlying Plato’s theory of the Forms, and later identified with God by Christian Neo-Platonists. Then to identify the belief that Truth is ‘out there’ with the correspondence theory of truth, as the pragmatist does, is to add further confusion. The correspondence theory of truth, Locke’s invention, does not fit with Platonism at all. Rejecting the pragmatist reduction of truth to what it is good to believe, however, does not imply acceptance of either Platonic or Lockean views. My insistence that what is rational to believe might not be true relies neither on Platonist metaphysics, nor on some tertium quid, intermediate between the things spoken about, on the one hand, and all knowledge of them, on the other. On the contrary, I maintain that the intentionality of statements goes right to the things themselves, and when those statements are true they succeed in doing just that. There is no room for intermediaries in this story, nor any need to posit Platonic Truth ‘out there’ either. Pragmatism is right in seeing that neither of these philosophical theories adequately explains the truth of statements. That does not mean, however, that one has to give up on truth, and talk instead about warranted assertibility, or about what it is good to believe. Instead of giving up so easily, let us return to the pragmatist’s allegation that no notion of truth is available to make sense of the claim that if we achieve everything we could ever hope to achieve by making statements, our statements might still be false. This allegation is tendentious. I have argued that an assertion is successful when what it claims to be the case is the case. That success is what we hope to achieve by making statements. If we achieve that,

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then, of course, no notion of truth could make sense of saying that we might still be making a false statement. The allegation gains its plausibility from this fact. But this provides no support for glossing truth as what it is good to believe, or any other complimentary value preferred by a pragmatist. On the contrary, recognizing that this is the major part of what we hope to achieve by making statements helps to flesh out the minimal dictum that a statement is true when, and only when, what it states is so. For reliably describing how things are is the intrinsic telos of the action of statementmaking. That the truth of a statement consists in the success of the act of its assertion is what lends a certain plausibility to the pragmatist’s riposte that saying that what is rational for us now to believe might not be true simply amounts to saying that somebody might come up with a better idea. For now we can see that some later idea would be better if its assertion were successful, a success not guaranteed simply by a belief’s satisfying criteria for rationality at the time of its assertion, nor by its success in explaining other actions. Embedding our account of the truth of statements within an account of the practice of assertion, and that within a more general characterization of actions as inherently teleological, allows us to recognize that truth, in this sense, is an achievement. To summarize, concerning any account of the telos of assertion, other than that for which I have been arguing, we can ask, “The statement that p is ... [whatever characteristic is supposed to signify its attaining its end], but is it so?”. If the filling supplied to complete that question admits the possibility of a negative answer, that account of the telos of assertion has to be rejected as unsatisfactory. We can therefore conclude that the point, or telos, of assertion is nothing more or less than to describe reliably how things are. And we have seen that this way of stating the point of assertion admits the possibility of ascertaining the way things are, independently of the act of assertion itself.

8.6

False statements

How does this account accommodate falsity? In contrast to contemporary scepticism about how truth is attainable, the deeper issue which bothered Plato and his successors for two millennia was how false speech is possible? And with good reason. If a statement’s being true consists in the situation which is currently being described is the same as the statement says it is, how is falsity to be explained? For in the case of a false statement, there is no actual situation which can be so described. It seemed to these philosophers that since a false assertion fails to pick out anything real, it fails to make a statement at all! It is noteworthy that this problem also afflicts any two-factor theory of truth. If there is nothing more to representation than an external relation between a representation and reality, then false assertions likewise fail to

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make a statement. The sentence uttered cannot serve as a representation, for the reasons canvassed in §6.1. Minimalist and deflationary theories are not much help with this problem either. Taking “false” simply to mean “not true”, the T-schemata tell us that “p” is false if and only if not-p. That seems straightforward enough – provided no hard questions are asked. But how is “not-p” to be understood in this context? As we saw, a simple subject-predicate statement directs us towards the phenomenon it describes. The predicate selects for attention some feature (which may be positive or negative) which is ascribes to that subject. A statement made by using an assertoric sentence without negation says that these two co- occur. But “not-p” directs us towards ... ? Anything and everything other than p, it seems! That was Parmenides’ problem with “is not”. He thought that the use of sentences containing “is not” fail to give any information, since they do not tell the audience how anything actually is. That is why he concluded that the path marked by the use of “is not” is one “from which no tidings ever come, for you could neither come to know the notreal (for it cannot be consummated) nor could you point it out”.6 Any use of such sentences simply fails to make a statement at all. But that conclusion is far too strong, and not justified by the argument. True, a simple negative statement does not provide very much information about its subject – but it does provide some. It tells its audience that the subject is different from how the predicate-term (that is, the predicate without the “not”) describes it.7 In the spirit of Parmenides, but contrary to his doctrine, we could say that a negative statement tells an audience to direct their attention elsewhere in order to ascertain the real. For an audience, learning even that minimal information might be quite important. And there is no special problem, in principle, in verifying a negative statement; the subject-term, understood in accordance with the contextual cues we have already discussed, signifies how to orientate oneself (e.g., what to look out for) and one can then ascertain that the predicate being negated is indeed absent. So asserting what is not the case when it is not so is true. The subject can (at least in principle) generally be discovered not to be as the predicate described it. Of course, the truth of negative statements is distinct from the issue of how to understand falsity. The latter is also explicable on the approach I am advocating. Firstly, there is no need to locate some strange bit of reality which somehow provides a false statement with its meaning. There is no 6. Fragment 2. That this is how the difference in Parmenides’ two paths is to be interpreted is argued in detail by Scott Austin (1986, ch. 1). 7. This was the essence of the solution Plato eventually worked out in his Sophist as to how false logoi are possible, although that solution was overly complicated by his doctrine of the Forms. See Truth and Historicity, 49–56.

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need for negative facts, or possible but non-actual worlds in which it is true. Those metaphysical inventions are required only if one is operating with a twofactor analysis of representation. Because ours is a three-factor analysis, an act of assertion – provided it is not confused, or ambiguous – has an intelligible content, the statement made, even though there is no relevant external relation between that content and any feature of the environment which the words uttered, in that context, purport to represent. This content can be determined by attending to the lexical meanings of the words uttered and the context of that act of assertion. Secondly, because on our account, the internal relation between a statement and the speech-act of its assertion is a specific instance of the generic relation between the telos of an action and that action, making a false statement is simply a case of an assertive act which misses its mark. Competent darts players, even when they miss, are still throwing their darts at the bullseye. Likewise, a false statement remains the content of an act of assertion even when that act fails to attain its telos. Its assertion was an unsuccessful act. Indeed, aiming at a target is a very apt simile: a statement’s being true is like its hitting the bullseye, whereas its being false is not so straightforward – it can be a near miss, or at varying distances wide of the mark. In order to be intelligible, an act of assertion has to be sufficiently close to the mark that sympathetic hearers can understand what it would be for the statement to be true, even when it is false. That is, they have to be able to work out from the words used and the context of the assertion what the telos of that act was, even though it was unsuccessful. If a putative statement is so wild and so wide of the mark as to be beyond comprehension in this sense, then it hardly qualifies as a statement at all, just like the ill-executed attempts to act which we considered when discussing the normative character of actions, in §4.6.2. The making of false statements is thus to be understood in terms of erring. That might seem an unexceptional claim, but in fact, it highlights a sharp contrast with the linguistic conception of truth. One of the distinctive features of that conception is that truth and falsity are opposites of the same order. The account being advocated here treats the difference between truth and falsity as more than a difference in valency. It provides that statements are true when what they assert to be so is identical to what is so, but there is another factor in the case of falsity: there is an error in their assertion, which is constitutive of their falsity. This way of construing falsity has particular relevance in the case of those subject-predicate statements which purport to refer to real entities when no such entities exist, such as Russell’s famous example, “The present King of France is bald”. On his analysis, the apparent referring phrase “the present King of France” is analysed away, with the sentence replaced by a triple conjunction. Subsequent discussion has recognized that definite descriptions can be used either referentially or attributively. A definite description such as “the President of the USA” can be used either to say something

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about current incumbent, Barack Obama, or to say something about whoever holds that office. Russell’s analysis seems to apply more appropriately to the latter use, an attributive use, than to the former. Yet the predicate in his famous example, “is bald”, is relevant to a person who happens currently to be King of France, not to whoever might hold that position. His paradigm example in fact confuses the attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions. On the other hand, ordinary referential uses of definite descriptions, which generally work quite effectively in context to make true statements, yield falsehoods on Russell’s analysis. People waiting at a bus stop might say truly, “The bus is late”, yet on that analysis, this statement would be false, since there is more than one bus. Russell has not provided an acceptable analysis of the referential use of definite descriptions. Since Russell rejected the very notion of internal relations, our way of understanding linguistic representations was not open to him. Since there is no present King of France, there could be no external relation to anything in the world; that expression therefore had to be banished somehow. But our account does not have to resort to such desperate measures. We can admit both referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions – and archetypal ones too – irrespective of whether entities so described exist. Furthermore, we can allow that assertions employing such ‘empty’ referring phrases are in error, but err in a way different from those which do pick out their intended subjects but err in ascribing their predicates. The former are significantly wider of their marks, sometimes to the point of being quite puzzling to their audiences. Given my insistence that statements are rooted in the acts of assertion which produce them, we have to say that the speechacts which produce such statements are in error, and therefore it is right that they be denied. But we do not have to say that such statements lack truth-value just because they lack an external relation to their subjects. If for other reasons (such as wanting to retain a two-valued logical calculus) it proves convenient in some circumstances to classify them as simply false, there can be no principled objection to doing so. Our account can accommodate falsification as easily as verification. Often the assertion of a false statement, understood in the context, nevertheless indicates enough information to direct attention towards some specific region in the world where the phenomenon described is supposed to be. A simple subject-predicate statement is falsified when an investigation of that region reveals either that there is nothing there which could be properly understood as satisfying the referring phrase, or that the features of the phenomenon referred to do not lend themselves to being so described. If the false statement is a universal claim, it suffices to discover just one phenomenon which does not have the feature(s) which the statement alleged everything of that sort to have.

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Philosophers have often noted that statements claiming that there is something which is such-and-such are difficult to falsify, since failure to discover something which is such-and-such is not sufficient to rule out the possibility that there is, somewhere, something of that sort, as yet undiscovered. That is a reasonable observation about the logic of sentences of that form, but it takes no account of the fact that such statements are usually made within specific contexts, which, like most statements ordinarily made, provide cues for their interpretation. Where that is the case, searching in the implied region suffices to falsify such statements.8 There is nothing in the processes involved in falsification which cannot be comprehended within the understanding of the truth of statements outlined here. Another hotly debated topic for which our approach offers a way forward is the socalled Liar Paradox, which we reviewed in §2.4. Various attempts have been made to resolve that paradox, most of which turn on restricting what can count as a well-formed sentence, so that the liar sentence, and its variants, is ruled out as illegitimately formulated. But, as we noted, it is easy enough to construct a set of sentences which in the circumstances suffice to generate the paradox. Whether the statement made by one person is paradoxical can depend upon contingent, empirical facts to do with what someone else might have said. Therefore, purely formal or structural attempts to block the paradox are pursuing a misguided strategy. The fact that paradoxes can be generated by the assertions of others shows that what is needed is an approach which is grounded in the empirical events of assertive speech-acts. Once we have clearly recognized this, the most promising approach was first suggested by Jean Buridan in the fourteenth century, and revived in the 1970s by Arthur Prior. Prior noted that Buridan believed at one time that “every proposition, whatever else it may signify or assert, signifies or asserts, by its very form as a proposition that it itself is true” (1976, 139). The implication of this for the liar sentence is that it is false, since [a]ny proposition, therefore, which asserts or implies its own falsehood asserts both its falsehood and its truth, and is bound to be in fact false, 8. Karl Popper most notably thought that falsifying existential statements, such as “Fs exist”, poses a special difficulty, since one would have to survey the whole world in order to ascertain that there are no Fs. But such unrestricted existence claims are rare; usually the context indicates the region where Fs are to be found (old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard). If there are none in that region, the existential statement is falsified (the cupboard was bare, so there was no bone for her dog). To be fair, Popper was thinking about scientific discourse, but even in that context existential statements can often be falsified, either because the statement is making an empirical claim specifying where to find the alleged item(s) (as in “there are three hydrogen atoms in a molecule of water”), or because the theory which posited the existence of something has been superseded (as in “phlogiston exists”).

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since at least something that it asserts to be the case is not so. We cannot pass back from its falsehood, thus established, to the conclusion that it is after all true, since it says that it is false and things are as it says they are; for things are not entirely as it says they are, part of what it says being that it is true. Buridan himself became unhappy with his own earlier proposal, on the grounds that propositions do not in general signify in virtue of their very form that they themselves are true. To take his own example, he argued that the terms of “A man is an animal” are ‘of first intention’, that is, nonlinguistic, whereas explicit assertions of truth contains terms which are ‘of second intention’, that is, terms referring to pieces of language. Prior shows that while Buridan’s alternative suggestion does not work, his earlier suggestion does seem to be workable logically. What this amounts to is recognizing that a language can contain its own semantics – which, of course, is the case with any natural language, such as English. According to Prior, the problem is solved if the semantics of a language contains a general law which prescribes that, for any sentence x, x means that x is true. This does not preclude a sentence meaning something else besides, but it does serve to dispose of the Liar Paradox exactly as the younger Buridan did dispose of it. The liar sentence turns out to be simply false. However, the way Prior has reported the younger Buridan’s solution, in the quotation above, is not altogether felicitous, since propositions do not assert anything. Nor do sentences. People do, by enacting the practice of assertion. Furthermore, a statement is not ‘a piece of language’. A sentence is, but a statement, which is the content of an act of assertion, has to be made by someone. But that very point suggests a way of reformulating the younger Buridan’s solution, without invoking a novel semantic law. The clue is the fact that paradoxes can be generated by certain acts of assertion; that is clear from the case of the Cretan liars and the cases constructed by Kripke. Because acts of assertion aim at truth, anyone who asserts something is thereby committed to its truth. That commitment is what justifies the T-schemata. So, starting with an actual assertion, made by someone, using the liar sentence, all we need is to abstract the statement made and apply the schema T1 (“p” is true if and only if p) and substitution to it. Let us represent a liar sentence uttered in an act of assertion by the letter P. What this sentence P explicitly says is “P is false”. Taking “false” to mean “not true”, that is: P = “P is not true” Definition Let us suppose that Arthur has actually performed an act of assertion, using this liar sentence. That is, our argument begins with the following assumption: (1) Arthur asserted that P is not true.

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From (1) we can abstract the following sentence used by Arthur to make his statement: (2) P is not true. Substituting (2) in schema T1 yields the following logical equivalence: (3) “P is not true” is true if and only if P is not true. It follows from (2) and (3) that (4) “P is not true” is true. Then, substituting P for the “P is not true” in (4), as the definition of P permits, yields (5) P is true. But (2) and (5) are contradictory. Since Arthur’s statement implies a contradiction, we can conclude that it is false. However, we cannot pass back from the falsehood of his statement, thus established, to the conclusion that his assertion was after all true. P does explicitly say that it is false and things are as it says they are. So we might think that licences a further inference, that P is true. But things are not entirely as Arthur’s act of assertion claims they are. This contradiction was derived from the assumption that Arthur asserted that P is not true. Every act of assertion also makes an implicit claim to truth, which we have made explicit by deriving (5) from (1) – from assuming that Arthur has asserted (2). Although what P says is so – namely, that P is false – anyone who asserts (2) is also implicitly asserting that P is true – an implication rendered explicit by the inference to (5). That second, implicit claim has just been shown to be false too. So both claims, one explicit, the other implicit, are false. Even if, from the fact that P is true if it is false, and false if it is true, it might be thought that the liar sentence, taken independently, entraps us in never- ending circles, the act of its original assertion is simply false, and cannot be undone. So, on a purely logical basis, Buridan’s original insight is vindicated. Unlike many of the solutions proposed for the Liar Paradox, there is nothing ad hoc about this one, since making an implicit claim to truth applies to all acts of assertion and the schema T1 is applicable to all statements. This solution relies on taking into consideration the telos of acts of assertion. It is therefore not available to those who take no account of such acts. The trouble with all earlier attempts to resolve the Liar Paradoxes is that they considered liar sentences in abstraction from anyone’s asserting them.

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Insisting that any analysis of the logic of these sentences must first extract them from (postulated) acts of assertion provides a resolution of these paradoxes. This fact, therefore, provides additional reason to accept the actionbased conception of truth I have been advocating. The Liar Paradox is aptly so named. A person who is lying is trying to deceive his or her audience. But liars can succeed in deceiving only if their speech-acts are taken by their audience to be genuine assertions, that is, if they are interpreted by their audience as acts of truth-telling. To deceive an audience, the act of lying has to be recognized as an authentic assertion, and therefore the statement made thereby understood to be a truth- claim. The simple Liar Paradox arises because what it claims negates the telos implicit in its telling. It thus turns out to be pragmatically self-refuting. This is like Descartes’ thinking “I do not exist”. His very act of thinking that thought provides the evidence for its falsity. Indeed, any assertion of the simple liar sentence is even more straightforward than this famous example, since the act of assertion is not just evidence for its falsity. The claim implicit in that act contradicts its explicit claim; so it is false. Clearly, our approach applies straightforwardly to the case of the Cretan liars and the cases constructed by Kripke, since they turn on certain people actually performing certain assertions. In the latter, it is the whole set of assertions which, taken together, generates a contradiction. Not all those assertions can simultaneously be successful. So the simple Liar, and its more complex cousins, can justifiably be said to be in error, that is, they are false. The analysis of statement-making developed in the previous chapter and this shows why truth and falsity are misconceived as opposite evaluations of the same order. To modify Meinong’s famous slogan (but not to complain about it, as he did) we have a prejudice in favour of the truth. Being true is an achievement, grounded ultimately in the success of what someone is doing in an act of assertion. When we consider the use of statements, across a wide range of types of discourse, it becomes evident that truth and falsity are not of the same order, yet that was the second of the three distinctive features of the linguistic conception of truth. We now have developed a richer conception of the truth of statements, in which falsity is explained in terms of error, a defect in the prime function of statement-making. The large issue with which I began remains: the challenge of contemporary relativism. How does this account help in confronting that challenge? That is the topic for the next chapter.

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9 The Challenge of Sceptical Relativism

These days, it comes as a surprise to learn that the deep issue about truth which puzzled philosophers from Plato until the seventeenth century was not whether truth could be attained, but how false speech is possible. Thereafter, the issue was reversed. Although certain themes derived from Plato and Aristotle persisted, the intellectual framework within which these themes were explored radically altered. One result is that, in modern times, the dominant worry has been whether it is ever possible to attain truth. Of course, this worry is hardly raised by such mundane questions as whether it is possible to ascertain that a cat is on a mat, or that some cooking pot is black. But over the past three centuries, a major philosophical problem has been how to combat scepticism. Although scepticism did have its ancient advocates, and was revived in the Renaissance by Montaigne and some others, that sceptical worry acquired a new urgency once Locke cut the ‘nominal essence’ of things (what we take our nouns to mean) off from their ‘real essence’ (what makes things be what they are, and to behave as they do). The fracture of the traditional forms, thus brought about, finally wrecked the complex conceptual frameworks which supported the classical conceptions of truth. No longer was there confidence that what actually makes things be what they are, and behave as they do, matches our ideas (in Locke’s sense of that word) of what they are. The medieval understanding of scientia as true, evident, and necessary knowledge has been given up, despite Descartes’ heroic effort to secure its possibility. Scientists nowadays generally accept that their best theories, no matter how well they survive testing, are only probable at best, and can never be proven true. Karl Popper’s contention that science has to be content with falsifying hypotheses, because generally they cannot be verified, has been widely influential, especially amongst scientists. In all but the most commonplace of cases, the very possibility of establishing the truth is seriously doubted. On top of that, how we describe phenomena inevitably involves issues of context, perspective, and interpretation. There is now widespread 212

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acceptance of the historicity of human existence, with its corollary of historical and cultural relativity, even though the word “historicity” is hardly commonplace. Feed that understanding into the underlying scepticism, and the result is the troubles with truth with which we began. What is disturbing about that pervasive outlook is its negative tone. Relativity is invoked in order to avoid acknowledging that certain claims to truth are unqualifiedly true. Those who manifest this predisposition are thoroughly unimpressed by philosophical pronouncements declaiming the incoherence of relativism. The attacks regularly mounted by conservative politicians and their supporters merely sound authoritarian, hollow, and ineffective. We will see that this predisposition to circumscribe the truth of certain claims – which I will call ‘selective relativism’ – can be maintained independently of any thesis about the relativity of all truths; it is used to rationalize restricting the authority of others in certain circumstances. Relativism of this sort is a core characteristic of the spirit of our times. The question is: Is there a way of coming to terms with our historical and cultural relativity, without sliding into sceptical relativism?

9.1

The possibility of truth

There is a curious paradox in telling the truth. On the one hand, whenever we speak about processes, situations, things and other people we step back from the immediate engagement which practical action requires, in order to talk about them. It seems as if talking about something separates the act of speaking from what it is about. But, on the other, if what we say is true, there is no separation at all between the statement made and what makes that statement true. They are identical. The thinker who thought hardest about this paradox was Søren Kierkegaard. He contended that since I am an existing individual, and existence is a process of becoming, so truth, defined as the identity of thought and being, must be a process of personal appropriation which could never be completed. From this contention, he drew a startling conclusion: it is the act of existence itself which separates thought from being. Although this argument is expressed in Kierkegaard’s characteristically enigmatic style, his argument can be reconstructed in a way which draws on very familiar and mainstream considerations (Campbell 1992, 297–304). This reconstruction begins with the traditional distinction between essence and existence, a distinction which goes back at least as far as Thomas Aquinas, and arguably to Aristotle. According to this distinction, what it is to be a such-and-such is one question, but whether anything of that sort exists is always another question. To answer the first question is to articulate the essence of a kind of thing, but spelling out that essence does not entail that anything of that sort exists.

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Fundamentally the same point was also argued by Kant, employing a quite different vocabulary. As Kant put it, saying of something that it exists is always what he called a ‘synthetic’ judgement. By that, he meant that any existential judgement always provides information additional to what is contained in the concept of the subject. He argued that the predicate “exists” is not a ‘real’ predicate. Although it is a genuine and legitimate predicate, it is not of a kind which could serve as what he called a ‘determining’ predicate, that is, a predicate which enlarges the concept of something by adding some extra determination. For that reason, the predicate “exists” cannot occur in the definition of some thing, some res; it is not realis. (Kant’s contention that “exists” is not a real predicate is frequently misunderstood as meaning that it is not a genuine predicate. That interpretation completely misrepresents his argument. On the contrary, if “exists” were not a genuine predicate, then, according to his own definition of ‘synthetic’ judgements – namely, judgements in which the concept of the predicate is not contained in the concept of the subject – existential judgements would not be synthetic.) For instance, “is red” is what he called a ‘determining’ predicate, since the concept of a red book is more determinate than, and ‘enlarges’, the concept of a book. But the concept of an existing book is no different from the concept of a book. In fact, if I assert that something exists, for my statement to be true, the thing which exists has to be the same as the one I am thinking of. Its existence makes no difference to the definition of that ‘object’ of thought. It follows that existence is always over and above every determination of thought. For this reason, Kant’s argument requires that “exists” be a locating predicate. The location of something is not a determination of what it is.1 Yet there is a world of difference between merely thinking of something and its actually existing. In this sense, existence ‘separates’ thought and being, the ‘object’ of thought from the actual thing. That was indeed Kierkegaard’s conclusion. It follows from quite general, and generally accepted, distinctions. Let us now apply this consequence to an individual existing thinker: for instance, to me thinking of myself. In this case, too, there will be a concept – my self-understanding – and an existence: my actual being. They are not the same. I might keep striving to deepen my self-understanding, but no matter how detailed and elaborate my self- characterization, nor how insightful I might become about the wellsprings of my own thinking and

1. That Kant classified “exists” as a locating predicate is clear from the following: “Though, in my concept, nothing may be lacking of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is lacking in its relation to my whole state of thought. ... Through its existence [the object] is thought as belonging to the context of experience as a whole. In being thus connected with the content of experience as a whole, the concept of the object is not, however, in the least enlarged.” (1933, Critique of Pure Reason, B628–629, my emphasis.)

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acting, my concrete historical existence as a thinker will always and necessarily transcend my concept of myself. This point follows quite straightforwardly from applying to myself the general distinction for which Kant had argued. Of course, amongst my true beliefs will be the fact that I do exist. As Descartes tried to exploit for his own purposes, whenever I think “I do not exist”, my thinking that thought provides its own refutation. I cannot reasonably doubt my own existence. That is unassailable. But this self-refutation is only pragmatic; it is my act of thinking that thought which demonstrates its falsity. That I exist is not, however, a necessary truth. I would not have existed if my parents had never met – and their meeting, marrying, and conceiving me was a series of historical accidents. Furthermore, my act of thinking that I do not exist, like all my acts of thinking, is also a contingent event – who, except for philosophers, would ever seriously entertain such a thought! Yet if thought and being are ever to coincide, that would most likely occur in the case of my thinking about my own existence (which, no doubt, is why Descartes lighted upon it as the foundation of his metaphysical system). Since the irrationality of doubting one’s own existence is not a necessary truth, but is demonstrated only pragmatically, it follows that existing individuals transcend the whole domain of their thoughts, including those thoughts which they cannot reasonably doubt. As an existing individual, I perform acts of thinking which can be described objectively, but as actual performances, those acts themselves are not reducible to the content of those thoughts. This argument explains how the existence of something separates it from any thoughts about it, which was Kierkegaard’s point. What about the other side of the paradox with which I began this section? Given the standard definition of truth accepted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the conformity or agreement of thought and being – of concept and object – it might seem as if this argument undermines the possibility of ever attaining truth. Kierkegaard was alive to the risk that his argument might be taken to carry this sceptical implication. His response was to propose a radically different conception of truth, a conception he summarized (with characteristic mischief) in the slogan: “truth is subjectivity”. No doubt designed to sound shocking, this infamous slogan, once properly understood, encapsulates a profound insight. What he meant by it emerges from his considering the conditions for truth, as standardly defined, to be realized. As I said, the point Kierkegaard was making here draws on very familiar and mainstream considerations. His strategy was to distinguish between what he called the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ ways of reflection. Following a line of thought running from Hume through Lessing, Kierkegaard maintained that the objective way of reflection produces descriptive statements which can, at best, only be probable. In this, he said, the accent falls on what is said. In the subjective way of

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reflection, however, it falls on how it is said. By emphasizing this ‘how’, he clearly was not referring to someone’s demeanour, tone of voice, or choice of words. So to what was he referring? I suggest there is a surprisingly simple and straightforward answer: how something is said is by performing a speech-act of assertion. So, a good century before Austin invented the term “speech-act”, Kierkegaard was drawing attention to what someone is doing in saying something. Now, when I am reflecting on what I might do – that is what he called a ‘subjective’ way of reflecting – the contents of my thoughts are no more than possibilities. For Kierkegaard, any and every thought ranges in the sphere of possibilities. Even when I am thinking of something which someone else has actually done, and so am thinking of a reality, I “lift this given reality out of the real and set it in the possible” (1944, 265). Now, if objective reflection can only produce probabilities, and subjective reflection deals in possibilities, it might seem that truth is forever unattainable. How could truth be subjectivity? His profound insight can be presented this way. Suppose I am thinking of some simple action I might perform, for example, raising my right arm. So long as I am merely thinking about doing that, the content of my thought is no more than a possibility; it is something I might do. Translating that content into reality cannot be effected by thought alone; to realize this possibility requires the exercise of will, moved by interest. So that is what I now do: I raise my arm. In that moment, I actualize what previously was merely a possibility entertained in thought. That is, as I raise my arm, the content of this thought, and the reality I am bringing about, become the same. Truth, according to the standard definition – as the unity of thought and reality – has been achieved. I have made my thought come true. In this way, I bridge the gap between thinking about something – in this case, what I might do – and its content. By enacting that thought, my action actualizes what my thought was ‘about’. Thus, whereas Kierkegaard had argued that existence separates it from any thoughts about it, enacting what one has decided to do overcomes that separation. So here is our first reply to any sceptic who thinks that truth is forever beyond human reach. Truth can be attained – at least in those moments of decisive action when human subjects actualize possibilities they have thought to do. Let me repeat, while Kierkegaard’s slogan that truth is subjectivity sounds outlandish, this argument for the possibility of truth works by rigorously thinking through how truth, according to the standard definition, can be realized. Truth is attainable, through the actions of a human subject; that is the sense in which it is ‘subjective’. Someone’s considering what to do, and then making that thought come true, is a more sophisticated and thoughtful instance of the same principle which we discerned (in §4.5) in a frog’s flicking its tongue and catching a bug. Kierkegaard’s argument thus anticipates in a striking way the action-based conception of truth for which I have been arguing.

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I submit that this is a powerful vindication of the possibility of attaining truth, at least in cases of personal action. In these cases, truth is an accomplishment achieved by appropriating and enacting certain possibilities, which I have argued is fundamental to the meaning of “true”. Of course, Kierkegaard’s account of how truth is possible only applies to the actions of an individual person, and then only fleetingly, a consequence he accepted. Once the action is performed, that moment of truth is past (1944, 176). Despite this argument’s cogency, Kierkegaard drew from it an invalid conclusion. His polemic was directed at Hegel, for whom philosophy aims at the truth “in the highest sense of the word ... [in which] God, and God alone is the truth” (1991, §1, 24). In this sense, ‘the truth’, as Hegel conceives it, encompasses the complete unity of all thinking and all being. Kierkegaard inferred from his argument that no human could ever attain ‘the truth’. But there is a false dichotomy here. Kierkegaard has assumed that the only alternatives are those instances when personal decisions are enacted, on the one hand, and ‘the truth’ in Hegel’s comprehensive sense, on the other. His argument is an effective refutation of thoroughgoing scepticism, but the dichotomy he posited concedes too much to Hegel’s ambition. Once we reject this dichotomy, we can see how this reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s argument has wider application. Just as we are able to make certain thoughts come true, so there are numerous occasions when we do succeed in making assertions whose contents are true, and can be verified. Suppose I say “that box is heavy”. Anyone can find out whether my statement is true by trying to lift that box. Likewise, my statement “the hill is steep” can be verified by trying to climb it or, more technically, measuring its incline. The truth of “The toy block is buried in the sandpit” can be ascertained by digging in the sandpit. In general, in a wide range of cases, future actions can be enacted to demonstrate the truth of what is asserted. Since linguistic meaning is ultimately grounded in our networks of potential interactions, it always remains possible for us, in principle, to enact whatever is necessary in order to verify the statements we make and hear. The fact that it is not practically possible to verify some statements, and that sometimes we make mistakes, provides no justification for wholesale scepticism.

9.2 Engaging with the world It follows that using language is also a way of engaging with the world, albeit in a way different from immediately handling things. That is not how most philosophers see the matter. All too often, implicit in their accounts of statement-making is a misleading picture, in which language and the world operate on different planes, with statements arrayed on one level, and the world on a lower level. This picture, redolent of the Olympian standpoint,

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is of a piece with the view that the truth or falsity of a given statement is a timeless matter. No doubt, the levels in this picture are suggested by the way quotation is used. But the picture itself misconstrues something important. The distance between our talk and what it is about is seriously misconstrued in the picture of language as somehow opposed to the world. No wonder that the opposition which it posits between language and the world has so often seemed unbridgeable, with the result that truth seems unattainable. Contrary to this picture, I have been arguing that our understanding of statements, and of the sentences used to make them, has to be referred back to the speech-acts of their assertion. Those speech-acts are also events in the world. So, the question of their truth, and of the statements they make, is a question of how those worldly events which are acts of saying (or writing) relate to other states of affairs, which are also in the world. The explication of assertion, and of what it means to say that statements are true, developed in the previous chapter, allowed for ‘gaps’ between acts of assertion and what they are about. But in our account, those speech-acts are worldly events which engage with some situation in the world. And the bridging of those gaps is determined by how effective they are in orientating both speaker and audience to what they are about. This is the importance of our insistence that the meaning of representations – especially in this context, the declarative sentences used to make statements – is projective. The future- orientating role of verbal representations is what makes sense of the close link between the making of statements and their verification. Recalling our example from Chapter 8, when I say “that pot is black”, both I and my audience need only look at the relevant cooking pot to see whether it is indeed black. This example of verification was deliberately chosen because it involves simple seeing. Cases of verification requiring simple visual perception are those where active engagement with the world seems minimal. It is easiest in these cases to pay no heed to the fact that the verbal representations point to potential actions. Nevertheless, as we noted in §8.1, even visual perception is not passive; it is interactive. Admittedly, as I used that example also to argue, interpreting what is said can be problematic. Perhaps the cooking pot is black in a different sense from the sense I was invoking when I uttered those words. But such possibilities of inaccuracy or misunderstanding are easily resolved by further conversational exchanges. The point is, the objective sense of what I said can be determined well enough, and its truth verified by future actions. Determining the objective sense of some statement requires identifying which potential actions (often only conditionally accessible) are being indicated by the words used, in that context. The act of making a statement holds out a promise of its future verification.

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That linguistic meaning is projective in this way was the germ of truth misleadingly summarized in the slogan of the logical positivists: the cognitive meaning of a statement is the method of its empirical verification. For many reasons, which we do not need to rehearse here, that slogan will not do. But at least it acknowledged the link between the content of statements and what would be involved in verifying them, and tried to take seriously the orientation to future action implicit in the practice of statement-making. Some who are inclined to resist this insistence on the priority of the practical might concede that the simple everyday examples we have been discussing do implicitly refer to potential actions, but shift their ground to scientific theories. Maintaining that the truths at which science aims are the most significant, they believe that theoretical discourse is free from action-references. That claim, however, is unsound. In the modern sciences, experimental evidence plays a constitutive role in determining the meaning of their theoretical terms. As I argued in §6.7, one of the crucial differences between medieval science and modern science (i.e., since the seventeenth century) is the different roles which observation plays in them. Whereas observation provided illustrations of scientific principles in the former, in modern science empirical data play a constitutive role as evidence. One does not have to go so far as to ‘reduce’ the meaning of theoretical terms to observational terms, as the logical positivists at one stage proposed, in order to recognize that the meaning of theoretical terms is ineluctably tied to the evidence produced by experiments. Indeed, what distinguishes the modern sciences from classical and medieval science is precisely the constitutive role played by experiments (Foster 1934). In this respect just like our ordinary everyday examples, the sciences make use of apparatus, the persons, the rooms in the institute, etc. which are accessible to everyone else in the pre-scientific world, as objects of straightforward experience, and involve an implicit reference to practical actions and depend upon practical, pre-theoretical understandings (Husserl 1970, 125–126). They too involve practical engagement with the world, although of a highly specialized sort. Once we recognize that the natural sciences are not merely sets of theories, but are sophisticated human constructions informed by their own distinctive activities, we can acknowledge how they too depend upon a complex array of human capabilities, traditions, practices, and techniques. So, within the scientific domain, truth is grounded in what those engaged in scientific inquiry actually do, where that includes the expression of their theoretical beliefs, as well as their experimental interactions with phenomena. In our view, questions of truth turn on how reliable future interactions show those practices and beliefs to be. Therefore, intelligent inquiry will employ those experimental methods which have a proven track record in providing effective tests of reliability. The heuristic principles guiding

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contemporary scientific practice, such as simplicity and empirical adequacy, have been refined through centuries of human experience and passed down the generations. These principles are respected because time and again they have fostered experimental techniques and theories which prove to be reliable. Precisely because truth, in the sense elaborated here, has to do with reliable practices which are vindicated in the future, it provides the required touchstone by which lines of inquiry can be evaluated. Since we have shown how this interactive conception of truth has normative force, it explains why science is right to accord a high value to truth. Not only is it the goal of scientific inquiry, but truth, thus understood, is the touchstone of its distinctive methodologies.

9.3 The relativist predisposition Few people ever call themselves ‘relativists’. Generally, that label is used pejoratively to name a popular way of treating truthclaims which they find alarming. Such critics usually assume that “relativism” refers to a philosophical doctrine, namely, that no statements are true absolutely. Once relativism is characterized in those terms, there is a familiar argument which purports to show that it can easily be shot down. Stated this way, as a universal thesis, the statement that no statements are true absolutely would have to apply to itself. Since that thesis is not relativized, it provides a fatal counter- example to itself. The doctrine is therefore self-refuting. QED! But that really is too quick. For one thing, this allegation of self-refutation is hard to make stick. Let us call the thesis that all truths are relative R. As Robert Nozick has pointed out, if we suppose that R is itself relative, it does not follow that R is incoherent (2001, 16): The relativist might reply that although R is only relative, I fall within its domain, R is relative to the group I am in, or to the property that I have, etc. And so the relativist answer to the question of why I should believe R, even though it is merely a relative truth, is that it is true relative to something about me. So I am stuck with it as true. (And about that statement that R is true relative to something about me, I ask: is that statement only a relative truth? Yes, replies the relativist, and it too is true relative to something about me. And as to that something about me, I wonder: is its holding only a relative truth? Yes, the relativist replies, but ...) As Nozick (p. 20) also points out, the same kind of manoeuvre can be applied by a relativist to the thesis that there is an absolute truth (call it A). The relativist, conciliatory as always, can then respond, “A is true for you but not for me”. The absolutist might reply (A2), “There is an absolute truth, and it is true for everyone”. To which the relativist can respond, “(A2) is true for you and your group, but not for my group”. And so on. The relativist

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gains the upper hand in these exchanges, by encircling and enfolding any absolutist’s claim, while the absolutist cannot similarly enfold the relativist’s claims, although he can deny it. As Nozick comments, this does not show that relativism is true, only that it is infuriating – to the absolutist, that is. This discussion assumes that relativists believe a universal thesis: that all truths are true relative to some factor. While this definition provides a neat contrast with the thesis that some statements are true absolutely, this way of defining the issue is far from satisfactory. The criterion it lays down for establishing the absolutist’s position is too easy; to refute relativism, all that is needed is just one statement which is true absolutely. Suppose there is one statement which is true absolutely – for instance (taking our cue from Einstein), that the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second. That one absolute truth is sufficient to refute the universalistic definition deployed in most philosophical treatments of relativism. But it would fail to impress those who typically circumscribe certain truthclaims of others concerning many significant aspects of life with a relativist response. They invoke a relativist response only in certain circumstances, which is why I call their form of relativism ‘selective’. Relativists rarely, if ever, generalize as a universal thesis their typical way of responding to those truthclaims of others which they do not accept. Nozick’s imaginary exchanges inadvertently reveal a more significant feature. The responses of his relativist show that, instead of being held as a doctrine, what is called “relativism” is better understood as a widespread predisposition. It evinces a way of regarding, or responding to, certain absolutist claims. Relativists need not articulate their predisposition to respond in this way as a universal thesis about all statements, nor as a philosophical doctrine. They can admit, quite consistently, that there are some statements whose truth is not relative (like the one about the speed of light), but remain untroubled by that admission. Rather, those who express relativist sentiments usually do so selectively, in response to particular truthclaims which they think bear importantly on basic beliefs and life issues. Significantly, these relativist sentiments tend to be expressed in response to some other person’s stating a categorical belief which is controversial. If someone is unwilling to accept this belief, he or she might nevertheless be happy to allow that the other sincerely believes that it is true, and not want to cause offence by overtly denying that truth- claim. Relativist responses are a way of expressing tolerance of alternative claims to truth. Those who respond by saying “that might be true for you (or for them), but it’s not true for me” are not only declaring their unwillingness to adopt those claims. They are also conceding that the experience of others might be significantly different from their own, and they want to avoid declaring someone else’s experiences invalid.

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For this reason, there is an ethical dimension to relativism, which those who are disposed to respond this way bring to the truthclaims of others. Its philosophical critics seldom recognize this ethical dimension. What is commonly called “relativism” thus refers to a predisposition to concede some truth to certain statements which do not accord with one’s own beliefs, but circumscribe that validity in a way designed to avoid causing offence while protecting one’s own differing beliefs. Attacks on relativism as self-refuting are therefore beside the point. Such criticisms fail to recognize that what is being expressed is an ethical attitude which is prepared to extend a selective tolerance to the truth-claims of others which are apparently inconsistent with one’s own. Since tolerance is crucial to maintaining harmony in a multicultural world, it is no wonder that this predisposition has proved so impervious to philosophical and conservative criticism! To dislodge so deeply entrenched a predisposition requires much more than a short, sharp show of logical cleverness. For a start, it requires an understanding of the grounds which give plausibility to that way of responding to truthclaims. Whenever someone says something, interpretation is always involved, and that fact raises the possibility of alternative interpretations of the same phenomenon. This would not pose such a serious problem if there were only one correct way of interpreting each phenomenon. But it is at least arguable that many phenomena lend themselves to being interpreted in more than one way; phenomena under- determine how they might be described. But if alternative interpretations are each credible, it seems to those imbued with tolerance unwarrantedly dogmatic to insist that just one is correct, with all the others dismissed as simply erroneous. Yet “correct” has an on- or- off logic; where there are alternative statements about the same subject matter, only one of them could be correct; the others must be simply false, or else qualified in such a way that they are no longer alternatives. The attraction of relativism, understood in this way, is that it offers a way of coping with this logic while allowing alternative interpretations as each valid, in its own way. The relativist solution is to allow that each of the apparently inconsistent interpretations might be correct, but only for different populations. The frequent expressions of relativist sentiments at popular levels are then easily explicable as trying to retain some sense of truth-ascorrectness, whilst shunning any semblance of intellectual arrogance. Accordingly, these relativist sentiments express an ethical response to the facts of historical and cultural relativity; they place a high value on tolerance in the face of alternative truthclaims. Any effective engagement with these sentiments has to reckon with this. Given this, relativists will only abandon their entrenched attitude if they are presented with, and find attractive, a viable and cogent alternative which also respects the considerations which led them to adopt their former approach. In the previous chapters, I have been exploring and expounding such an alternative. An action-based conception of truth takes biological

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embodiment and social contexts seriously, and locates representational content in projective activity. I will argue that this interactive conception is able to accommodate relativity and the fact that realities are generally appraised from some perspective, without admitting the selective relativism which so often accompanies the recognition of these relativities. And it can do this while maintaining the orientation towards reality required of any viable conception of truth. But if entrenched relativistic predispositions are to be dislodged, more is required than simply presenting a plausible alternative. We need also to show that that attitude expresses inappropriately the grounds which seem to render them plausible. This supplementary line of criticism has to show how this predisposition arises from dubious assumptions, which can be rejected without denying the insights upon which they rely.

9.4 The presuppositions of relativism Two questionable assumptions underlie relativist attitudes. The first is to presuppose that truth has to do exclusively with statements. Assuming that “true” applies only to statements, and that it is synonymous with “correct”, relativists typically respond to categorical claims by relativizing the truth of those claims to their speakers. Popular relativism thus inadvertently shares with much contemporary philosophy the linguistic conception of truth, although in a way antithetical to the ideal which takes truth to be timeless. It is indeed ironic that philosophers’ preoccupation over the past hundred years with the truth of statements should provide unwitting support for such a stance! Our critique of the linguistic conception of truth thus plays a central role in undermining the plausibility of relativism. I have argued that, on its own terms, this conception of truth is seriously inadequate, and fails to satisfy the desiderata which any conception of truth has to meet in order to be plausible. That critique, therefore, has the happy consequence of calling this relativist assumption into question. The preoccupation with truth-ascorrectness needs to be rethought. The linguistic conception of truth, by itself, does not mandate a relativist predisposition. Witness those philosophers who have sought to translate ordinary statements into ‘eternal sentences’! It does so, however, when the preoccupation with what is said is combined with a second assumption concerning our own historicity. In §5.5, I argued that we always find ourselves in some specific, naturally and historically determined situation. Historicity is intrinsic to our very humanity, and our natural and historical situations both limit and augment the possibilities of how each one of us might become. Those who express relativist sentiments recognize this very well, but understand it in a distinctive way. Namely, they presuppose that what humans are able to think and

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do is completely determined by their natural and historical situations, and cannot transcend those limitations. In particular, they assume that what people are able to understand and express is entirely a function of their own situations. Or, to put the point another way, in regarding everyone’s ways of thinking and speaking as inevitably and inescapably determined by their situations, they are assuming that human being is exhaustively described as a naturally and historically situated project of self-making. Given this, it is easy to regard the truthclaims of others who speak out of situations different from one’s own as valid only for them. This assumption, which puts a reductive gloss on the recognition of historicity, is what gives relativism its sceptical character. Rejecting as invalid any conception of truth as transcendent, relativists can see no alternative to allowing that those who assert truthclaims have privileged authority as to what they mean, but then views those meanings in turn as entirely the products of their speakers’ particular cultural histories. Hence, anyone who does not share those histories is in no position to challenge their truth. When truth is exclusively located in the domain of language, and when transcending the particularities of one’s own culture is taken to be impossible, truth is both restricted to linguistic practices internal to particular cultures or histories and can have validity only within them. In this case, human speech-acts are no more than acts of self-expression which are fully explicable in terms of their local contexts. This circumscribing of the authority of others to make statements gains support from Michel Foucault’s suggestion that truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it. According to him, the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth, together with the criteria accepted and authorized in some discipline, amount to a ‘regime of truth’ established by power relations. There is, no doubt, much that is illuminating in Foucault’s excavations of how people’s personal identities – their sense of ‘self’ – have come to be constituted under specific historical conditions. But the relativist appropriation of his project profoundly misunderstands it. He set himself to identify and describe the ‘regimes’ which govern statements, and the way they govern each other, so as to constitute a set of propositions which are acceptable, and hence capable of being verified or falsified by established procedures. That is, he was concerned with what counts as true, with the ways of speaking and seeing, the whole ensemble of practices, which serve as supports for certain forms of knowledge. That is not a reductive conception of truth; the concern is not whether some statement is true or false, scientific or ideological, reliable or erroneous, but how it has been produced, circulated, transformed, and used. Furthermore, while Foucault’s project involved a historical inquiry in order to account for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, and domains of ‘objects’ such as madness, criminality, sexual expressions, etc., he was

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actually opposed to historicizing the human subject. As he said, “one has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework” (1980, 117). While this admits historical relativity, it is not compatible with the view that truth is a function of human subjects, for whom statements are true. For Foucault, the challenge “is not changing people’s consciousness – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth”. That statement presupposes that truth is not simply reducible to what certain people happen to believe at some time. “It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time” (p. 133). If it is possible for the power of truth to be so detached, there has to be some way of detecting what is true which is not determined by those forms of hegemony. There is, however, some philosophical support for deriving sceptical conclusions from the recognition to our historicity. We noted in §8.1 Nietzsche’s coupling of interpretation with subjectivity. Having rightly seen that identifying some particular object of interpretation is already to have begun the process of interpretation, he concluded that it is a ‘quite idle hypothesis’ to suppose that things possess a certain constitution in themselves quite apart from subjectivity. (“Subjectivity” here has its usual reference to expressions of an individual’s feelings, beliefs, concerns, etc – not Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic sense.) I submit that that conclusion only follows if people’s interpretations of phenomena are so confined by their own historical situations that they cannot transcend them. So let us examine that assumption.

9.5

The human situation

The first point to note is that human beings have much in common, across all situations. As biological creatures, every human being must breathe, eat, and drink, sweat, and excrete. These activities, however, are universal and determined by our natural situations. But beyond that, every human society speaks at least one language, and also has elaborate customs, rituals, generic norms, and taboos which regulate the conduct of its members. The conduct influenced and regulated thereby includes not only the basic biological activities just mentioned, but also sexual activity and reproduction, the raising of children, the roles people serve, their social interactions, the passing of knowledge down the generations, their play – in fact, a vast range of activities directed towards many different goals. These norms, customs, and goals do vary from society to society, and in each are more or less flexible and fluid. But the striking variety in how these activities have been, and

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are, performed bear witness to the fact that the forms of behaviour being thus regulated are found universally in every human society. These observations will not, however, cut much ice with those who accept reductive historicism. They will still insist that how those forms of behaviour are understood and interpreted is inescapably tinged with subjectivity. There is much confusion in popular thinking, and indeed in some academic thinking, about this. In one sense, their insistence is trivial. Of course, when I interpret some phenomenon that interpretation is mine; it is made from my perspective, in my language, and is influenced by my own experience. That truism, however, does not entail that the phenomena which I am interpreting have no constitution in themselves apart from my subjectivity. On the contrary, the logic of the verb “interpret” requires that there be some independent phenomenon X, which is being interpreted, even if no- one can say in a context-free and interpretation-neutral way what X is. Nonetheless, let us grant, for the sake of argument, that there is no one ‘right’ way of comprehending these universals of human being, that each society has its own ways of understanding and describing these phenomena. Let us also grant that each society has its own generic norms, and there are no norms applicable to much human behaviour across all cultures. Those concessions amount to a maximal statement of the reductive historicist position. Even so, it does not follow that everyone is locked irrevocably into the forms of thought inherited from their own culture, unable ever to transcend them. And if it is possible to transcend those thought-forms, the historicity of human being does not justify the form of scepticism implicit in relativism. On this issue, there is no point considering those positions which ignore, or effectively reject, the historicity of human being. But two ways of understanding our historicity do admit the possibility of transcending one’s own cultural situation, and so are not reductive (Campbell 1992, ch. 17). The first is implicit in the philosophy of Hegel, who was arguably the first philosopher to take the historical development of thought as constitutive of the philosophical enterprise. For him, philosophy essentially involves ‘afterthinking’ (nachdenken); it is a reflexive and reflective discipline, always engaged in questioning its own presuppositions and the very terms in which its questions are posed, and searching for richer ways of thinking which encompass what was true in both sides of antithetical conceptualizations.2

2. There is a terminological difficulty here in summarizing Hegel’s position. He used the word Reflexion to refer to the ‘reflective philosophy of subjectivity’ – that was his label for Kantian rationalism – which construed reality in terms of the finite categories of the ‘understanding’ (Verstand). The English word “reflection”, however, is broader than this, and is appropriately used to refer also to what Hegel called Spekulation, the form of ‘after thought’ (Nachdenken) engaged in by the proper use of Reason (Vernunft).

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Recognizing that human being is always historically situated, Hegel argued that it is possible to transcend the limitations inherent in one’s particular situation. Unlike animals, which are immediately conscious of particular phenomena, and respond according to their immediately felt needs, humans are capable of thinking about phenomena, and of recognizing their own finitude. Hegel contended that, like humans, animals can to some extent feel their own limits – they are fearful, hungry, thirsty, and so forth – but unlike them, humans can also know their own limitations (1984, 277ff.). This knowledge includes recognizing how limited are our own ways of thinking about those phenomena. But, as he repeatedly argued, in reflecting upon these limitations, in identifying those limits, our thinking has already passed beyond them. In the very act of recognizing a boundary to the validity of our thought-forms, we have projected ourselves beyond that boundary. Thus, human being is characterized not only by the finite aspects derived from its situation, but also by an infinite capacity for transcending that finitude. For Hegel, however, this way of understanding how human being has infinite aspects was still inadequate, for each step beyond one set of limitations only takes one to another set of limitations. Because each step in an infinitely extendible series of transcending some limitation arrives at another form of finitude, he regarded such a series as a ‘bad infinite’. These considerations led him to seek a ‘truly infinite’ consciousness, what he called ‘absolute knowledge’. This is a form of consciousness which would encompass all forms of finitude, and for that very reason, would itself be entirely self-generated and free of all limitations. He claimed that this ideal, the ‘good infinite’, finds expression in art, in religion, and, above all, in philosophy. For Hegel, these two aspects of human being – the finite or situated aspects, and the infinite or non-situated aspects – must, yet cannot, integrate themselves into a unity. As he put it (1984, 212), In thinking, I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition. ... These two sides seek each other and flee from each other. I am this conflict and this conciliation. Now, a conflict can only persist if the two opposing sides nevertheless connect with each other. (As an illustration, consider a boxing match. The fight exists only so long as the two boxers, although opposed, keep engaging with each other.) So, for Hegel, what constitutes me as an integrated self is precisely this conflict between the ‘infinite consciousness’ of my thinking and the finitude of my empirical condition. “I ... am both of the combatants and the conflict itself” (1984, 213).

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Yet in the end, Hegel let go of the struggle between these two aspects. In his quest for absolute knowledge, which led him to posit the ‘true infinite’ as the outcome of his philosophy, Hegel failed fully to acknowledge the finitude of his own philosophical system, which was an expression of his own self- consciousness. As a result, it is evident nowadays that his philosophy was much more a product of its time than Hegel himself ever could acknowledge. His philosophy could not escape its own historicity (Fackenheim 1961, 67–70). The other non-reductive understanding of historicity likewise takes human beings to be constituted by the struggle between the finite and the infinite, but rejects the possibility of the kind of ultimate philosophical truth, or ‘absolute knowledge’, which Hegel sought. This alternative view was first articulated by that Hegelian critic of Hegel, Kierkegaard. For him, the idea that a human could eventually attain to truly infinite consciousness was simply absurd. In writing a parody of Hegel, Kierkegaard took over the idea that the self is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite. But he then argued that, since I am an existing individual, and existence is a process of becoming, truth, defined as the identity of thought and being, must likewise be a process of personal appropriation which I could never complete.3 Setting aside Hegel’s ambition to attain absolute knowledge, we can nevertheless appropriate some of his arguments. In particular, when we recognize the historical and conditioned character of our interpretations of phenomena, we have already transcended those thought-forms. Thereby we open ourselves to the possibility of interpreting those phenomena differently. Of course, in expanding our horizons in this way, we do not free ourselves from all limitations. We might strive for the freedom of complete selfdetermination, but we will always founder in the attempt. Hegel was right to characterize human being as constituted by the struggle between two aspects – the recognition of our finitude, and our infinite capacity for transcending that finitude through reflecting upon our specific limitations – which both seek yet flee from each other. But none of us ever achieves a final resolution. As Emil Fackenheim (1961, 71) has pointed out, the struggle between these two aspects must remain in principle unresolvable: The aspects must seek each other because human self-identity must be achieved, if not in integration, so at least in the search for integration. And the aspects must flee each other because if they found each other the result would either be a self-refuting historicism or else a Hegelian elevation of man above humanity.

3.

This parody is developed in The Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard 1954, 163), the ostensible author of which is his anti-philosophical persona, Anti-Climacus.

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Given that the constitution of us humans involves historicity – we are partly (but only partly) self- determining – that we are always engaged in this unresolvable struggle is no accident; it constitutes what human being is. This struggle is manifest in the lives of people in many different ways. But some moments stand out as qualitatively distinct, namely, those in which people recognize themselves as striving to determine how they will be, through their own decisive actions. Coming to recognize this is not easy – it can only be achieved after considerable effort – but it holds out the prospect of coming to understand that dialectical process itself, in principle and as a whole – in short, of coming to a self-understanding. As Fackenheim went on to argue, such a self-understanding cannot be attained by assuming the standpoint of a detached subject observing an independent object. To approach the task that way would be self-defeating, since it would break up the reality of unresolvable struggle into two pseudorealities: a detached spectator who is not involved in the struggle; and an object which, being merely an object-for-understanding but qua object not a subject engaged in self-understanding, is not involved in the struggle either (1961, 73). Such an objectified standpoint is neither possible nor necessary. One of the distinctive characteristic of us humans is that, through reflection, our consciousness becomes reflexive, that is, it rises to self- consciousness. (Hence, those philosophers who want to eliminate all reflexivity from what is true are seriously misguided.) As children learn to speak, they learn how to say “I” and how to use the other reflexive pronouns. For each of us, that is our first expression of self-consciousness. As we mature, that elementary form of self-consciousness slowly develops until we reach the stage where we can come to recognize, own, and shape the processes of our own selfformation. This struggle for self-understanding can be fraught, and is always only ever partial. Even when one is trying to be rigorously honest, self- deception always threatens; one’s self-understanding incorporates many misunderstandings. For some people who have become very distressed, attaining a genuine self-understanding might require the aid of a psychotherapist. But even then, the most a therapist can do is make interpretive suggestions, which the client then either adopts or rejects as not fitting. The question of truth here concerns how one appropriates one’s own life-history. This question is not a matter of accepting some correspondence between the suggestions of a therapist and some objectively observable facts. Rather, the kind of knowledge aimed at is self-reflective (Habermas 1972, 228). Self-understanding is achieved when some of those suggestions strikes the client as ‘ringing true’, and then adopts them in telling his or her own lifestory in the light of these new insights. The issue is whether one attains an understanding of one’s own life-history which is faithful and reliable, an understanding which is autonomous, and manifests commitment, integrity, and self-knowledge. The test of truth in these settings is whether the

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new self-understanding, articulated in this revised account of one’s own self-formative processes, actually frees one from distressing complexes and symptoms, and enables one to move on with enhanced competence and a new self-assurance. Thus, the verification of one’s new self-understanding occurs through the appropriateness and efficacy of one’s future actions. Although we can never become completely transparent to ourselves, as one attains new selfreflective insights, one reconstitutes oneself as a more effective person. As one does this, one’s self-understanding deepens – which does not imply that previously one had no self-understanding at all. As I have already remarked, understanding is not on- or- off; it admits of degrees. Someone’s understanding might be shallow or deep, but the difference between the two involves more than simply collecting some more correct statements. Those who attain a deep self-understanding can also come to recognize that, for all that their own situation and life-history are peculiarly their own, their struggles to attain self-understanding are but their own unique version of something which is universally human. In the effort to define oneself – even though one inevitably founders in the attempt as one recognizes one’s own limitations – one can come to recognize that this is a manifestation of a universal human condition, over and above one’s own natural and historical situation. To recognize this is to discover what Fackenheim has aptly called the human situation. The ‘human situation’, in this sense, is not a source of additional limitations; it is the ontological ground of both one’s natural and historical situation. The human situation is manifested in how each person appropriates his or her own natural and historical situation. As we saw in §5.5, striving to become self-determined involves recurring dialectical movements between appropriating some aspects of both our natural and historical situations, and rejecting others, which we resist and try to change. In this way – as we continually try to free ourselves from the limitations given by our natural and historical contexts, and founder in the attempt – we are able to gain an insight which is radically universal. We can not only come to realize that we are situated, but also we can come to recognize how powerfully everyone’s self-formative processes have been shaped by their specific situations. As Fackenheim has aptly expressed the point (1961, 77), A person discovers his natural situation when he comes upon such individual limits as his lost childhood, a disease which afflicts him, or the frailties of old age. He discovers his human situation when he sees, in the foundering attempt at radical self-transcendence, that temporality and mortality are universally part of the human lot. Again, a person discovers his historical situation when he faces up, say, to the unique historical limitations and opportunities of the nuclear age. He comes upon the human situation when he recognizes that all history is a conjunction

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of compulsion and freedom, and that to be subject to the one and challenged by the other is universally part of the human condition. It was for this reason that I argued in §5.5 that our self-making is only ever partial; how we are, and will be, is not wholly an issue to be decided by our own choices. Our freedom to choose is not sovereign. We find ourselves already in the world, already interacting in a series of changing situations, which generate certain possibilities, and close off others. Our natural and historical situations contribute to the constitution of our humanity, for our actions are always performed in contexts of considerable complexity, and actualize only some of the concrete possibilities which they afford. While the range of what I can do on any occasion is not unlimited, rarely is it restricted to a single possibility. If it were, I would not be choosing at all – indeed, I would not be engaging in reflective action in any strong sense at all. Rather, the movements I make would rather be simply effects in a chain of causation. In this way, one’s self-making integrates certain aspects of the natural and the historical into one’s own self. When each of us appropriates our unique life-history as our own, we are embracing how we have already become thus far. It follows from all this that acknowledging one’s own natural and historical relativity does not require one to adopt a relativist attitude. Because the human situation is genuinely universal, everyone’s struggles manifest, in ways relative to their own situations, a common pattern. Even though each person’s struggle to realize concretely their common humanity takes a unique form, this pattern can be discerned and appreciated by others. Hegel’s insight, that those who are sensitive to how their own historical situation conditions their outlook and concerns thereby have transcended its boundaries, is relevant here. That recognition renders them open to exploring alternative interpretations of phenomena. Awareness of one’s own relativity, far from blocking the possibility of entering into the ‘thought-world’ of another, is the precondition of cross- cultural understanding. It frees one from the limitations of one’s own intellectual horizons and enables one to enter into the thinking of others, fusing one’s previous horizon with theirs. One cannot negate one’s historicity, but one can transcend one’s inherited thought-forms in order to understand how others, in their different situations, are responding to the human situation. This is the real issue raised by facile relativist expressions. It is possible to project oneself into the Weltanschauung – the complex of perspectives, concepts, preoccupations, ideologies, and values – of those with different cultural, religious, and moral beliefs to the point where at least some genuine understanding of their view of life can be attained. Understanding of this sort involves much more than a passive reception of information. One always approaches another with some pre-understanding, as we already noted in §8.2. But one does not have to insist, dogmatically, that the concepts and

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beliefs one brings to the task of understanding the other are unshakable. Understanding others requires an active willingness to suspend one’s own prejudices and preconceptions, and to enter into a lively relationship with them. All learning involves anticipations and expectations. When the issue is one of trans- cultural understanding, these anticipations can literally be prejudicial, can involve prejudgements. One not only has to question the others (or, if they are distant, or no longer alive, the texts recording what they have said), but one has also to be open to finding one’s own presuppositions challenged, and be ready to re- evaluate them critically and possibly revise them. It follows that we are not irrevocably locked into the limitations of our natural and historical situations. On the contrary, as reflective persons, we are capable of transcending our inherited thought-forms, of imagining other ways of understanding, of learning other languages, of acquiring new concepts. While our interpretations of statements and the world are always made from some perspective, it is not beyond our wit to project ourselves from our own frame of reference into another. As Hans- Georg Gadamer (1981) has expressed this insight, every phenomenon is interpreted against some horizon of meaning, but it is possible to ‘fuse’ horizons by moving beyond any given horizon and revising our interpretations in the light of new insights. This process of understanding others involves ever- expanding circular processes, to which Gadamer, more than anyone else, has made us sensitive. Any understanding has to be repeatedly tested, in two ways. The process begins with some provisional understanding of parts of the available evidence (for instance, a complex text). But then one has to see how those understandings of the parts add up to yield a consistent understanding of the whole of the relevant evidence. But then, one’s understanding of the whole will typically call into question how the parts have been understood. As the latter are revised, that will yield a new understanding of the whole. So, round and round one goes, from part to whole and back to the parts, with each step yielding a deeper grasp of the whole. Secondly, the provisional understanding with which one began that process will inevitably be couched in terms of one’s own initial ‘pre-understanding’. What at first seemed to be obscurities, incoherencies, or anomalies can become clearer, and make more sense. But then, one realizes that the appearance of obscurity, incoherence, and anomaly might result more from how one was interpreting the text, reading into it ways of thinking the other did not share. As one gains a deeper appreciation of the other, that will typically call one’s pre-understanding into question. In this way, an interpreter can find his or her own preconceptions challenged by the other, and could well respond by acknowledging that they have to be revised, or at least, set aside. Doing so will often open the possibility of understanding the text in a new light, which in turn can be even more challenging. So, once again, the process of

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understanding goes round and round, with this dialectic moving between the interpreter and the other. Although these ‘hermeneutical circles’ could be extended indefinitely, they provide no support for historical scepticism. Quite the opposite; they presuppose that the thinking of others is accessible – and intelligible – even if the level of understanding reached at any stage remains always open to further revisions and refinement. Since sociality is intrinsic to our humanity, the possibility of maintaining openness to others – indeed, the necessity of doing so – is a manifestation of the human situation. As we hold ourselves open to others in this way, we can find our intellectual horizons extended and our understanding both of them, and of what it is to be human, deepened. Acknowledging the relativity of our own existence need not have sceptical consequences. It follows that the presuppositions of reductive historicism deny an essential characteristic of our very humanity. Relativist predispositions therefore turn out to be inimical to harmony in a multicultural world, which they are ostensibly trying to maintain. To circumscribe the possible validity of another’s truthclaims, so that they could not challenge one’s own, is at bottom a refusal to respect the other’s integrity. It is at this deeper level that relativism is self- defeating. Relativist predispositions turn out to be superficial and harmful to the very values they are supposed to preserve.

9.6

Relativity and truth

I have argued that recognizing the historicity of human being does not entail the negative gloss which relativists place upon it. On its own terms, it has now become clear that this predisposition is badly conflicted. But where does that leave the implications for truth of context, perspective, reflexivity, and interpretation, which I have also been arguing are inescapable? If those features are inevitably involved in the assessment of many different types of truthclaims, it seems that at least some relativizing of truth is unavoidable. The important issue is whether acknowledging that relativity justifies relativism. We saw in §9.3 that defining relativism as a universal thesis fails to dispose of it, misses the heart of the issues involved, and is beside the point. Someone can maintain a relativizing predisposition towards certain truthclaims, while readily accepting that other statements are true simpliciter. Because relativism expresses a particular ethical attitude, albeit a deeply conflicted one, it involves more than a view about the relativity of those statements which are true. There is yet another problem with defining relativism as the universalistic thesis that no statement is true absolutely: it runs together two distinct issues.

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One is the contention that what statement is being made on some occasion depends upon, and is therefore relative to, the circumstances in which it is asserted. This contention is about the relativity involved in understanding the import of the sentences used in the circumstances to make statements, independently of whether those statements are true or false. It is not a thesis about truth. The other issue is whether the statements made, whose sense usually has to be worked out relative to the circumstances of their assertion, are true only for its speaker, or for some restricted group. Once any statement “p” is taken to be equivalent to “it is true that p”, it becomes easy to run these two issues together. But that alleged equivalence is contestable. In particular, if truth is a substantial concept, as I have been arguing, those two quoted sentences do not have the same sense (although they do have the same truth-conditions). The second says more than the first: it says that “p” is reliable. Progress on this topic requires operating with a clear distinction between the relativity of statements and the predisposition to give relativist responses. So let us consider the various sources of relativity involved in identifying statements to see whether they justify a relativist predisposition. Let us begin with those assertions which use sentences containing reflexive pronouns to make personal statements. We saw in §2.3 that it is not possible to eliminate all reflexivity from the use of language. Although third-person locutions can faithfully report someone’s first-person statements, those locutions mirror the reflexivity expressed in the original sentences. Toddlers frequently have some difficulty learning the proper use of first-person pronouns. Often they will begin by referring to themselves by means of their own names. So, for a while Sophie uttered at bedtime sentences like “Sophie is not sleepy”. But after a while, she learnt to say “I am not sleepy”. Her mother could then truly report that Sophie said that she is not sleepy. This third-person report did not eliminate the reflexivity of Sophie’s original statement, but such shifts in perspective do allow someone other than Sophie to assess the truth of what Sophie said, as her mother did by putting her to bed. Examples like this show that the relativity involved in first-person avowals provide no bar to others assessing their truth. And the fact that this relativity cannot be eliminated provides those statements no immunity from falsification. Next, consider how both the aspect and the tense of verbs are metaphysically significant, although aspect is fully evident in English only in the past tense (Thompson 2008, ch. 8). This significance is exemplified in the difference between “Sophie was walking to school” and “Sophie walked to school”. The former does not entail the latter (Sophie might not have reached school on that occasion), whereas the latter does entail the former. The former describes a process – indeed, an action identified in terms of its telos – the latter an event.

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The metaphysical significance of the role of tenses in conditional statements was discussed in §7.7. Of course, sometimes it is difficult to verify a past- or future-tensed statement, because what is being asserted of that past or future occasion is not directly accessible. Nevertheless, many future-tensed statements, which are not directly accessible now, do become verifiable – a fact exploited by the importance I have been placing on errordetection. The ones which generate difficulty are open- ended predictions, such as “A city will never be built here”, which is falsifiable but never verifiable. Past-tensed statements are not decisively verifiable either, but many of those which express memories can be checked against other people’s memories, and oftentimes evidence can be accessed in the present or near future which can put beyond reasonable doubt (as the legal system puts it) an assessment of the truth of such statements – or at least, support their probability. Those difficulties, however, are not generated by the use of tenses per se. Rather, they are generated by the flow of processes and events themselves. Nevertheless, the relativizing of truth required by the fact that everyday statements use tensed verbs generates no significant problems for understanding. If I utter now the sentence “It is sunny today”, my statement would be true. But if I uttered that sentence yesterday, what I said would be false, since yesterday was a rainy day. As we have observed, there are general and well-known rules for translating tensed sentences, with or without more specific temporal indices, into other tensed sentences, with appropriately shifted indices, so as to make the same statement. Tomorrow, anyone who wanted to make the same statement as I did today would have to say, with implicit reference to this region, “It was sunny yesterday”. What is not available is an atemporal way of articulating that truth. There is a logic, a tense logic, embedded in these translation rules. Because the world is always changing, a statement which is true for a time might cease to be true (the cat might walk off the mat!). Indeed, the passage of time changes the truth-value of most statements made with the same sentence. Interestingly, philosophers and logicians in the medieval period generally accepted that consequence; for example, the paradigm statement in Anselm’s discussion of truth (1974) is “it is day”, which is true when uttered at noon, but false at midnight. By contrast, many contemporary philosophers and logicians aspire to render statements tenseless. But there is no good reason, other than metaphysical prejudice, to privilege tenseless statements in this way. Systems of formal logic employing tensed sentences are certainly possible, and have interesting features (Prior 1967 and 2003). These logics take their basic sentences to be in the present tense and introduce sentence-forming operators upon sentences, such as “it was true that ...” and “it will be true that ...”, plus “it was always

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true that ...” and “it will always be true that ...”. In fact, if everything is at bottom a configuration of processes, as I am inclined to believe, systems of tense logic express more faithfully the nature of our world.4 It is relevant to note here that the Special Theory of Relativity entails that everyday assumptions about what is simultaneous with events here and now do not hold for phenomena moving with speeds close to the speed of light. Events which might be occurring outside the past and future light- cones of the here-and-now – in what Eddington felicitously called ‘the absolute elsewhere’ – are currently inaccessible, and so are currently neither determinately past, present, nor future. But that fact does not justify scepticism; at some space-time point in our future the effects of those inaccessible events can become accessible, provided a currently inaccessible event comes to fall within the past light- cone of that future space-time point. Again, this provides no grounds for regarding our universe as a timeless four- dimensional ‘block’; rather, it shows that relativity to space-time locations must be taken even more seriously. General rules governing shifts in frames of reference, similar to those governing the use of tenses, apply to other indexicals. What for me is ‘over here’, for someone else is ‘over there’. What is currently ‘now’ is afterwards ‘then’. What is future will become present, and then past. By appropriately shifting the frame of reference expressed in relevant sentences, different speakers can make the same statement at different times and places. Any identifying citation of that statement has to be relativized to the speakers, and the time and place of their assertion – and there is no way of telling what that statement is without adjusting the sentences used in ways relative to some speaker, time, and place. However, this sort of relativity provides no support for scepticism, nor for treating the truth- claim made by assertions employing these different sentences as true only for some speakers. A quite different kind of relativity is implicated in the issues of context and perspective involved in interpreting a statement such as the example discussed in §8.2, “that pot is black”. There are no general rules which prescribe how the descriptive terms used in making statements are to be

4.

If Nozick (2001, 29 and 310) has rightly interpreted the implications of ‘wave collapse’ at the quantum level, the following theses of standard tense logic cannot be sustained as universally applicable: If p is the case, then it always will be the case that p [once] was the case; If p is the case, then it always was the case that p will be the case. These intriguing consequences, however, provide no support for the view that truth is (ideally) timeless. Quite the opposite! What they show is that our everyday assumptions about the relations between the past, present, and future, which are reasonable at everyday macroscopic levels, have more limited validity than is commonly thought.

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understood in different circumstances. What statements are being made has to be discerned by attending to the specifics of each context. While this provides greater scope for misunderstandings and confusion, it does not justify any sceptical or relativistic conclusions. As Yourgrau has pointed out, effective communication does not require that the language used be fully determinate, in advance, with respect to every conceivable possibility. And once any issues of context, perspective, and interpretation have been clarified, it can usually be ascertained whether the statement made is true or false, simpliciter, even though the sense of the sentences used have to be understood relative to specific circumstances. None of these kinds of relativity involved in identifying what statement is being made is likely to provoke a relativistic response from those who are disposed to make them. That response is more likely when speakers claim, or present themselves as having, privileged authority. Consider the case of the playwright Arthur Miller, mentioned in §1.3, who claimed that there is no correct interpretation of his plays based on his marriage with the actress Marilyn Monroe. How he sees it, he asserted, is his truth, and it does not matter if someone else sees it differently. (Note that this is a typical example of relativism, whether or not Miller believes that no statements are true absolutely.) Miller seems to be claiming privileged authority here on two grounds: that he is the author of these plays; and that it is his former wife upon whom the female character in each of those plays is based. There can be no doubt that he has a unique perspective on those plays, being their author, and his having been married to Marilyn Monroe afforded him insights not available to others. But neither renders his representation of her incontestable. Critics often interpret a work of literature in ways which are plausible and insightful, but of which their authors were unaware. And someone who lives intimately with another can be too close to apprehend everything that is going on in that relationship. But Miller’s response shows that he was not open to any of that. His relativizing retort, then, is a refusal to enter into dialogue about the truth of his representation of Monroe. Had he been willing to do so – admittedly, something he is unlikely to do in an interview with a journalist – he might have come to a new appreciation of his own literary output. Through exchanges with a serious and sensitive critic, he might come to a deeper understanding of his own characters, and perhaps of his former wife. Because understanding always admits of degrees, the level of understanding of a complex phenomenon attained at any given time, or from just one perspective, can rarely be final. That last observation is especially relevant to the understanding of human phenomena generally. Not only are people not completely transparent to themselves; they are even less so to others. Seldom is the whole story known. Moreover, the significance of some historical event, or complex of events, is never fully evident or settled, but is always liable to reinterpretation in

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the light of new evidence and of what happens subsequently. That might be thought to justify relativizing the truth of some historical account to the interpreter. But, just as in the case of Arthur Miller, anyone making that kind of qualification is refusing to modify their original account in the light of other considerations, or of what subsequently transpires. That is what a relativist is doing in making such a comment. Such a refusal, like the lack of respect for another’s integrity noted at the end of the previous section, shows that the ethical motivation underlying the predisposition to relativism is in fact quite shallow and conflicted. A more respectful predisposition would regard all statements, including one’s own, as defeasible in principle. Maintaining that such accounts are defeasible does not imply that understanding someone, or some historical phenomenon, is impossible. The fact that one’s understanding of such phenomena can always be modified and deepened in the future does not imply that one currently has no understanding of it at all. Because such understandings are limited, it can fairly be conceded that there is some truth in each. That is, each can be faithful to some aspect of the complex phenomenon it is about. But that concession does not justify relativistic responses which shut alternative interpretations out of consideration. I will have more to say in the next chapter about how faithfulness and openness apply in such cases. A relativist predisposition can seem most reasonable where there is an apparent clash between statements made against the background of diverse cultural settings. The tolerance and respect for the diversity of human expression which relativists claim as virtues are certainly commendable. And there are undeniable difficulties in reaching mutual understanding across cultural boundaries. As we have noted, often what is said in one language is not perfectly translatable into another. Insofar as one’s perceptual skills, emotions, sense of self, personal relationships, and understanding of everyday phenomena are shaped by the linguistic resources available in one’s native language, to that extent there can be profound differences in how different peoples describe themselves and other phenomena. That people are born and initiated into different traditions has the consequence that their social formation, the goals they seek, their moral and legal values, and their religious and political commitments and beliefs differ in important ways. Relativists take all of that as grist to their mill. The distinction between the relativity of statements and the predisposition to give relativist responses is most pertinent here. The fact that the statements people express, and their motivations for doing so, have to be understood relative to specific cultural settings exemplifies the relativity involved in identifying what statements are being made. There is a sense in which anyone’s statements cannot but be expressed in ways which pertain to their own natural and historical situation. It is in these settings, however, that the universals constituting the human situation, canvassed

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in the previous section, are most relevant. They provide a bridge across ethnic divides. Cultures are not irretrievably sealed off from one another. People can learn to speak with competence in more than one language. When people from widely diverse cultures converse, they can explain to one another their own cultural practices, why they do things differently, and the significance of what they say and do. Mutual understanding does not require a single universal language, nor a universal set of values. What it does require is openness to the other, and willingness to learn and appreciate the rich variety of human expressions. Engagement with others whose speech and practices seem at first foreign and even bizarre can, with hermeneutical effort and sensitivity, be understood in the light of these universals of human being. None of that relativity justifies the closed attitude which characterizes selective relativism. There is a further difficulty facing relativism. While cultural and linguistic diversity might appear to support taking what is asserted as true only for specific populations, that is a superficial inference. The point of insisting that some statement is true only for someone, or some group, is to imply that it is not true for oneself. But this kind of discrepancy can only obtain if the other person (or group) and oneself hold contrary views as to the truth of the same statement. But when that apparent disagreement is grounded in differences of culture and language, it is far from clear that the sentence apparently in dispute means the same for both. Although the relativist is claiming that cultural diversity implies incommensurable differences in understanding, that very fact implies that there cannot be genuine disagreement between them. As I pointed out in §2.1, any genuine disagreement presupposes some basic agreement. A clash of truthclaims is possible only where there is some significant overlap in the cultural understandings informing what each respectively asserts. But the relativist’s stance rests upon a denial of any such commonality. So, relativism does turn out to be self-refuting, not as a universal thesis which undercuts itself, but as relying for its plausibility on maintaining a kind of diversity which implies that there can be no genuine disagreements. Relativism makes sense only if what the other asserts, and the relativist refuses to endorse, mean the same. But the relativist’s stance depends on there not being sufficient commonality of understanding across cultures for that to be possible. The upshot of all this is that what is ordinarily asserted using natural languages involves understanding the speaker’s perspective and the nuances of what they mean. In that sense, assessing the truth of statements has to take into account the speakers and their cultures, times, and places. But it does not follow that the use of natural language can be understood only by those who share the same perspective – which is just as well, since if that were so, communication between people would be impossible. In learning a second language, one learns how to translate from one perspective and conceptual

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framework into another. But knowing how to make these translations, and how to extend one’s horizons to embrace those of someone else, does not provide a way of eliminating perspectives altogether. Quite the contrary. Underlying the hostility to acknowledging that statements have to be understood relative to the context of their assertion is the fear that doing so will open the door to a radical subjectivism, as if then anything goes. Certainly, some extreme expressions of relativism do seem to suggest such a view. It is not difficult to understand why it has been believed that admitting any relativity is to venture onto a slippery slope. Whatever someone believes is in a sense ‘true for them’. All that means, however, is that whatever people believe, they believe to be true. But it does not follow that one can believe whatever one pleases, or that truth is somehow a function of what people believe. Precisely because the concepts expressed in what we say have an implicit reference to potential actions, what we can plausibly believe is constrained by what we could possibly do. The world with which we are always engaged, one way or another, exercises significant constraint over what we can plausibly say about it.

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10 Truth as Faithfulness

An issue still remains to be resolved. I have allowed that in formulating a statement about some matter one has to interpret the relevant phenomena and it is possible that no one interpretation is the ‘correct’ one, with all others simply false. I have also maintained that realities are always appraised from some perspective, and that cultural differences often influence how phenomena are interpreted. We have seen how accepting those points, and at the same time restricting truth to the correctness of statements, generates a logical problem, to which selective relativism offers only a pseudosolution. If at least some phenomena lend themselves to being interpreted in more than one way, how could alternative descriptions of the one phenomenon each be true? Although I have argued that people are able to transcend the forms of thought inherited from their own cultures, and can shift their perspectives so that some degree of understanding is achieved, that is not sufficient to dispose of this issue.

10.1 Perspectives and faithfulness The problem we have to confront is generated by the fact that alternative descriptions of the one phenomenon cannot all be correct. Correctness does not admit of degrees, and “correct” has an on-or- off logic. If alternative descriptions of the one phenomenon are each true how can they be genuine alternatives? And if we admit they are alternative descriptions, are we not forced to accept the legitimacy of relativistic locutions like “true for them” and “true for me”? If so, truth would no longer be a univocal concept. This problem is generated by glossing the meaning of the word “true” as “correct”. But the existence of certain idiomatic phrases in the English language betrays the fact that all is not well with the logic of truth-ascorrectness. The concept of truth is regularly invoked in yet another way which philosophers have ignored: locutions like “There is truth in what you say”, “That is a half-truth”, and “That is not wrong but ...” are commonplace. That there are such uses indicates something significant. The point of such 241

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locutions is to avoid identifying truth with correctness in those contexts. They exist as ways of sidestepping the dilemma just posed. The point of responding that there is truth in what you say is precisely to create room for an alternative interpretation or perspective – without implying that what you said is just incorrect, or resorting to a relativistic response. But simply noting such linguistic devices does not suffice to dispel the issue posed above. Adopting an action-based conception of truth provides a way of resolving this dilemma. Correctness is not the only concept of truth; that was clearly demonstrated in Chapter 5. In the interactive conception of truth, correctness is a derivative sense. The basic connotations of truth are success in action, and trustworthiness and reliability demonstrated by one’s actions over time. Truth as faithfulness is an achievement, manifest when actions succeed in doing what they are directed towards accomplishing. This is the sense which has been preserved in the non-linguistic uses of that word, but ignored by philosophers. Yet we have found this conception of truth to be vindicated by the logical structure of actions. Moreover, we saw in §5.7 that faithfulness is a generic norm, which could be fulfilled in many ways. Unlike a promise, being faithful does not require that certain specific actions be performed. Rather, what counts as a faithful action varies, since it has to be fitting, appropriate to the circumstances, and fit into an extended pattern of actions which are likewise faithful. Nor is there a single determination which ensures that a faithful pattern of action is ‘appropriate’. Different actions will manifest faithfulness in different circumstances, and often there is more than one way of behaving faithfully even in a single circumstance. This is compounded by the fact that novelty is intrinsic to historical situations. So no settled and general criteria can be specified in advance as to which actions are necessary and sufficient for persons to act faithfully. In fact, the concept of faithfulness is more open-textured than most other empirical concepts. Working out what is fitting in some novel situation requires that we conduct ourselves in ways that are open to apprehending what presents itself in the situation, and act accordingly. While the discussion in Chapter 5 ranged across many ways in which faithfulness can be manifest, included amongst those ways are speech-acts, and within that class of actions, acts of statement-making. When we focus upon this last class of actions, the general points just summarized equally apply. Speech-acts of assertion are likewise subject to the generic norm of being faithful; what they have to be faithful to are the realities which they purport to describe. This is the obligation which assertoric thought and speech owe to phenomena; that is their proper function, as I argued in §8.3. When those speech-acts are faithfully performed, the statements made are reliable. That is why we call them ‘true’. The reliability of statements in turn warrants their being called ‘correct’, but correctness is the thinner, less weighty, and more restrictive notion. Its use presupposes that the issues of

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how phenomena are to be interpreted, explored in the previous two chapters, have already been resolved. Not only does the concept of truth as faithfulness thus underpin the correctness of statements, but its richness also provides a way of solving the dilemma with which I began. This is where the concept of faithfulness has real work to do. Just as there are no recipes for how to be a faithful friend, for example, so there is no one way to describe some phenomenon faithfully. Because the obligation to be faithful, to which assertoric speech-acts are subject, is a generic norm, there are no specific criteria, applicable across all cultures and all situations, which statements purporting to describe some given phenomenon must meet in order to be reliable. We could say that the only requirement they must satisfy – which does apply across all cultures – is the generic one to ‘tell it like it is’. But ‘how it is’ is precisely the question! People often come to phenomena from different perspectives, with different concerns and pre-understandings, interested in drawing attention to different aspects of them, and taking them to have differing significances. Given these various contexts, perspectives, and interests, each statement might well describe something pertinent to how this reality is. That is, depending upon the context of their utterances, it is possible that their various descriptions are each, in their own way, genuine and reliable. It is a commonplace observation that the concepts expressed in different languages often carve up the world in significantly different ways. The relevant point here, however, is that the acts of describing those phenomena can be performed from a variety of perspectives and might be couched in linguistic expressions which do not map one-toone. Yet all of these assertoric speech-acts might be faithful to reality, each in its own way. If so, each of the statements thus expressed will be reliable. This is the subtle, but highly significant, contribution which reviving the concept of truth as faithfulness makes to meeting the challenge posed by relativism, whether selective or universal. This concept proves itself ‘roomy’ enough to admit a variety of perspectives upon the same phenomenon, each interpreting it differently, while allowing for the possibility that each interpretation is in its own way reliable, and therefore in that sense true. It is that same concept which makes sense of locutions like “There is truth in what you say”. The assertion in question manifests faithfulness, although the responder would not put it that way themselves. This concept of truth is univocal. It therefore resolves the issue of how to acknowledge the relativities of understanding implicit in the historicity of human being while preserving a univocal concept of truth, unlike the pseudo-solution to which relativists resort. Because the latter operate with a concept of truth as correctness, restricted to statements and such like, their only way of coping with historicity is to relativize “true” to speakers or their communities. As a result, that predicate becomes equivocal. On the other hand, because the concept of truth as faithfulness is more deeply

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grounded, in the speech-acts which produce statements, it is able to tolerate some variety of interpretation while preserving a fecund and recognizable notion of truth. In reaching this conclusion, let me reiterate that the notion of truth being recommended here provides no licence to radical subjectivism. Being true, that is, faithful, involves much more than the subjectivity of the agent; it requires overt expression, and is subject to verification. It is plainly not the case that ‘anything goes’, or that whatever one believes is true. Because people’s speech-acts are observable events, whether what they say is reliable is, in principle, a publicly ascertainable issue. Of course, any fair assessment of their statements has to take into account the context of their assertion. Considerable empathy and sensitivity might be required to understand precisely where some speakers are ‘coming from’, as the popular phrase puts it. But, in principle, there are no insuperable obstacles to testing the reliability of what they assert. While people genuinely hold many beliefs, and will sincerely maintain that their beliefs are true, it does not follow from the position I am advocating that whatever different people sincerely believe is equally legitimate. Many beliefs are simply false – precisely because they are unreliable. Other beliefs might be such that their truth cannot be decisively settled – it is not incumbent on an account of truth that all statements, and all beliefs, be verifiable. The people holding those beliefs might be intending to be faithful to what is – belief, like assertion, aims at truth – but it remains possible that they have nevertheless fallen into error. The crucial point is that what can count as faithful action is constrained by that towards which it is directed. Only if a reality has been faithfully described can the speech-act describing it, and consequently the statement made by that assertion, be true. But that does not rule out the possibility that, in some cases, statements made from different perspectives, and invoking different concepts, might each in their own way be faithful to that reality.

10.2 Openness to the truth There are therefore powerful constraints upon anyone who would speak the truth. The possibility of making true statements is constituted by a twofold openness: a speaker’s openness to how phenomena are; and by those phenomena being open to investigation and description. Only when both kinds of openness are respected can true statements be made. Assertion, like all other kinds of action, is therefore interactive. To take the second point first, for assertions to succeed, the phenomena about which we would speak must also reveal something of how they are. As Heidegger has insisted, the basic meaning of the word “phenomenon” is something which ‘shows itself’ (1996, Introduction, ch. II, §7). Contrary to Kant’s use of the word – or at least, contrary to how he is usually understood

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to be using it – phenomena are not opposed to how things are, in themselves. Rather, a phenomenon is something which shows something of itself. Rarely, however, do we apprehend something in its totality. Even in cases of visual perception, we usually cannot see the back of what is open to our view, as we noted in §6.7. Consequently, most naming and describing has to go beyond what is immediately given to observation. Moreover, scientific investigation is rarely a matter of simple observation; it standardly involves operating upon and manipulating the subject of investigation in order to coerce it to reveal what is not evident to uneducated sight. That is why scientific description typically involves experimentation, and then reinterpreting the phenomena employing terms drawn from a theory-laden vocabulary. In all cases, truth is made possible by reality’s revealing something of itself. On the other side, speakers will err unless they are acting out of a genuine understanding both of themselves and of the phenomena about which they would speak. The first aspect of this is fraught with potential difficulties. That we approach some phenomenon with a pre- existing set of expectations and understandings is inescapable. Derived from our previous experiences, these predispose us to interpret this new phenomenon in certain ways which might well be inappropriate. For many ordinary everyday situations, this causes no serious problems. But speakers need always to be alive to the possibility that their pre-understandings will lead them to misunderstand what they encounter. They therefore need to be open to possible novelty, and be ready to correct their pre-understandings in the light of what they discover. But that can only occur if they also are open to learning from what they encounter. Our understandings will be misunderstandings unless, in arriving at them, priority is conceded to the reality about which we would speak. For this reason, in the reciprocity of openness between self and other which makes truth possible, the two sides are not on an equal footing. Because an open orientation towards phenomena involves an intrinsic directedness, speakers are committed by the very act of assertion to hold what they say subordinate to how the phenomena are. The openness to reality which renders success in acts of assertion achievable requires that our thinking and speaking about phenomena be subordinated to what they are and how they are. Since assertoric acts are subject to this twofold openness, the position I am advocating, far from being relativist or subjectivist, is a modest form of realism. It is relevant here to recall briefly from §5.7 the three respects in which being faithful to another person requires openness. Firstly, in order to be faithful, actions must not only express genuine and consistent commitment on the part of the agent; they must also be fitting, that is, appropriate to the circumstances. Secondly, working out what is fitting in some situation requires conducting oneself in ways that are open to apprehending the others, as they are, in their situations. That calls for insight and discernment

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into the character of the situation and into the needs and desires of the other person. And thirdly, faithful action towards another person respects the integrity of the other. When one consistently shows one’s care for the welfare of others, in ways that respect their own autonomy and integrity, being true has to do with treating them as they are. These three aspects of openness apply with full force to acts of assertion. This kind of speech-act likewise must be fitting, appropriate to the circumstances. While some phenomenon might lend itself to be described in more than one way, each description is required to be appropriately faithful to how that phenomenon is showing itself. Secondly, working out what would be an appropriate description of some situation requires that we conduct ourselves in ways that are open to apprehending those phenomena, as they are. That calls for insight and discernment into the character of those phenomena. The requisite kind of knowing is noetic and interactive, and is prior to the kind of discursive knowledge which can then be expressed in statements. And thirdly, acts of assertion, in order to be faithful towards some phenomena, have to respect their integrity and respond to them as they are. It follows from these considerations that, in general, statements are always open to falsification. To invoke some technical jargon, the position I am advocating is ‘fallibilist’. Unlike scepticism, fallibilism does not imply that all claims to truth are unwarranted – we do not need to have logically conclusive justifications for what we claim to know. Rather, because all truthclaims might have to be revised in the light of further discoveries, it could happen that whatever we take to be true might turn out to be false. The nature of assertion requires that statements be always held liable to retraction or revision in the light of a more adequate apprehension of what they are orientated towards. Adopting this form of realism is a healthy check upon our tendency to claim absolute truth for our favourite theories or ideologies. As I have argued above, today’s insight might indeed have attained a glimpse of the truth, but the partial character of that insight might become evident tomorrow. In our activities we can be true to what we have glimpsed, but other approaches in other situations will evoke other insights.

10.3

Truth as a value

In Chapter 3, we identified a number of respects in which truth has normative force. It is the telos of the activity of statement-making. It plays a normative role in the community of its users. It is regarded as a moral value – to say that some statement is true is to commend it, and we generally expect people to be truthful and think ill of them when they are not. Of course, truth and truthfulness are not the same, but they are connected: in general, we hold people accountable for the truth of what they say. We have now seen why truth and truthfulness should be so highly regarded.

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I pointed out in §2.2 how testing any system of logic for validity relies on the concept of truth as an indispensable notion. Since our account of the truth of statements allows us to appeal to reliability, it is well suited to the task of justifying the rules and axioms of any such system. The meaning of the logical constants and operators can be specified in terms of their preserving reliability. Our analysis has also shown why truth conveys normative force. That follows from the teleological nature of actions generally. But the high status accorded to truth and truthfulness in codes of morality is a further point, which the notion of truth as faithfulness renders explicable. Faithfulness is a prerequisite for trust between people. Unless people can rely upon those who give them their word, interpersonal relations soon break down. But as we saw in Chapter 5, being faithful involves more than speaking the truth; it is displayed in consistent patterns of behaviour which are authentic and reliable. On the other hand, untrustworthiness and disloyalty are both hurtful and destructive. From commercial dealings, through occasional undertakings, to intimate relationships, trust is the social glue which enables individuals to mature and communities to thrive. This is why truth is an important value. To be a true friend, for example, is to act in the way friends ought to act – to be someone whose friendship can be relied upon, whose evident friendship can be trusted, and who shows that friendship with steadfastness and integrity. A person’s being true to another is rightly regarded as honourable and a virtue. Furthermore, to maintain ourselves in existence, like all biological creatures, we generally need to hold fast to the truth in what we do and what we say. When our beliefs and actions are not consistent with how the world is, and is becoming, we soon find ourselves in trouble. In certain circumstances, making empirical mistakes can prove fatal. In noting this obvious fact, I am not, however, implying that every act of assertion is somehow aimed at self-maintenance. The life of us humans is much more complex than that of bacteria, frogs, rats, and cheetahs, and involves the pursuit of many more generic goals than self-preservation, some of which, in certain circumstances, we value more highly than individual survival. But whatever our individual interests and goals might be, if we do not hold fast to the truth in what we do and say, our intended actions will generally be frustrated and prove ineffective. The same applies to acts of assertion. When what we assert is not true, our act of assertion will not succeed in identifying a state of affairs which our audience can also identify. In conversation, that is not necessarily upsetting; our audience might believe the falsehood we have uttered, or might simply understand the sense of the words used and not bother with understanding what they are about. Or if the mistake is obvious, our audience might quickly point it out, and readily forgive our error. Nevertheless, if too many of our statements turn out to be false, people will be right to regard us as unreliable witnesses and will not trust even

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those of our assertions which do happen to be true. That will be disruptive of our personal relationships. Truthfulness, in the sense of speaking the truth, is also rightly regarded as honourable and a virtue. Maintaining the truth as a high value in both personal and public life is not easy. The health of a society depends upon constant vigilance. That is why freedom of speech, and of publication, is so important in curbing the abuse of power. Those philosophers who deny that truth is a value are (no doubt unintentionally) playing into the hands of the cynical and politically unscrupulous. Against that, I contend that it is dangerous to devalue truth. Resolute commitment to truth in the public domain is one of our protections against disillusion, corruption, and injustice. Always speaking the truth, with care and sensitivity, is indeed an indispensable part of maintaining the truth. But being true encompasses more than what we assert; it concerns our many ways of interacting with one another, of which asserting statements are but one. Personal commitments and personal growth require openness, faithfulness, and authenticity. Conducting oneself in that way in all our dealings is not effortless, and we frequently err. But it is possible both to speak the truth and to do the truth. The concept of truth has always been a central topic of philosophical reflection. Having diagnosed what has led philosophers over the past century into fruitless controversies and to propose inadequate theories, it is now time to move beyond them. Our reflections have yielded a coherent, adequate, and comprehensive conception of truth which is both deeply grounded and resolves many seemingly intractable philosophical problems. Restoring the threefold senses of the word “true” not only provides a conception which is compatible with our historicity, but also explains why truth should be treasured as one of our highest moral values.

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Index “about,” 125–6, 170, 213–18 actions metaphysically deep, 61, 91, 158 minimal, 15, 62–3, 80–8, 89, 92, 95, 98, 105, 144, 145 necessarily successful, 85, 105, 106, 109 nested, 82, 159 reflective, 15, 81, 88–91, 93, 112, 115, 145, 149, 231 self-directed, 15, 77, 85, 88–91, 112, 115, 145 see also goal-directedness of actions aging, 69 agreement, 12, 17, 19, 22, 39–42, 102 see also truth, as agreement aleˉ theia, 5, 19, 116, 163n Alon, U. et al., 66 ancient Greek philosophy, 5, 15, 58, 163–4 anticipation, 77, 81, 90, 96, 138–41, 144–6, 152, 155–6, 159, 162, 232 Appignanesi, Lucy, 12 Aquinas, Thomas, 7, 38, 213 archetypes, 5, 8, 69, 71–2, 76, 102, 107, 207 Aristotelian forms, 7, 8, 66 see also constituting organization and organization Aristotle, 5, 7, 39n, 78, 81n, 87, 88, 126, 192, 212, 213 arrows, 58, 84, 86, 103, 104, 169, 195 atemporality, 116, 117, 235 atoms, 63, 208n Augustine, 5–6, 19, 116 authority, 4, 11, 105n, 109, 213, 224, 237 autonomy, 63, 66–73, 75, 77, 81, 86–8, 95, 100, 113, 118, 122–3, 128, 135, 138, 229, 246 Ayer, A.J., 27–8, 29 bacteria, 62, 63, 66, 77, 79, 83, 86, 90, 93–5, 96, 112–13, 134, 135–6, 145, 158, 247 ‘bearer’ of truth, 18, 20, 21, 26, 36, 59–60 see also locus of truth belief, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25–6, 27, 29, 40, 45, 47, 48, 49, 59,

96, 104, 107, 137n, 143, 166, 204, 221–2, 225, 231–2, 238, 244, 247 Berkeley, George, 40, 128 Bickhard, Mark, x, 57, 64, 67n, 73, 76, 132, 133, 135, 136, 146, 150, 151, 155, 171n biosemantic, 75, 142–4 blind ascriptions of truth, 26–7, 34–5, 42, 49, 178, 179, 198 candle flames, 64–5, 66, 67, 70, 71, 76, 77, 112 Capaldi, Nicholas, 91 Capek, Milic, 117n Castaneda, H-N, 28 causality, 7, 62, 74–5, 81n, 87, 88, 91–3, 111, 171 see also representation, causal theories of character, personal, 109, 110–12, 114, 115, 118–19, 123 cheetahs, 89–90, 145, 247 chemical baths, 63–4 Christensen, Wayne, 67, 89, 145, 150 coherence theory of truth, 21, 25, 128, 137n coherent systems, 67, 69 commitment, 60, 103, 107, 116, 118–21, 123, 209, 229, 238, 245, 248 communication, 98, 159, 162–3, 164, 169, 173, 174–8, 183, 184, 189, 237, 239 conceptual role of representations, 127 consistency in action, 105–7, 109, 110–12, 117–20, 123, 245–7 propositional and theoretical, 1, 2, 33, 63, 115, 117, 124, 168, 171n, 191, 201, 221–2, 232 constituting organization, 65–6, 68n, 69, 72, 73, 77 see also organization content, 4, 21n, 30–1, 37–8, 40, 102, 130–1, 133–6, 137–45, 147, 149–52, 160, 165–8, 177–8, 181, 183, 188, 206, 209, 212, 214n, 215–17, 219, 223

255

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256 Index contextuality, 10, 12, 21n, 27, 31–2, 46, 48, 60, 89, 94, 108, 113–15, 117, 118, 153–4, 158, 162, 165–6, 169, 172, 175, 179, 181, 185–6, 188–9, 194, 197–9, 205–8, 212, 214n, 218, 223–4, 226, 230–3, 236–7, 240, 243–4 correctness. See truth, as correctness correspondence theory of truth, 14, 21, 25, 39, 40, 41, 42, 128, 178, 192–3, 198, 202–3 see also representation, as correspondence culture, 1, 2, 4–5, 9–10, 114, 189, 224, 226, 239, 241, 243 Davidson, Donald, 137n Dawkins, Richard, 78n death, 4, 69, 85, 158 defining life, 67, 70–2 definite descriptions, 28, 32, 70, 172–3, 206–7 deflationary theories of truth, 25, 41, 44, 46, 49, 51, 54, 196, 205 Descartes, René, 6, 8, 19, 29, 74, 146, 152, 211, 212, 215 desires, 52–3, 83, 87, 91–3, 107, 120, 162, 246 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 9 disagreements, 1, 12, 17, 19, 20, 21, 239 disquotation theories of truth, 21, 22n, 25, 41–4, 50, 55, 108 distrust, 1, 4, 13, 247 see also trust Dummett, Michael, 33, 50–2 Duns Scotus, 8, 38 dynamic presuppositions, 97, 100, 139, 158 dysfunction. See functions Eddington, Arthur, 236 efficient cause, 7, 88 Einstein, Albert, 117n, 221 emergence, 57, 61, 63, 65– 6, 73, 75, 76 – 80, 83, 88, 92, 95, 98, 107, 112, 123, 126, 134, 137–9, 144, 148, 158 energy wells, 63, 69, 76 error, 19, 46, 54–5, 78–80, 83–5, 86, 88–9, 95–7, 121, 123–4, 127–8, 130, 132–4, 139, 142–4, 158, 165, 168, 190, 193, 195, 206–7, 211, 235, 244, 247

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essence, 7, 8, 9, 39, 69, 212, 213 eternal sentences, 12, 27, 30–2, 117, 158, 223 eternal truths, 6, 9–10, 116 etiological, 75, 83, 142n see also biosemantic etymology of “true,” 109–10 eudaimonia, 78 evolution, 15, 74, 75, 78, 80, 83, 89, 90, 125, 130, 143–5 existence, 8, 9, 15, 32, 38, 54, 62–4, 66–70, 72–8, 83, 86–7, 101n, 102, 112, 115, 129–30, 134, 138, 140, 152, 177, 194, 198, 206–7, 208n, 211, 213–16, 228, 233, 247 external relations, 21, 54, 64, 111, 133–4, 139–40, 146, 165–6, 194, 204, 206–7 see also internal relations Fackenheim, Emil, 113, 228–30 faithfulness. See truth, as faithfulness fallibilism, 246 falsity, 1, 2, 6, 12, 18–19, 23, 26, 29–30, 31, 40, 46, 47, 48, 98, 127, 130, 133–4, 139–40, 142–4, 163n, 166–8, 174, 182, 192, 193, 195, 202–3, 204–11, 212, 215, 218, 222, 224, 235, 241, 247 “false” and “true” as opposites of the same order, 18, 21, 22, 32–6, 51–2, 54–5, 96, 103, 106 false friends, 105–7. See also friend, true false objects, 102–3, 105n, 106, 107 far-from-equilibrium, 15, 63–4, 66–7, 72–3, 75–6, 83, 87, 115, 144 feedback, 77, 80 figure-and-ground, 127 flexible learners, 89–90, 112, 115, 128, 145 Fodor, J.A., 93, 95 forms, 5–8, 24, 70, 72, 116, 203, 205n, 212 see also life forms Foster, M.B., 154, 219 Foucault, Michel, 11, 225 Frege, Gottlob, 13, 25, 29n, 30, 32, 33, 34, 48, 101n, 167–8, 178, 180 friend, true, 18, 59, 100–10, 118–20, 243, 247

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Index 257 frogs, 59, 80, 82–3, 86, 89, 96–8, 102–3, 109, 112–13, 123, 132, 134–6, 138–9, 141, 143–6, 158–9, 165, 168, 171, 173, 178, 182, 193, 216, 247 fulfilment, 59, 65, 73, 82, 84, 91, 96, 105–6, 109, 116, 119, 140, 142, 155, 162, 175, 177, 193, 195, 242 functional indications, 80, 97–8, 100, 135–6, 139, 171, 178, 182 functional wholes, 68, 76, 86–8, 92 functions biological, 63, 66, 69–70, 72, 73–6, 78, 83–4, 86–8, 94–5, 96, 97, 99, 102, 115, 141–4, 193 functional distinctions, 144, 147–9, 158 normative, 47, 55, 58, 61, 75, 84, 103–7, 109, 147, 184, 197, 202 proper, 74–6, 84, 85, 94, 96, 102, 130, 141–4, 150, 169, 177, 195, 242 propositional, 25, 32n, 33–4, 101n, 180 representational, 126, 131, 136–7, 150, 164–6, 168–71, 173, 175, 177, 185, 193, 195, 211 see also communication future-regarding, 16, 77, 81–3, 90, 96, 107, 115, 117–18, 120, 135–6, 138–41, 144, 147, 152, 165, 170–1, 173, 175, 180–1, 186, 218–19 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 232 generic norms, 87–8, 120, 145–6, 225–6, 242–3 Gergonne, J.D., 57 Gibson, James, 129, 136, 171n, 184 goal-directedness of actions, 15, 58, 60, 62–3, 76–8, 79, 81–90, 92, 94, 96, 105, 113, 123, 134–6, 138, 141, 145, 147, 155, 165, 170, 173, 177, 184, 193, 220, 225, 238, 247 Greenblatt, Stephen, 114 Habermas, Jürgen, 11, 162, 201, 229 Hale, Bob, 57 Hegel, Friedrich, 9, 19, 24, 72, 100–4, 120, 217, 226–8, 231 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 38, 121–2, 137, 154n, 176, 184, 244

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Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 9 hermeneutics, 191, 233, 239 heuristic, 47–8, 49, 55, 219 Hilbert, David, 57 historical situations, 113–15, 119–20, 223–5, 230–2, 238, 242 historicity, 9, 14, 112–15, 190, 213, 223–6, 228, 229, 231, 233, 243, 248 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 152 Homer, 19, 23, 163 homunculus problem, 128–9 Hooker, Cliff A., 67, 68, 89, 145, 150 Horwich, Paul, 22n, 43, 44, 52n Hume, David, 29, 56, 57, 62, 84, 101n, 111, 215 Husserl, Edmund, 137, 155, 219 implicit definitions, 57, 98 information, 27, 30, 56, 79, 97–8, 125, 126, 129, 130–1, 135–40, 152, 168, 177, 181, 186, 195, 205, 207, 214, 231 infrastructure, 67–8, 73, 76–7, 79, 135–6 insight, 120–3, 214, 229–32, 237, 245–6 integrity, of a system, 65–6, 69 personal, 2, 47, 104, 106–7, 118, 121–3, 229, 233, 238, 246–7 intentionality, 92, 107, 148, 155, 161, 169, 174, 203, 209 intentions, personal, 53, 73, 91–5, 118, 131, 143, 161–3 interactive processes, 63–5, 67–70, 72, 75–80, 86–7, 89, 93, 97–8, 112, 114–15, 123, 127, 135–6, 147–8, 189, 191, 193 conception of truth, 98, 219–20, 222–3, 231, 242, 244, 248 knowledge, 38, 121–3, 146–7, 153, 246 model of representation, 130, 132–42, 144–6, 148–56, 157–9, 164–5, 167, 170–1, 173, 177, 180, 183–6, 193–4, 217–18 ontology, 100 internal relations, 54–6, 64, 82, 84–5, 110–11, 133–4, 140, 166, 206–7

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258

Index

interpretation, 2–3, 10, 27, 43, 79, 87, 113, 131–2, 134, 142–4, 153, 154, 160, 161, 166, 172, 179, 182–92, 194, 196n, 197–200, 205n, 208, 211–12, 214, 218, 222, 225–6, 228–9, 231–3, 236–8, 241–5 Kant, Immanuel, 29, 72, 84, 101n, 187, 191, 214–15, 244 kidneys, 71, 73–4 Kierkegaard, Søren, 176n, 213–17, 225, 228 Kim, Jaegwon, 70 Kirkham, Richard, 33, 52, 201 Kneale, William, 57 knowledge, factual, 3, 10, 27, 48, 49, 53, 88, 97–8, 101, 114, 121–2, 130, 132, 134, 167, 203, 212, 224, 225, 227–8, 246 interactive, 38, 121–3, 146–7, 153, 246 see also self-knowledge Korsgaard, Christine, 107 Kripke, Saul, 34–6, 209, 211 law courts, 3, 92, 186, 235 Lawson, Hilary, 12 leaping in and leaping ahead, 122 learning, 29, 80, 89–90, 112, 115, 128, 130, 145, 147–9, 151, 153, 154, 159, 170–1, 175, 178, 180, 183, 185–7, 205, 229, 232, 234, 239, 245 Lettvin, J.Y. et al., 134, 143 Lewis, David, 26, 29, 198 Liar Paradox, 33–5, 208–11 lies, 1–2, 47, 53, 93 life defined. See defining life life forms, 15, 67, 69–72, 77, 83, 85, 115 Lineweaver, Charles, 67 linguistic conception of truth, 14, 17–44, 45, 52, 55, 58, 60, 95–6, 100, 108, 110, 124, 125, 157, 166, 197, 200, 203, 206, 211, 223 ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, 13, 25 Locke, John, 8, 14, 23, 25, 38–40, 126, 128, 192–3, 203, 212 locus of truth, 18, 24–5, 58–61, 107, 125, 193 see also ‘bearer’ of truth logic, formal, 13, 21, 25, 28, 32–4, 42, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56–7, 71, 72, 174, 178, 180–1, 207, 235–6, 247

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love, true, 18, 59–60, 103, 106–7, 118 mammals, 68, 89, 112, 136, 158 McDowell, John, 3, 10, 191 memory, 148–9, 158, 235 mental states, 26, 91, 93 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 127 Mill, John Stuart, 62, 88 Miller, Arthur, 10, 237, 238 Millikan, Ruth, 75, 142–4, 149 ‘mind-body’ problem, 70, 91 minimal action. See actions, minimal minimalist theories of truth, 21, 22n, 25, 41–4, 45, 46, 49, 50, 54–5, 196–9, 205 misrepresentation, 131, 133, 138–43, 154 missiles and goal-seeking, 77, 81 Montaigne, Michel de, 212 Moore, G.E., 10, 54 natural laws, 74, 94 see also causality natural situations, 113, 115, 223–5, 230–2, 238 see also historical situations neo-Platonism, 5, 116 Newton, Isaac, 127n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 191–2, 225 non-linguistic uses of “true,” 15, 19, 60, 100–24, 125, 182, 193, 195, 197, 199, 242 normativity, 14, 16, 46–9, 52, 53–7, 58, 60, 62–3, 73–6, 78, 84, 86, 95–6, 99, 102, 104–6, 139, 142, 195, 197, 202, 206, 220, 246–7 novelty, 113–14, 119–20, 122, 190, 242, 245 Nozick, Robert, 10, 196n, 200n, 220–1, 236n objectivity, 5, 10, 30, 80, 91, 118, 124, 152, 153–5, 173, 184–5, 190, 215–16, 218, 229 objects – of experience, 29, 38, 40, 58, 101–3, 128, 136, 141, 143, 149–56, 159, 170, 191, 219 abstract, 147 propositions as, 43 Ockham, William of, 8 Olympian standpoint, 12, 16, 130, 153, 181, 217

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Index 259 ontology, 15, 24, 26, 30, 37, 60, 83, 100, 110, 153–4 see also truth, as ontological openness, 113, 118–23, 138, 155, 162, 228, 231–3, 237, 238–9, 242, 244–8 necessary, 64, 67, 76 open-textured, 120, 186, 187, 242 organization, 63, 64, 65–6, 67, 68n, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 80, 86, 92, 146–7 Parmenides, 116, 205 Perry, John, 29n, 31n persistence, 63–5, 69, 72, 73, 77–8, 87–8, 115 perspective, 3, 5, 10, 30, 137, 152, 153, 158, 185, 188, 197–8, 212–13, 226, 231–40, 241–4 petrol gauge, 130–1, 134 Philo of Alexandria, 6 photographs, 29, 129, 148 physicalism, 70, 87, 91 Pico della Mirandola, 9 Pierce, C.S., 3 Plato, 5, 6, 9, 12, 19, 24, 48, 116, 117, 126, 163, 192, 196, 203, 204, 205n, 212 Platonic influences, 5, 7, 8, 12, 32n, 102, 116–17, 163, 185, 190, 203 politicians, 1, 10, 190, 213 Popper, Karl, 2, 208n, 212 practices, 1, 4, 12, 24, 46, 51, 52–5, 58, 79, 90, 93, 96–8, 113, 148, 153–4, 157, 164, 170–2, 175–6, 178–9, 183–7, 189, 193, 194, 195–7, 204, 209, 219–20, 224, 239 pragmatism, 18, 26, 95, 137, 201, 202–4, 211, 215 primary consciousness, 146–7, 158 projection, 16, 74, 79, 81–2, 90, 111–12, 115–16, 120, 123, 136, 154, 161, 165, 167, 168–71, 173, 174, 176, 180–1, 186, 189, 218–19, 223, 224, 227, 231–2 promises, 116, 118, 119–20, 142, 160, 162–3, 192, 218, 242 quantum physics, 65, 91, 196n, 236n Quine, W.V.O., 27, 54, 179 rats, 80, 90, 112–13, 145, 247 the real, 3, 5–6, 19, 116, 176, 192, 205, 216

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real essences, 8, 39, 212 realism, 38, 153, 245–6 recursive self-maintenance. See selfmaintenance redundancy theory of truth, 21, 25, 41–2, 45, 55, 196–9 reflective action. See actions, reflective reflexivity, 28–31, 70, 72, 80, 87, 115, 146, 149, 158, 181, 185, 226, 229, 233–4 relativism, 3, 9–13, 14, 15, 115, 190, 197, 211, 212–40, 241–5 reliability, 3, 59, 97–8, 100, 103, 105–10, 116–19, 123–4, 125, 127–8, 131, 133–4, 139–41, 187, 193–201, 204, 219–20, 224, 229, 234, 242–4, 247 representation causal theories of, 40, 126–7, 131–2, 135, 148, 152n, 154, 165, 169 as correspondence, 126–33, 135, 136–8, 142, 143, 148–50, 165, 169. See also correspondence theory of truth interactive model of, 132–42, 144, 148–50, 153, 155–8, 164–5, 171n, 193 reproduction, 69–70, 72–3, 74, 78, 95, 225 Rescher, Nicholas, 23 Rorty, Richard, 23, 44, 137, 202–3 Russell, Bertrand, 10, 13, 22, 25, 32–4, 40, 54, 70, 101n, 172, 180, 206–7 scepticism, 4, 8, 10, 13, 15, 39, 114, 140–1, 194, 204, 246 see also relativism science, 2–3, 7–9, 15, 37, 46, 49, 51, 53, 62, 76, 81n, 88, 91, 97, 101, 113, 126, 130, 151, 153–4, 189, 208n, 212, 219–20, 224, 245 scientific explanation – the medieval model, 7–9 self-directed actions. See actions – selfdirected self-knowledge, 118, 123, 229 self-maintenance, 15, 63–6, 70–1, 73–5, 77, 112 recursive in organisms, 62–3, 67–70, 72, 75–80, 83–7, 89, 112–13, 115, 141, 144, 193, 247 self-making, 9, 114, 121, 224, 231

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260 Index self-organization. See organization self-reflection, 16, 81, 90, 112, 147–9, 158, 226, 229, 230, 232 see also actions, reflective Sellars, Wilfred, 137n semantic theories, 9, 48, 49, 58, 175, 181, 209 Shakespeare, William, 105, 110 sincerity, 47, 53, 112, 118–19, 162, 221, 244 space-time, 117, 196n, 236 Special Theory of Relativity, 117, 221, 236 Stalnaker, Robert, 26 stimuli, 62, 67, 89–90, 93–4, 126, 127, 132, 141, 159, 171 subjectivity, 118, 124, 161, 191–2, 215–16, 225–6, 240, 244, 245 substantial conceptions of truth, 19, 41, 45, 54, 61, 63, 108, 125, 197, 198–9, 234 success, 25, 27–8, 46, 51, 93, 104, 171, 173 in action, 58, 81–2, 84–5, 89, 90, 94, 96–8, 105–6, 109, 138–9, 140, 158, 161, 168, 193, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202–4, 206, 211, 245 and truth, 15, 95–7, 104–6, 123, 141, 195, 197, 199, 200–2, 204, 211, 242 survival, 56, 68–9, 74–5, 78, 84, 87–8, 90, 94, 97, 113, 134, 145, 151, 193–4, 247 Tarski, Alfred, 34, 202 teleological character of actions, 81, 161, 204, 247 theory of truth, 168, 195n telos, 46, 58, 61, 81–2, 84–5, 92–3, 96, 105, 134, 138–41, 161–3, 166, 168, 175–9, 193–5, 204, 206, 210–11, 234, 246 temporality of truth, 115–18, 124, 135, 180–1, 235 Tennyson, Alfred, 108 tense-less, 116, 235 tense logic, 235–6 theology, Christian, 5–11, 19, 24, 116–17, 203, 217 theory of relativity, 117, 236 Thompson, Michael, 67, 70–1, 76n, 234 three-factors in representation, 133, 144, 166 timelessness. See truth, as timeless transduction, 40, 131–2

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Travis, Charles, 31n, 188 ‘true for me’, 3, 221, 241 trust, 2, 13, 104, 109, 110, 118, 123, 195, 242, 247 truth as agreement, 21–2, 36–42, 100–4, 130, 178, 201, 215 as consensus, 21, 25, 37, 47, 200–1 as correctness, 20, 98, 107, 109–10, 117, 124, 125, 193, 195–8, 222, 223, 241–3 as correspondence. See correspondence theory of truth as faithfulness, 103–10, 115–24, 125, 164, 194–5, 197, 199, 229, 234, 236, 238, 241–8 as the goal of inquiry, 14, 46, 48 as ontological, 5, 15, 19–20, 24, 100, 102, 193 as timeless, 5, 12–13, 116–17, 185, 196n, 218, 223, 236 as warranted assertibility, 18, 37, 46–7, 200–3 see also eternal truths Truth and Historicity, 5, 14, 32n, 163n, 192, 195, 205 truthfulness, 2, 4, 47, 52, 246–8 truth-tables, 21, 32 truth-values, 12, 21, 30, 32–6, 98, 160, 188, 207, 235 two-factor accounts of representation, 133, 144 value, truth as a, 5, 11–12, 21, 30, 32–6, 49, 52–4, 55–6, 59, 98, 106, 160, 188, 190, 201, 204, 207, 220, 224, 235, 246–8 verification, 2, 12, 39, 40, 52, 149, 158, 166, 168, 177–8, 179, 182, 194, 205, 207, 212, 217–19, 224, 230, 235, 244 Vico, Giambattista, 6, 9 viruses, 72 Waismann, Freidrich, 120 Wallas, Graham, 111 webs of interactive potentiality, 146, 151–4, 155, 159, 170–1, 173, 177, 180, 183 Whitehead, A.N., 25, 32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 29, 31, 42, 51, 176, 187

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