Abstract
Internalism is an explanatory strategy that makes the internal structure and constitution of the organism a basis for the investigation of its external function and the ways in which it is embedded in an environment. It is opposed to an externalist explanatory strategy, which takes its departure from observations about external function and mind-environment interactions, and infers and rationalizes internal organismic structure from that. This paper addresses the origins of truth, a basic ingredient in the human conceptual scheme. I suggest the necessity of pursuing an internalist line of explanation for it, as adopted in the biolinguistic program and generative grammar at large. According to this view, the concept of truth is a presupposition for the way language is used in relation to the world, rather than a function of that use or a consequence of language-world relations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For example, internalism as here understood has little to do with the truth-internalism as discussed by Putnam (1981, p. 49), where it means “some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability” and intrinsically relates to the question of metaphysical realism/anti-realism, which is orthogonal to my concerns. An internalist “Cartesian” story of concept possession—in the sense of, say, Fodor (2004) or Hinzen (2006b)—is arguably consistent with realism.
Though probably not: for facts are what correspond to propositions/sentences. Would speakers of a language that does not have the sentence/NP distinction as a structural design feature of their communication system (see Carstairs-McCarthy 1999 for such languages, and see below) have the intuition that there are “facts” in this world? For an externalist account of human truth judgements to be viable, the notion of a fact as the one relatum in the analysis of the relevant external relation (e.g., representation) must be individuated independently of the notion of a sentence meaning, i.e. not depend on what we wish to explain. We must be able to refer to the putative facts out there without re-using the sentence in question, or a translation of it.
Might we be just happy with having an identical relation in the cases of NPs and clauses, as long as the worldly referents are different (say, for concreteness: facts vs. objects). But this requires to make plausible that this ontological distinction is available independently of certain universal structures of our human linguistic cognition, and the sentence/NP distinction in particular. If it is a mere shadow of that latter distinction, it does not explain it. But suppose such independence could be made plausible (which I doubt: the basis for the ontological distinction pretty much seems to be the syntactic one). Then it would still be unclear why the ontological distinction should ever give rise to a creature using the truth-concept. Take the creature mentioned in Sect. 1 (see also below), with a language that has only NPs while lacking clauses. Why should clausal structures supporting truth-judgements spring into existence just because a creature lives in a certain kind of physical world?
See, e.g., Longobardi (2005). More precisely, reference appears to be configured in syntactic respects in DPs (Determiner Phrases). I follow linguistic convention in using “NP” as a label capturing NPs as well as with their extended projections, such as DPs, of which this emperor is an example.
As Fodor has reminded us recently, a sequence of ideas does not yet constitute a complex idea. But there are complex ideas, over and above simple ones. Therefore, thinking a complex idea (such as a sentence) is not thinking a sequence of ideas (Fodor 2003, pp 91–92). The point is as old as Plato, to be sure, and I return to it below.
As one referee asks. The same referee also suggests that truth may simply “require a degree of complexity to get a grip [on truth], and that this complexity is missing in the case of names (which refer simply to objects)”. But this will not do, as we have such complexity (in fact arbitrary complexity) in the case of complex NPs as well, without this giving rise to clauses.
Note that, for Y to exist on the option under discussion, it must be possible to refer to it, if not by us, then by another creature, say God. If we did this, of course, we would use an NP, and thus miss the target, as noted. But maybe God wouldn’t have to use an NP, and spot Y all the same. However, I see no motive to expect evidence for this option. It may even seem conceptually contradictory: if the notion of reference is defined through the paradigm of the nominal phrase and it’s use in referring to objects, then to say there is reference to something, though not by means of an NP, is conceptually contradictory.
This suggestion is revisionist in a similar sense as Rorty’s suggestion that truth is an “ethnocentric” notion, being tied intrinsically to particular cultures. Here again it seems that the notion of truth is applied as a universalist and absolutist notion, and the origin of this feature human judgment may be deeper than merely calling it an entrenched practice would suggest (see further fn. 15 in relation to Price 2003).
Leaving moral and aesthetic judgements on a side, however, what about science, which, rather than morality or philosophy, is traditionally the main domain where truth has been an issue? Is science a matter of representing facts out there? I cannot go into this matter here. Suffice it to remark that (i) it seems science could do without an ontology of facts: speakers of a language containing only NPs, which cannot refer to facts qua facts, need not have any other kind of science, it would seem (science will develop its own technical and mathematical languages anyhow); and (ii) science may not so much be about representation than experimentation; but experimentation is a way of interfering with the course of events rather than depicting it, a major conclusion of Hacking (1983) or Galison (1987), though probably clear from the structure of Galilean science as such (see, e.g., Machamer 1998; Koyré 1968).
If we move her to the front, as in Mary, John loves, she remains the object. We cannot mess with semantic facts as determined by the grammatical structure, once the structure is there.
The dispute of whether truth applies to sentences or propositions/thoughts does not matter much to the present discussion, and it becomes opaque once the notion of “sentence” is not used as in linguistics, i.e. as an object represented in the mind/brain. In Chomsky (2000), an “expression”, such as a sentence of some human language, is inherently a meaningful one, its meaning being something it cannot lose while remaining the expression it is.
In a way, this result is what we expect simply from the fact that truth and assertion are two different words/concepts in the human mental lexicon, given the general feature of our conceptual system that none of its lexicalized constituents seems strictly to reduce to any other.
Also Price (2003) questions that our assertoric practice would have the features it has, in the absence of us possessing a conception of truth. Hence indeed the concept of truth does play a crucial and independent explanatory role: our grasping it needs to be invoked to explain the behavioural consequences that Price argues follow from us making a distinction between justification and truth. On the other hand, Price points out that eliminating this feature from our rational discourses is hardly feasible, as we would be “underestimating the practical inflexibility of admittedly contingent practices” (p. 170). On the present approach, what explains this inflexibility is a contingent feature of our cognitive endowment, from which both our kinds of practices and the limits on our capacity to change them derive. This is an internalist line of explanation, and I am not certain what, on Price’s account, would explain the inflexibility he notes.
Also Price (2003) takes it that “the right approach to truth is to investigate its function in human discourse—to ask what difference it makes to us to have such a concept” (p. 171). While that is entirely adequate by my lights, that function leaves the origins of the concept that allows that function (hence the explanation of the function) unaccounted for. Hence it is not the case that “there is no further question of interest to philosophy, once the question about function has been answered” (ibid.).
Georges Rey, whom I thank much for discussion.
I also distinguish a concept from a property, which often is what a concept is said to “refer” to. See the fn. 20 for more on this.
Kuenne (2003, p. 2) takes it, too, that you have the “concept of being thus-and-so [...] if and only if you are able to think of something as thus-and-so”.
Arguments against empiricist models of concept acquisition need not perhaps be repeated here (see, e.g., Carey 2006). These models tend to be externalist ones, but certain other rationalist models, although they lean towards the innatist side (Fodor 1998, 2001), are so too. Whether nativism is consistent with externalism in this fashion is a doubtful issue into which I cannot go here (but see Hinzen 2006b). Externalism in the theory of concepts would mean that the meaning of a concept is explained “from without”, e.g., by the way a certain symbol-token is caused to occur by a certain referent-token out there in the world. For our minds to “lock on” to certain properties in the world in this fashion, however, the least that is required is that they are minds of a certain kind, minds with a pre-disposition to interpret experience in a certain way.
But truth might simply be a relational property, Kuenne (2003, pp 93–94) contends, similarly to the one denoted by the predicate “being a spouse”, which also is not relational syntactically. So “x is true” might be explainable as “there is something to which x corresponds”. But this is to offer an analysis of the concept of truth of a sort that concepts arguably are lacking in general (Fodor 1998); irrespective of that, it seems a particularly implausible analysis: as my remarks on aesthetic, moral and philosophical judgements were meant to suggest, a person making a truth judgement of one of these sorts is not making a claim that the string of words that she utters “corresponds to something”. Note also that in the case of the predicate “x is a (or the) spouse”, but not in the case of “x is true”, language allows you to specify the other argument by adding the prepositional phrase “of y”, say.
Which appears to have been Descartes’ point of view, formulated beautifully in the first lines of the Discours.
Still, it does appear to have (as Susan Carey remarks in personal conversation) a crucial metalinguistic element to it. As Carey notes, merely “monitoring whether their mental models of some situation actually fit it [...] isn't exactly the same as the notion of ‘truth’”, which may presuppose the ability to actually represent linguistic structures as such, hence a form of meta-representation.
For a recent defence of the latter claim see, e.g., Baker (2003). Nonetheless, many qualifications would be appropriate here.
More recently, considerable evidence from aphasic disturbance has been presented that grammatical categories like Noun and Verb, being crucially categorical and discrete, have no “associationist”, sensory, or lexico-conceptual basis (see Caramazza and Shapiro 2004).
See, e.g., Pinker and Jackendoff (2006), who assert that propositional structures of thought existing prior to human language gave rise to its structural features, sentences in particular. One immediate objection to this view is that there appears to be no evidence for propositionality prior to human language. A proposition, again, is a term of art by which we mean what can be expressed in terms of a sentence. While there was of course a rich conceptual apparatus (just as there is, today, in non-human primates), and maybe some kind of reasoning apparatus, in place prior to the evolution of human language, such capacities are probably consistent with many other structural-syntactic formats than we find in all human languages. See also Hinzen (2004) for discussion.
That should not begin to look like a defence of coherentism, since indeed, as I have argued, the realist ingredient of the human concept of truth seems empirically speaking a crucial feature of it. We do not, I think, hold, on reflection, that anything becomes true because it coheres with what I or anyone else happens to believe. The point is not to follow the empiricist instinct that would suggest objectivity must have to do with facing/representing some external facts.
The same vision, Stich (1990, p. 62) notes, forces the conclusion that “natural selection does not care for truth; it cares only about reproductive success”. Sommers and Rosenberg (2003) argue plausibly that Dennett’s attempt to “naturalize ethics” is inconsistent with his own Darwinian functionalist orientation, which rather forces a “moral nihilism” that denies that terms like categorical obligation, moral goodness, or intrinsic value pick out anything real.
Perhaps the contention that truth has no material content is quite in line with the following assertion of Horwich: “[I]t is not part of the minimalist conception to maintain that truth is not a property. [...] What the minimalist wishes to emphasize, however, is that truth is not a complex or naturalistic property but a property of some other kind. [...] According to minimalism, we should [...] beware of assimilating being true to such properties as being turquoise, being a tree, or being made of tin. Otherwise we will find ourselves looking for its constitutive structure, its causal behaviour, and its typical manifestations—features peculiar to what I am calling ‘complex’ or ‘naturalistic’ properties” (Horwich 1998, pp 37–88). On the other hand, human behaviour, I have pointed out, does seem to depend on, and hence to be explained by, human’s possession of the concept of truth. Maybe that does qualify as “causal behaviour”, and maybe pointing to the objectivity of truth that humans see in it even points to the possibility of analyzing the content of truth (though no further claim should be made here that the analysis can actually replace the concept analyzed). In any case, we must be studying empirically how humans engage in truth judgements in the course of ontogeny, a rich research program involving evolutionary and developmental biology, psychology, and linguistics, hence there is a “manifestation” both “complex” and “naturalistic” to be studied here.
There is also a quite obvious affinity between my verdict against externalist accounts of truth and John McDowell’s (1996, p. 179) contention that what one thinks (when one’s thought is true) is identical to what is the case. For given this identity claim, one cannot also hold that truth can be made sense of in relational terms: the fact will not rationalize the true thought that corresponds to it. McDowell would not think of this as an internalist conclusion, though. My reason for going that way is that there is a sense in which truth depends on specific structural arrangements of human mental representations, in particular the things that underlie what we informally call sentences.
References
Baker M (2003) Lexical categories. University Press, Cambridge
Baron-Cohen S (1995) Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Bloom P (2000) How children learn the meanings of words. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Caramazza A, Shapiro K (2004) Language categories in the brain: evidence from aphasia. In: Belletti A (ed) Structures and beyond. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 15–38
Carey S (2006) The origin of concepts. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Carstairs-McCarthy A (1999) The origins of complex language: an inquiry into the evolutionary beginnings of sentences, syllables, and truth. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Carstairs-McCarthy A (2003) The link between sentences and “assertion”: an evolutionary accident? In: Elugardo R, Stainton R (eds) Ellipsis and non-sentential speech. Kluwer, Dordrecht
Chomsky N (1995) The minimalist program. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Chomsky N (2000) New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Dawkins R (1976) The selfish gene (2nd edn, 1989). Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford
Dennett D (1995) Darwin’s dangerous idea. Simon & Schuster, New York
Devitt M (2001) The metaphysics of truth. In: Lynch M (ed) The nature of truth. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, pp 579–611
Devitt M (2002) Moral realism: a naturalistic perspective. Croat J Philos 2:1–15
Dworkin R (1996) Objectivity and truth: you’d better believe it. Philos Public Aff 25(2):87–139
Fodor J (1998) Concepts. Blackwell, Oxford
Fodor J (2001) Doing without what’s within. Fiona Cowie’s critique of nativism. Mind 437:99–148
Fodor J (2003) Hume variations. Clarendon, Oxford
Fodor J (2004) Having concepts: a brief refutation of 20th century philosophy. Mind Lang 19(1):29–47
Galison P (1987) How experiments end. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Gallistel CR (1998) Brains as symbol processors: the case of insect navigation. In: Sternberg S, Starborough D (eds) Conceptual and methodological foundations. Series: an invitation to cognitive science, vol 4. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Gleitman L, Gleitman H (1997) What is language made out of? Lingua 100:29–55
Godfrey-Smith P (1996) Complexity and the function of mind in nature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Gould SJ (2002) The structure of evolutionary theory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Hacking I (1983) Representing and intervening. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Hauser MC, Spelke E (2004) Evolutionary and developmental foundations of human knowledge: a case study of mathematics. In: Gazzaniga M (ed) The cognitive neurosciences, vol 3. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Hinzen W (2003) Truth’s fabric. Mind Lang 18(2):194–219
Hinzen W (2004) Origins of truth. Linguist Philos 26(6):765–780
Hinzen W (2006a) Mind design and minimal syntax. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Hinzen W (2006b) Spencerism and the causal theory of reference. Biol Philos 21:71–94
Hinzen W (2006c) Truth, assertion, and the sentence. In: Greimann D (ed) The illocutionary role of truth. Routledge (forthcoming)
Horwich P (1998) Truth, 2nd edn. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Jackendoff R (2002) Foundations of language. Oxford University Press, New York
Jenkins L (2000) Biolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Koyré A (1968) Metaphysics and measurement. Essays in scientific revolution. Chapman & Hall, London
Kuenne W (2003) Conceptions of truth. Clarendon, Oxford
Lenneberg EH (1967) Biological foundations of language. Wiley, New York
Leslie A (2000) How to acquire a ‘representational theory of mind’. In: Sperber D (ed) Metarepresentations. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 197–224
Longobardi G (2005) Toward a unified grammar of reference. Zeitschr f Sprachwissschaft 24, pp 5–44
Lowe J (2006) Could volitions be epiphenomenal? J Conscious Stud (forthcoming)
Machamer P (1998) Galileo’s machines, his mathematics, and his experiments. In: Machamer P (ed) The Cambridge companion to Galileo. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McDowell J (1996) Mind and World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Nagel T (1997) The last word. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford
Piattelli-Palmarini M, Cecchetto C (1997) The problem of meaning in generative grammar. In: Mandell C, McCabe A (eds) The problem of meaning: behavioral and cognitive perspectives. Elsevier, North Holland
Pinker S, Jackendoff R (2006) The faculty of language: what’s special about it? Cognition 95:201–236
Price H (2003) Truth as convenient friction. J Philos C 4:167–190
Putnam H (1981) Reason, truth, and history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Rorty R (1986) Freud and moral reflection. In: Smith JH, Kerrigan W (eds) Pragmatism’s Freud. The moral disposition of psychoanalysis. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, pp 1–27
Sommers T, Rosenberg A (2003) Darwin’s nihilistic idea: evolution and the meaningless of life. Biol Philos 18:653–668
Stich S (1990) The fragmentation of reason. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Uriagereka J (1998) Rhyme and reason. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Williams GC (1966) Adaptation and natural selection. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hinzen, W. Internalism about truth. Mind & Society 5, 139–166 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-006-0016-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-006-0016-0