Abstract
According to contemporary folklore, the debate between realists and anti-realists has undergone several transformations. First, zealous advocates engaged in passionate disputes. Sincere idealists fought honest realists with the enthusiasm of those who expect imminent victory. Then, battle-weary, they opted for the seemingly gentler activity of ‘characterizing the debate’. Predictably, the fight over how to characterize the debate soon became as hot, if not hotter, and less clearly delineated. Famously, Dummett championed the idea that truth is an essential component and that bivalence is the hallmark of realism. Others disputed the import of bivalence, but truth was never far from the fray.
I am grateful to the National Science Council of the Republic of China on Taiwan for supporting research on this paper and for funding travel to Prague for the symposium on the Nature of Truth (if Any) in September 1996. Thanks also to Jaroslav Pergrin, both for his organisation of the symposium, and for his helpful comments on my paper.
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Notes
The key proponent and clearest expositor of this combination of views is Paul Horwich in his book Truth (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1990) and in his contribution to this volume. I will address Horwich’s position directly in Section 6 of this paper. Deflationism is exciting because of its promise of philosophical life free from the headaches of metaphysical debate about realism. A philosopher who considers that debate to be irrelevant merely to the theory of truth, while acknowledging its significance for the theory of meaning is not advancing a view which undermines the debate, and so lacks the advertised punch of the deflationist.
The relationship between logic and meaning that I am claiming here is considerably weaker than that which Michael Dummett has argued for in, for example, The logical basis of metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991 ). He maintains that substantial disagreements in the philosophy of language and metaphysics are rooted in disagreements about logical laws. For Dummett, logic serves both as the common ground and as the battlefield.
Dummett, `The philosophical basis of intuitionistic logic’.
Permutation states that the validity of an argument is independent of the order of its premises; Contraction states that premises may be used as many times as one cares in the course of a valid argument; Weakening states that a valid argument remains valid on the addition of extra premises; Identity is the triviality that a sentences entails itself; and Cut expresses the transitivity of valid argument — if the conclusion of a valid argument is a premise of another valid argument, then the conclusion of the latter is entailed by the combined premises of the two arguments minus the intermediate conclusion.
A useful survey of modern developments in dynamic logic is the article Dynamics by Muskens, van Benthem, and Visser in the Handbook of Logic and Language, North Holland, 1997.
An alternative strategy for saving T-preservation in dynamic logic is to re-interpret the T-predicate as applying to a sentence if and only if it the action associated with the sentence does not change the current state. Under this definition, not all T-preserving arguments are dynamically valid, but all dynamically valid arguments are T-preserving. Whether the content of such a T-predicate is similar to our ordinary concept of truth depends largely on the interpretation of ‘state and ’action’ underlying dynamic semantics, which rests on substantial issues of the kind the deflationist would want to avoid.
In saying the better theory is of greater metaphysical significance, I do not wish to come down on the side of the realist. My point is only that if there are two theories and one has better scientific credentials, then the better theory is the one on which the philosophical debate should focus. It may still be open to a philosopher to argue that the theory is to be understood in an anti-realist fashion.
For example, Davidson, D. 1990, ‘The structure and content of truth,’ Journal of Philosophy, 87, 6: 279–328, and 1996, ‘The folly of trying to define truth,’ Journal of Philosophy, 93, 6: 263–278.
It is interesting to wonder if the debate about the reality of truth, as a property of sentences of a given discourse, is any different from the debate about realism for the discourse itself. Dummett’s proposal that we take bivalence as a mark of realism, indicates that he regards them to be the same; but it is notoriously difficult to fit certain traditional forms of anti-realism, such as phenomenalism, into this mould. One could argue that a phenomenalist theory of meaning would result in realism about the truth-value of a sentence like `the chair is under the table’, combined with anti-realism about tables and chairs.
For example, if English is generated by a context-free grammar, then the time taken to check whether or not a string of letters is an English sentence is only polynomial in the length of the string.
McGee, V. 1992: `Maximal consistent sets of instances of Tarski’s schema (T)’, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 21, 235–241. Perhaps the fallacy that a set of sentences has at least as high a complexity as any subset is responsible for the illusion of simplicity of the Disquotational Theory.
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Seligman, J. (1999). The Substance of Deflation. In: Peregrin, J. (eds) Truth and Its Nature (if Any). Synthese Library, vol 284. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9233-8_13
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