The Face of Cognition

30 The

Face

of

Hilary

Putnam

Dummettian

Michael

Cognition

antirealism

Dummett

sees the problem

" recognition

transcendence

being

, or

and

verified if

it transcends

it transcends

what

presence

the

speaker

whose

presence

(in

some

the

mystery short

speaker

" grasp " is telling

postulating how

of mind

requires

according

principle

of bivalence

There

from

the beginning

(1)

, and

is your problem

Lizzie

Borden

Even if the truth stand what chief logical

not

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,

becomes

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a

, then ,

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form

to

powers

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,

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logic , beginning

which

he discusses

rejoinder

, which

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killed

with

her parents

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with

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at length

of truth

antici

in The goes

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as follows

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take a sentence whose truth

please . For

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of this sentence is ' recognition governing

he himself

in essence

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it means to say that (1 ) is true . For you understand principle

is a property

one so radical

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to Dummett

of Metaphysics

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a number

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to Dummett

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to do with

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speaker can

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. In effect , Dummett

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the

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as having

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whose

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of realism

" of truth

the use of the word

' true ' is :

' , surely you under (1 ) itself , and the

706 [

T

HilaryPutnam

arski

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Borden

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sentence

example

only

sentence

another

S

be

that

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true

is

.

true

is

equiv

-

. ]

killed

her

parents

with

an

axe

'

and

you

that

' Lizzie

Borden

killed

killed

her

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you

do

also

to

"

-

the

something

'

the

of

his

that

philosophical

de

the

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if

that

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only

if

(

is

to

Tarski

is

"

unmodified

is

true

;

Lizzie

Borden

it

means

that

who

form

s

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as

own

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not

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1

philosophers

of

shall

true

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some

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"

to

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claim

position

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sentences

predicate

about

Dummett

axe

fact

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that

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add

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philosophers

distinguish

claim

note

we

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with

to

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is

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himself4

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with

axe

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arski

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parents

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alent

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us

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under

to

-

stand sentence(1), and other sentenceswith an unknown truth value, for example, undecidedconjecturesin mathematics," he answers [in effectI am formulating his reply in my own words], " the philosophical problem is to give an account of what that understanding consists in." In short, if you appeal to an unexplicated notion of " understanding a sentence," then you are simply ducking all the philosophical problems. According to Dummett, my understanding of the sentence(1) [that is, of any sentence] consistsin my ability to recognizewhether (1) is verified. In other words, if (1) should be verified (by data that I myself perceive), then I would be able to tell that it was; and the ability or system of abilities that enablesme to do this constitutes my understanding of (1). Similarly, I possessthe ability to recognize proofs in mathematics, and this allows me to say that, if I were given a proof of the conjecture that there are infinitely many twin primes (pairs of primes such that one is obtained by adding two to or subtracting two from the other), I could

The Faceof Cognition

707

recognizethat it was a proof . And that is how I can say that I understand the twin -prime conjecture. Dummett, of course, would concedethe " Tarskian" points that he also understandsthe statementthat (1) is true and the statementthat the twin prime conjecture is true, and that he knows that the statementthat (1) is true is equivalent to (1) itself, etc. " But notice," he will point out [my words again!], " If my account is right , a speaker's understanding of the statementthat (1) is true involves the speaker's understanding what it is for (1) to be verified- and this property, being verified, is a property that (1) and its negation may both lack; it does not require the speaker to know anything about a property- call it 'classical truth '- that must be possessedeither by (1) or elseby (l )'s negation, independentlyof whether anyone can tell which one possesses it , as is postulated by classicallogic." In short, if Dummett's verificationist account of what constitutes understanding is right , then either truth is a uselessmetaphysical abstraction, or elsethere is nothing to the claim that truth is a bivalent property, the claim that characterizes" two -valued" logic. (It is thus that Dummett is led to the radical claim that a sound philosophy of languagerequires the revision of classicallogic itself.) I want now to consider the responseof the " detlationist philosophers" I mentioned a few moments ago. Thesephilosophers agreewith Dummett in thinking of our understanding of our sentencesas consisting in our knowledge of the conditions under which they are verified, although they reject Dummett's notion of " conclusive verification," replacing that notion with a notion of degreesof verification.6 They also reject Dummett's claim that we must not think of truth as a bivalent property, although they do agree that it is not a " substantive property" about which some metaphysical story needsto be told ; rather they claim that rejecting that metaphysicalpicture of what truth is does not require us to give up the " law of the excluded middle," " p v , p." As just mentioned, the deflationists even allow us to assertbivalence: (3) Either p is true or the negation of p is true. where p is any declarative sentence,7 but they interpret the assertion of (3) as a mere linguistic practice, free of commitment to the existenceof a property 'truth ' that is determinately possessedeither by the sentenceor

708

Hilary Putnam

elseby the negation of the sentence. For example, if we put sentence(1) for p, what (3) means, they say, is (4) Either Lizzie Borden killed her parents with an axe or Lizzie Borden did not kill her parents with an axe. - and (4), it will be noted, does not contain the word 'true'. But why should we accept (4)? Deflationists give different answers. Rudolf Carnap and Ayer said that the acceptanceof sentencesof the form 'p or not-p' is a linguistic convention; Quine, rejecting that answer, says simply that such sentencesare " obvious" (sometimeshe says " central " to our reasoning). But doesnot the " obviousness" of (4) depend on our belief that there is a fact of the matter as to whether Lizzie Borden did or did not administer the famous " forty whacks" ? And if uttering a sentence(whether or not I also employ the " logical device" of saying that the sentence'is true') is just following a community-wide practice of assigning it a degree of assertability ''as a function of observable circumstances,' how do we so much as make senseof the idea of a fact of the matter as to the rightnessof statementsthat are neither confirmed nor discon.f1rmedby those observablecircumstances? If we structure the debate in the way in which both Dummett and the de lationists do, then we are left with a forced choice between (a) either Dummettian antirealism or deflationism about truth , or (b) a retreat to metaphysical realism. Both Dummett's " global antirealist" 8 and the deflationist advertise their accounts as rescuing us from metaphysical realism. But, surely, one of the sourcesof the continuing appeal of metaphysical realism in contemporary philosophy is a dissatisfaction with the only apparent alternatives. The metaphysicalrealist will want to reply to the deflationist (and the antirealist) as follows . " Realism requires us to say that either (1) or the negation of (1) is true. If a philosopher advisesus to retain 'Either (1) is true or the negation of (1) is true' as something we are permitted to say while reinterpreting what we are doing when we say it in such a way as to deprive us of what we ordinarily mean (when we say of a sentencethat it is true), then he is disguising the radically revisionary character of his theory through a terminological slight-of-hand. That is what the deflationist, in effect, does. He allows us to hold on to the thought that 'Either (1) is true or the

The Faceof Cognition

negation

of

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710

HilaryPutnam

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The Error (and the Insight ) in Verificationism

Part of what is right in the metaphysical realist's responseto the deflationist is the realization that that view does not (as advertised) success fully undercut Dummettian antirealism. On the contrary"', deflationism about truth - aslong as it involves (as it has sincePaul Ramseyintroduced the position in the 1920s) a verificationist account of understandingadopts the most disastrousfeature of the antirealist view, the very feature that brings about the loss of the world (and the past). It differs from antirealism in this regard only in that it attempts to disguisethat feature

The Faceof Cognition

711

by means of a superficial terminological conservatism. The metaphysical realist is thus right to this extent: to undercut Dummett's antirealism requires challenging his account of understanding , not adopting it . But

what makesthe metaphysicalrealist's responsemetaphysicalis its acceptance of the idea (which it shares with the Dummettian

antirealist ) that

our ordinary realism- for example, about the past- presupposesa view of truth as a " substantiveproperty." The metaphysicalrealist, in wanting a property that he can ascribe to all and only true sentences , wants a property that correspondsto the assertoricforce of a sentence. But this is a very funny property . To avoid identifying this property of " truth " with

that of assertability, the metaphysicalrealist needsto argue that there is something we are saying when we say of a particular claim that it is true over and above what we are saying when we simply assert the claim . He

wants truth to be something that goes beyond the content of the claim and to be that in virtue

of which

the claim is true . This forces the meta -

physical realist to postulate that there is some single thing we are saying (over and above what we are claiming ) whenever we make a truth claim , no matter what sort of statement we are discussing, no matter what the circumstances

under which the statement

is said to be true , and no matter

what the pragmatic point of calling it true is said to be.12 The right alternative to thinking of truth as a " substantive property "

a la the metaphysical realist is not to think of our statementsas mere marks and noises that our community has taught us to associatewith conditions for being conclusivelyverified (as in the account of Dummett's " global antirealist" ), or to associatewith " betting behavior" in a way that is " a function of observable circumstances " (as in Horwich 's account ).

The right alternative is to recognize that empirical statements already make

claims

about

the world

-

many

different

sorts

of claims

about

the

world - whether or not they contain the words 'is true ' . What is wrong

in deflationism is that it cannot properly accommodate the truism that certain claims about the world are (not merely assertable or verifiable

but) true. What is right in deflationism is that if I assertthat " it is true that p," then I assertthe samething as if I simply assertp. Our confidence, when we make statements about the past , that we are saying something

whose rightness or wrongness depends on how things were back then (when we claim , for example , that " It is true that Lizzie Borden killed her

712

HilaryPutnam

parents with an axe" ) is not something that requires the metaphysical idea that there is a " substantive property " whose existence underwrites the very possibility of using the word 'true ' . In order to see more clearly the difference between the commonsense realism I am defending and the kind of metaphysical realism we are right to recoil from , let us shift our attention for a moment from discourse

about observable things, such as deer grazing on the meadow, to discourse about unobservables, for example, microbes. In the first lecture, I remarked that the use of instruments should be viewed as a way of extending our natural powers of observation. But the use of languageis also a way of extending our natural powers of observation. If I could not understand talk about " things too small to seewith the naked eye," the microscope would be at best a toy (like the kaleidoscope); what I saw when I looked through the eyepiecewould mean nothing to me. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the dependencegoes both ways. The phrase 'too small to seewith the naked eye' does not depend for its intelligibility on the invention of an instrument that allows us to seethings smaller than the things that the naked eyecan see(nor did we regard it as changing its sensewhen the microscopewas invented). What is mistaken about verificationism is the claim that the meaning of an expressionlike 'things too small to see with the naked eye' depends on there being methods of verifying the existenceof such things, and the related claim that the meaning of such an expression changes as these methods of verification change (for example, with the invention of the microscope). There is a philosophical danger, however, of rejecting what is right in verificationism in the course of rejecting what is wrong with it . What is right in verificationism is that a great deal of scientific talk does depend for its full intelligibility on the provision of the kind of thick explanatory detail that is impossible if one has no familiarity with the use of scientific instruments. For example, in Democritus's writings , as we know of them, the notion of an " atom" was a metaphysical one, but one to which we can give a sense, even if Democritus himself could not .13Thus, scientific instruments and scientific ways of talking are both ways of extending our perceptual and conceptual powers, and those ways are highly interdependent; indeed, they can fuse into a single complex practice.

TheFaceof Cognition 713 The ways in which language extends the mental abilities that we share

with other animals are almost endless; our ability to construct sophisticated scientific theories is only one example. A very different sort of example is provided by the role of logical constants, for example, the words

' all ' and 'no ' . An animal

or a child that has not yet learned to use

thesewords may have expectationsthat we who have acquired them can and do describewith the aid of thesewords. For example, imagine that someonewith modest skills at sleight-of-hand causesa handkerc,hief to " vanish" in front of a child's very eyes, and the child displays astonishment. We might say that the child believes(believed) that " handkerchiefs do not vanish into thin air just like that " - that is, that no handkerchiefs

vanish into thin air just like that. Of course, that generalization does not have any consequencesthat the child can understandnot possessedby the generalization: " observedhandkerchiefs do not vanish into thin air just like that ." Yet we would not dream of using the latter words to describe the child ' s attitude

to the event . We would

not know

how to make sense

of the suggestion that a child is only concerned to make a judgment about the behavior

of observed handkerchiefs

. This is the case not because

we take the child to be concerned with making judgments about both observed and unobserved

handkerchiefs

; the distinction

between the two

generalizations is not one that belongs to the child's intellectual repertoire . It is a part of our repertoire (and which description we use may make a difference

to us under certain circumstances

: " Fine shades of behavior .

Why are they important ? They have important consequences " 14). We describeeven primitive preverbal attitudes as attitudes toward objects of which people mayor may not be aware, and not just toward the part of the world that the child (or we) can " verify." Our sophisticatedadult talk about certain

features of the world

(such as " those which

are observable

to us" ) rests upon- is parasitic upon- just such a primitive preverbal attitude

toward

the world .

A quite different aspect of the extension of our conceptual abilities brought about by the possessionof words for generality is the possibility of formulating

conjectures that transcend even " ideal verifiability ," such

as " There are no intelligent extraterrestrials ." The fact that this conjec ture may not be verifiable even " in principle" does not mean that it does

714

Hilary Putnam

not correspond to a reality; but one can say what reality correspondsto it, if it is true, only by using the words themselves.1s And this is not deflationism; on the contrary, deflationism, by identifying understanding with possessionof verification abilities, makes it mysterious that we should find thesewords intelligible. Once again, the difficulty here lies in keeping what is right in verificationism (or in this case in deflationism) while throwing out what is wrong. . . .

Wittgensteinon Truth How, then, do we understand"recognition-transcendent " usesof the word 'true', as, for example , when we say that the sentence'Lizzie Bordenkilled her parentswith an axe' may well be true eventhoughwe may neverbe ableto establishfor certainthat it is?Tarski (who wasnot a delationist in my sense , becausehe neverendorsedthe verificationist accountof understandingin any of its versions ) expresseda genuine insightin pointingout (as Gottlob Fregehad beforehim) that thereis an intimateconnectionbetweenunderstandinga sentenceand understand ing the claim that that sentence is true. If we acceptit that understanding the sentence 'LizzieBordenkilled her parentswith an axe' is not simplya matterof beingableto recognizea verificationin our own experience acceptit, that is, that we are able to conceiveof how things that we cannotverify were- thenit will not appearas"magical" or " mysterious " that we can understandthe claim that that sentence is true. What makes it true, if it is, is simply that Lizzie Bordenkilled her parentswith an axe.16The recognitiontranscendence of truth comes , in this case , to no morethan the "recognitiontranscendence " of somekillings. And did we everthink that all killers can be recognizedas such? Or that the belief that therearecertaindeterminateindividualswho areor werekillers and who cannotbe detectedassuchby us is a beliefin magicalpowersof the mind? Thereis, however, somethingthat Tarski ignores, and that is the fact that thereareperfectlywell-formeddeclarativesentences that are neither true nor false; indeed,in Tarski' s theory, it wassupposedto bea theorem of logic (given what Tarksi calls an " adequatedefinition" of the truth predicate17 ) that eachsentence is eithertrue or false(hasa true negation).

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But there are many reasons why a sentence may fail to have a truth value : for example , the vagueness of some of its terms ('The number of trees in Canada is even' ), or the failure of the world to behave the way it should if the terms it employs are to work (for example , many sentences about the simultaneity of events were discovered to lack a truth value when relativity theory appeared on the scene; this is quite different from ordi nary vagueness, of the kind that it requires only " linguistic intuition " to perceive ). The use of 'true ' and 'false' in " Such and such a sentence is neither true nor false" is inadmissible in Tarskian semantics. Those who regard 'true ' as a mere " device for disquotation " (for example , asserting sentences without actually using them ), also ignore or deny this clearly predicative use of 'true ' and 'false' . One thinker who did not ignore or deny this was Wittgenstein . In an important (but frequently misunderstood ) section of Philosophical Inves tigations , he writes : At bottom, giving " This is how things are" as the general form of propositions18 is the sameas giving the definition: a proposition is whatever can be true or false. For instead of " This is how things are" I could have said " This is true." (Or again " This is false." ) But we have 'p' is true == p 'p' is false == not-p And to say that a proposition is whatever can be true or false amounts to saying: we call something a proposition when in our languagewe apply the calculus of truth functions to it . Now it looks as if the definition- a proposition is whatever can be true or false- determinedwhat a proposition was, by saying: what fits the concept 'true', or whatever the concept 'true' fits, is a proposition. So it is as if we had a concept of true and false which we could use to determine what is and what is not a proposition. What engageswith the concept of truth (as with a cogwheel) is a proposition. But this is a bad picture. It is as if one were to say " The king in chessis the piece that one can check." But this can mean no more than that in our game of chesswe only check the king. Just as the proposition that only a proposition can be true or false can say no more than that we only predicate " true" and " false" of what we call a proposition. And what a proposition is is in one sensedetermined by the rules of sentenceformation (in English, for example), and in another sense by the use of the sign in the language-game. And the use of the words " true" and " false" may be among the constituent parts of the game; and if so it belongs to our concept 'proposition' but doesnot 'fit ' it . As we might also say, check belongs to our concept of the king in chess(as so to speaka constituent part of it ). To say

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that checkdid not fit our conceptof thepawns, would meanthat a gamein which pawnswerechecked , in which, say, the playerswho lost their pawnslost, would be uninterestingor stupidor too complicatedor somethingof the kind ( 136). Kripke , who quotes only " But we have 'p' is true == p," sees 136 as a clear expressionof deflationism. But, for the following reasons, I do not believethis can be what Wittgenstein intended. 1. We know that Wittgenstein does not oppose the idea that empirical propositions " correspond to realities" ; indeed, he elsewherediscussesthe senseof this correspondence, and distinguishesit from the very different sensein which mathematical propositions correspond to reality;19rather, the thrust of the whole passageis clearly directed against the metaphysical realist's understanding of such platitudinous thoughts as the thought that " This chair is blue" can correspond to the fact that a particular chair is blue. The essentialpoint Wittgenstein makes in 136 is that we do not recognize that something is a proposition by seeing that it " fits" the concept " truth ," where truth is conceived of as a free-standing property.20But it would be exactly as much of a mistake to think that we can explain what truth is by saying that for any proposition p, p is true == p, as it is to think that we can explain what a proposition is by saying that a proposition is what is true or false. In both cases, we are simply making grammatical observations; we must not confuse what are virtually tautologies for metaphysical discoveries. The notion of truth and the notion of a proposition meshtogether like a pair of gearsin a machine; neither is a foundation on which the other rests. Our understanding of what truth comesto, in any particular case(and it can come to very different things), is given by our understanding of the proposition, and that is dependent on our mastery of " the language game," by which Wittgenstein means here " the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven." 21 There is a certain " holism" here; knowing what truth is in a particular casedependson knowing the useof signsin the languagegame just as knowing what checking is depends on knowing the use of the various piecesin chess. 2. When we ourselvesare willing to apply truth functions to a sentence - note how Wittgenstein emphasizesin our language- we regard the sentenceas true or false, as a genuine Satz. 3. A grammatical string of sounds or marks which is neither true nor false is simply not a sentence(Satz) in Wittgenstein's sense.22This is what Wittgenstein means by speaking of " the definition- a proposition is whatever can be true or false" [my emphasis]. There is no suggestionin this that adding the words 'is true' is a " logical device" that we can apply to " declarative sentences " ad libitum .23

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we think about logic (or " grammar" ) in the wide sensein which Wittgenstein understandsthat notion- have a plurality of uses, and new usesare constantly added as new forms of discoursecome into existence. On the other hand, that does not mean that any practices at all of employing " marks ,and noises" can be recognized by us as adding up to a form of discourse- for not every way of producing marks and noises is " one in which there is the face of meaning at all ." 3O Part of what I have been trying to show in these lectures is that what we recognize as the face of

meaning is, in a number of fundamentally important cases, also the face of our natural cognitive relations to the world - the face of perceiving , of

imagining, of expecting, of remembering, and so on- even though it is also the case that as language extends those natural cognitive relations to

the world , it also transforms them. Our journey has brought us back to the familiar : truth is sometimes recognition -transcendent because what

goes on in the world is sometimesbeyond our power to recognize, even when it is not beyond our power to conceive . Notes

This chapter has been excerpted, with omissions, from Putnan's 1994 Dewey Lectures, Lecture 3, " The Faceof Cognition," Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9. 1. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Harvard , 1991). 2 . " The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages ," reprinted in his Logic -, Semantics, Metamathematics (New York : Oxford , 1956 ). 3. If the sentence S is not in English , then we must write the translation of the

sentenceS into English in the blank. 4. Jan Wolenski, a scholar who has spent a many years studying the history of Polish logic and philosophy, has informed me that at the time T arski wrote " The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages" he held that nothing much could be said about what understanding a sentenceconsistsin. The idea that T arski agreed with logical-positivist accountsof languageis just wrong, according to Wolenski. In " The Concept of Truth " itself , Tarski employs the notion of " ascribing con -

crete, and, for us, intelligible meaningsto the signs" quite uncritically , (SeeLogic, Semantics , Metamathematics

, pp . 166 - 7 ; see also Wolenski

, " Tarski

as a Philo .5-

opher," Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciencesand the Humanities, XXVIII (1993 ): 318 - 38 .) 5 . Paul Horwich , a well -known deflationist , sums up the position thus iFf a recent review : " [I]t is a mistake to think that truth is a substantive property with some

unified underlying nature awaiting philosophical articulation . Rather, our truth predicate is merely a logical device enabling simple formulations of certain kinds

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719

of generalizations. . . and the concept of truth is entirely captured by stipulating the equivalenceschema, 'The proposition that p is true if and only if p'- where p can be replaced by any declarative sentence" - " In the Truth Domain" (a review of Crispin Wright , Trttth and Objectivity ), Times Literary Supplement (July 16, 1993 ), p . 28 .

6. See, for example, Horwich , " Wittgenstein and Kripke on the Nature of Meaning ," Mind and Language , v , 2 (Summer 1990 ): 105 - 21 . Horwich writes , " The communal disDosition to use a word in a particular way should not be ~

regarded as simply the disposition to treat certain sentencesas definitely and permanently acceptable and others not. In addition, there are dispositions to sanction various levels of confidence (cashed out as 'betting behavior ' ) in the

truth of certain sentences- where the appropriate degreesof belief are a function of observablecircumstances" (p. 112, emphasisadded). Horwich has published a hook -lene:th defense of deflationism titled Truth (Cambridge : Blackwell , 1990 ). '-'

Note that when Horwich

says that this theory is not " committed to verification -

ism" (p. 114), all he meansis that he is prepared to say that a sentencecan be said to be true or false even if its verification

conditions

do not determine

that

it is

" determinately" true or false- indeed, this follows from the decision to retain the principle of bivalence as a logical truth ; Horwich 's account of what understanding consists in is precisely Carnap 's, down to the identification " betting behavior ." 7. According to Horwich

of confidence with

(" In the Truth Domain " ), one of the purposes of what

he calls " the truth predicate" is to enable us to make the generalization " All propositions of the form 'p or not p ' are true ," where p is " any declarative sen-

tence." In particular, even if p is a sentencewhose truth value we might consider indeterminate- for example, " A broken chair is still a chair" - logic forces us to say that the sentence is true or false , on Horwich

' s account ; cf . Truth , pp . 80 - 8 .

8. If I distinguish here between Dummett himself and the position he calls " global antirealism," it is becauseDummett himself frequently expressessome dissatisfaction with the counterintuitiveness of global antirealism, and some uncertainty as to its correctness . But , I would argue , it is because he structures

the debate in the way I describethat he seesno satisfactory alternative to global antirealism

.

9. Cf. Carnap. " Truth and Confirmation," in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, H . Feigl and W . Sellars, eds. (New York : Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), for as clear and forceful

a statement

of what

has come to be called " deflationism

" as

has ever been given .

10. As pointed out in footnote 5. Horwich believesthat there are " substantive" things to be said about degreesof warranted assertability- for example, that they are determined, at least loosely, by " communal standards," and that they establish legitimate " degreesof confidence" which are in turn to be interpreted as " betting behavior ."

11. Philosophical Investigations 195.

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12. I fell into this error myself in my previous published criticisms of deflationism

(" On Truth " and " Does the Disquotational Theory of Truth Solve All Philosophical Problems?" both reprinted in Words and Life ). 13 . In this connection

, see Cora Diamond

's discussion

of the " sense " of riddles ,

in " Riddles and Anselm's Riddle," Proceedingsof the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol . II (1977), reprinted in her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge: MIT , 1991). 14. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 204. 15. I borrow this use of 'correspond to a reality' from Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics, Diamond, ed. (Chicago: University Press, 1989),

lecture 25 . 16 . Note

that

from

the fact

that

a " that

clause " is a nominalization

, it does

not follow that we have to postulate an object that it names. Davidson (who is following Tarksi here) is right in maintaining that the connection between the " fact ," if it is a fact , that Lizzie

Borden

committed

the famous

murder

(or what -

ever the example in question may be) and the truth of the sentence we are using

as an example can be stated as a simple biconditional: " Lizzie Borden did commit the famous murder" is true if and only if Lizzie Borden did commit the famous murder ; and that biconditional

does not contain

a " that -clause ." Even sentences

with (apparently) ineliminable that-clauses, for example, "John believes that Lizzie Borden did commit the famous murder ," do not have to be interpreted as

asserting a relation between a belief and a proposition (contrary to the view of Fodor). The tendency to postulate entities whenever one finds quantifiers used is the legacy of Quine's " criterion of ontological commitment" ; my reasons for rejecting the whole idea of such a criterion are briefly stated in Lecture I, footnote 12 [of " Sense, Nonsense , and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Hu -

man Mind ," Journal of philosophy 91, no: 9.- Ed.] 17. In " A Comparison of Somethingwith SomethingElse," in Words and Life, I argue that Tarski 's so-called " truth definitions " are at best extensionally correct , they do not yield correct characterizations of truth under counterfactual circum stances, and they certamly do not tell us what 'true ' means.

18. " This is how things are" was given as the general form of propositions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 19. See, for example, Wittgenstein's distinction of two very different notions of " corresponding to reality" in Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics, lectures 25 and 26. Among other things. Wittgenstein saysthat " This chair is blue" (imagine he had a blue chair in front of him) correspondsto a reality, but he can only say to what reality by using the sentenceitself. He also says that while the sentencesof arithmetic do not correspond to a reality in that sense, the practice of arithmetic does, in a different sense, correspond to " a diffuse empirical reality ." 20 . Notice that a little later , in 138 , Wittgenstein rejects the idea that " the meaning of a word I understand fit [s] the sense of a sentence I understand ," saying " Of course , if the meaning is the use we make of the word , it makes no sense to

speak of such 'fitting '." A similar contrast between thinking of meaning as use

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721

and thinking of the possibilities of use as fixed by the ways in which meanings " fit " or fail to " fit " one another in already drawn in Wittgenstein's 1932- 35 Lectures. Wittgenstein's rejectsthe idea that we can explain what a proposition is by appeal to the notion of fitting the sens,e of " true" becausehe rejects the idea of "fitting " involved, not becausehe is offering a philosophical thesis about the meaning of " true." 21. Cf. Philovophical Investigations 7. 22. As I pointed out earlier, Wittgenstein thinks of a " sentence" (Satz, translated as " proposition" by Anscombe) neither a.s a sentencein the sensein which logicians speaks of " sentences ," that is a mere string of marks or noises, nor as a " proposition" in the sensein which some philosophers do, that is, as a " sense" (in abstraction from the sign-design that carries that sense). Wittgenstein rejects that kind of " sentence /proposition" distinction. Deflationists read the formula " p is true == p" as meaning that to produce the mark or noise p is true is equivalent to producing the mark or noise p, but Wittgenstein is not talking about writing marks or producing noises. 23. SeeHorwich 's formulation of deflationism quoted in footnote 5. 24. Although T arski never pretended to be a philosopher of language, his profound logical investigation into the liar paradox and the other so-called " semantical paradoxes" (investigations which built on the techniques Godel used to prove the celebrated incompletenesstheorem) convinced him that, on pain of paradox, we may only regard " true" as a well-defined concept when that predicated is restricted to a single " language," a single determinate totality of propositions, and that the judgment that a member of the totality is itself true or false may not belong to the totality on pain of contradiction. An immediate corollary of this T arskian view is that the totality of possible propositions is inherently unsureveyable. For details, seethe discussionof the liar paradox, and the version known as the " strong liar ," in the title essayof Realism with a Human Face. Today, not all logicians agreewith Tarski that a consistent language may never contain its own truth predicate; but the " non-Tarskian" ways of avoiding the Liar paradox that have been proposed by Kripke and others still have the property that the semanticsof a consistentlanguagecannot be completely given in the languageitself. As Kripke has put it , " The ghost of the Tarskian hierarchy is still with us." Of course, Wittgenstein's reasons for regarding language as an ever growing body of ways of speakingand thinking , with an unpredictable variety of ways of " corresponding to reality," do not have to do with the problem of the formal antinomies that concernedT arski. 25. Rush Rhees, who understood Wittgenstein's philosophy as well as anyone, once wrote " If anyone doesask " What are moral statementslike ?" I should think one ought to begin by giving examplesof them. But often writers on ethics do not do this. You mention " Honesty is good." I cannot rememberever hearing anyone say this, unless it be in a philosophy discussion. And I cannot imagine just the circumstances under which anyone would say it " - Without Answers (New York : Routledge, 1969), p. 103.

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26 .For discussion on religious language ,see Renewing Phi losophy .a cbs .7,8. ofWittgenstein 27. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics 46 (" A motley of techniques of proof " ) and 48 (" I want to give an account of the motley of mathematics" ). 28. Note that the reason this is clear in context is certainly not that the context makesit perfectly precise! It is that exactnesshas no place here- and, as Wittgenstein says (Philosophical Investigations 69) " you still owe me a definition of exactness." 29. Philosophical Investigations 422 to 427. 30. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, p. 261