Abstract
I begin with an exposition of the two main variants of the Prosentential Theory of Truth (PT), those of Dorothy Grover et al. and Robert Brandom. Three main types of criticisms are then put forward: (1) material criticisms to the effect that (PT) does not adequately explain the linguistic data, (2) an objection to the effect that no variant of (PT) gives a properly unified account of the various occurrences of “true” in English, and, most importantly, (3) a charge that the comparison with proforms is explanatorily idle. The last objection is that, given a complete semantic account of pronouns, proadjectives, antecedents, etc., together with a complete (PT), the essential semantic character of “true” could be deduced, but then, the idleness of the comparison with pronouns would be apparent. It turns out that objections (2) and (3) are related in the following way: the prosentential terminology is held to conceal the lack of unity in (PT), by describing the different data in the same terms (“proform”, “antecedent”, etc.). But this, I argue, is only a way of truly describing, rather than explaining, the data, these being certain relations of equivalence and consequence between sentences. I consider a language for which (PT) would be not only true, but also explanatory, but note that this language is very different from English. I end by showing that Robert Brandom’s case that “is true” is not a predicate fails, and that his motivation for saying so is based on fallacious reasoning (namely, Boghossian’s argument against deflationism).
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Notes
Ramsey’s proposal, of course, was “For all a, R, b, if he asserts aRb, then aRb”, but given the obvious limitations of such paraphrases, his view is usually presented as above.
Somewhat confusingly, they previously explained the workings of lazy pronouns by claiming that they take the referent of their antecedent (1975: 85). However, it would seem that since they give a substitutional account of prosentences, other proforms must have such a semantics as well, lest the analogy must be abandoned.
A major motivation for Priorian analyses of such quantified sentences is nominalism. In Båve (2006: Ch. 5), however, it is argued that the naïve, relational syntactic analysis can be had without commitment to propositions. Prior’s analysis is naturally coupled with a conception of singular attitude ascriptions, of the form “x Vs that p” on which “Vs that”, rather than “that p”, is regarded as a syntactic unit, a function from a term and a sentence to a sentence. This idea has its roots in Russell’s “multiple relations” theory (1910), (1912: XII), and similar views have more recently been defended by, e.g., Tye (1989), and Matthews (1994), and it receives a very elaborated treatment in Moltmann (2003).
Brandom also explicitly acknowledges the intersubstitutability of “it is true that p” and “p” in all occurrences (1994: 299f).
Brandom describes other deflationary theories as “cruder” than his own (2002: 119)—as if simplicity were a vice—and then claims that it cannot cover as many types of occurrences of “true” ((1997: 211), (2002: 108)). In fact, however, principle (b) explains every occurrence of “true” with only very plausible or “obvious” assumptions (see Båve 2006: 4.3). Concerning the critique against the prosentential analysis of (1), though, Brandom has more recently (2002) given a syntactic analysis that accords with my own. Here, the role of “is true” in “Everything he says is true” seems to be explained rather by first rephrasing the sentence as “Everything is such that if he says it, then it is true”, and then considering “is true” as having the quote-names instantiating the first “it” as antecedent. For instance, in the instance “If he says ‘Snow is white’, then it is true”, “it is true” is a lazy prosentence and has the quote-name of the sentence “Snow is white” as antecedent (2002: 107). (This idea also seems to extend naturally to cases of indirect speech.) Brandom thus seems to have rid himself of the Ramseyan heritage of the original prosententialists. He also gives a more plausible account of tensed and modified truth-claims (2002: 108), so as to save (PT) from objections on that score (e.g., in Kirkham 1992: 327f), and about anaphoric uses of “that” in truth-claims (i.e. “That is true”). This does not, however, save him from the generic objections against (PT) to be given below.
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Båve, A. Why is a truth-predicate like a pronoun?. Philos Stud 145, 297–310 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9232-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9232-2