Abstract
Minimalists about truth contend that traditional inflationary theories systematically fail to explain certain facts about truth, and that this failure licenses a ‘reversal of explanatory direction’. Once reversed, they purport that their own minimal theory adequately explains all of the facts involving truth. But minimalists’ main objection to inflationism seems to misfire, and the subsequent reversal of explanatory direction, if it can be made sense of, leaves minimalism in no better explanatory position; and even if the objection were serviceable and the reversal legitimate, minimalists’ adequacy thesis is still implausible.
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Notes
I’ll follow Horwich (1990/1998; 2001, p. 162 fn. 7; 2005, p. 8 fn. 2; 2008b, p. 268) in his non-committal use of facts and facts involving truth to broadly allude to the data sets comprising the explananda. Horwich’s neutrality about the proper metaphysical characterization of facts is partially vindicated by the history of the grammaticalization of fact-talk from action-, occurrence-, and event-designation to clausal coordination in adverbial and gerundial position (see Johnston 2004).
Indeed, Reduction is no more a theory of truth than, say, the axiom of extensionality just is set theory or Feynman diagrams are a theory of quantum dynamics. (Otherwise, the term theory has really lost all meaning.) Incidentally, the same point applies to Equivalence. And where Equivalence isn’t a theory of truth per se, it isn’t a deflationary theory of truth for propositions.
Edwards (2013) helpfully distinguishes the so-called opacity and constitution conceptions of substantive truth properties from a third taxon involving the denial that truth is a merely logical property. While theorists do toggle between these conceptions for their various constructive purposes, I take constitution conceptions as the more basic. Principles to the effect that truth is a metaphysically opaque property, e.g.,
Nontransparent: truth has a constitutive nature F that isn’t exhaustively revealed just in our grasp of the concept.
presuppose more basic principles like Constitution, but not vice-versa. However, Edwards demurs from assigning constitution conceptions theoretical priority because he observes that some constitution conceptions (e.g., disjunctivism) may not always admit of substantive truth properties, while others (e.g., primitivism) posit substantive truth properties that aren’t straightforwardly amenable to constitution conceptions. If there’s a divergence of opinion here, it’s quite shallow. The disjunctivist counterexample doesn’t arise if traditional inflationary theories include Uniform as a partial explicans of Reduction. And inflationary theories are such that the truth properties they posit aren’t primitive precisely because those properties have a specifiable internal substructure. (It’s because they deny this kind of reductive conception that primitivists aren’t substantivists in the sense of inflation that I take minimalists to be focused on.)
One might object that reductive analysis implies some kind of ontological simplification, such that truth is eliminable (and perhaps truth-talk dispensable in favor of F-ness). But there’s no imperative for such implications, even if inflationary theory construction occasionally proceeds in that direction. (For example, see the exchange between Churchland (1992) and Putnam (1992) on the establishment of a ‘successor notion of truth’, in which truth is re-conceived as an inflexible configuration of vectors in neurocomputational state-space.) Similarly, whether ontological simplification implies identity, rather than elimination, is also an open question. Perhaps the best explanation of why truth and F are constitutively related is just that, essentially, truth is F. But whether theory construction must proceed by explicating Reduction such that constitution conceptions imply, ultima facie,
Identity: x is true = x is F
isn’t obvious (cf. Horwich 1990/1998, p. 143; 2013, p. 286 fn. 17). Following ‘new wave’ reductionists in philosophy of science, I presume both that between elimination and identity is a spectrum of ontologically retentive consequences that fall out of the pairwise intertheoretic relationship—in this case, between our theories of truth and F-ness—and that nothing in the construal of inflation as reduction necessitates stipulating in advance of theory construction what the ontological outcomes will be (see also Sher 2004).
Horwich never explicitly states just what the failures of inflationism are, and his allusions to them are typically not more than innuendos and casual references to his own and others’ works; for instance, justification for his assertion that ‘[inflationism] has [n]ever survived serious scrutiny, (1999: 240 fn. 2) consists in nothing more than a reference to his own book (1990/1998) and Kirkham’s (1992/2001). Horwich noted that ‘[minimalism] suggests that the search for such a [substantive] theory would be misguided’ (2001, p. 150). And indeed it does, though no justification is offered. Horwich has also asserted that ‘[a]mongst other ideas, we tried truth as correspondence with fact, as coherence, as provability, as utility, and as consensus; but they all turned out to be defective in one way or another’ (2008a, p. 29; see also 2005, p. 39). Justification for this third assertion consists in reminding readers of the existence of two additional books. Elsewhere, Horwich wrote: ‘the alleged peculiarity of truth is that there is nothing to be said—not even very roughly speaking—about what it consists in’ (Horwich 1999, p. 240 fn. 2) and ‘the trouble is that this [substantivist] conclusion is unjustified and false’ (Horwich 1990/1998, p. 2). We can grant that inflationism may well be wholly wrong, but surely not for these reasons: the first of these latter two claims is unjustified and false (much has already been said), and the second is overtly question-begging (no inflationist could assent to it). Because Horwich offers only no justification for lobbing either charge and ignores extant responses to putative problems—whether they’re successful is another matter—and because Horwich also stresses that neither is the minimalist’s main objection anyway, let us chalk up most or all of these claims to mere rhetorical burnish and look to other theorists for sustained accounts of the failures of inflationism.
If by explanation we mean something that must be truth-apt and truth-aptness requires schemata to be closed, then it’s unclear what it would mean for just Equivalence to play the role of explanans. Elsewhere, Horwich claimed that the minimal conception—not the minimal theory—is what explains the instances of Equivalence (2005, p. 38). To complicate matters further, he sometimes uses both Equivalence and Modified interchangeably (cf. 1990/1998, p. 10, 13), and vacillates between each of them (e.g., 1990/1998, p. 11; 2001, p. 149, 162 fn 7; 2005, p. 38) and the operator (1990/1998, p. 6) and disquotational (2005, p. 26 ff.) schemata. See also Horwich (1999, p. 245; 2001, pp. 149–51). Horwich has also suggested that Equivalence could just be a theorem in a more general truth theory (1990/1998, p. 134).
Some scholars have described the minimal theory as an infinite conjunction (e.g., Kirkham 1992/2001, p. 340; Thalos 2005, p. 77); but Horwich has been careful to say that the minimal theory is a mere list-like collection (and so involves no logical connectives conjoining its instances, and so has no truth-functional structure (unlike the items comprising it)). The mistake perhaps originates from the perceived similarity of Horwich’s minimal conception to Tarski’s discussion of Convention T: ‘it should be emphasized that neither [Convention T] itself (which is not a sentence, but only a schema of a sentence) nor any particular instance of the form of [Convention T] can be regarded as a definition of truth. We can only say that every equivalence of [Convention T...] may be considered a partial definition of truth, which explains wherein the truth of this one individual sentence consists. The general definition has to be, in a certain sense, a logical conjunction of all these partial definitions’ (Tarski 1944, pp. 335–336).
Kitcher once advanced a similar criticism, to the effect that nomologically subsuming T-biconditional instances under Equivalence provides no deep explanatory insight: ‘[t]he problem with Horwich’s explanation is that it stops at a rather shallow level. Indeed, it’s akin to the classic paradigms of ‘explanation’ that subsumed facts about bird plumage under putative ornithological laws’ (2002, pp. 354–355; see also Wright 2001, p. 757). Kitcher’s point, even if not particularly diagnostic, is illuminating and worth exploring further. So consider an analogy with the law of non-contradiction. When a statement conjoined with its explicit negation is discovered and ruled impermissible, we take it to be an instance of the law, and we take the law to be confirmed and to continue to hold (relative to our other commitments about logic). But the law itself doesn’t adequately explain the nature of any particular pair of contradictory statements, much less all the varied and interesting facts about contradictoriness and its relationships to other phenomena. Indeed, to explain such facts—i.e., to explain why an instance of the law is a contradiction, or why its being a contradiction renders it normatively impermissible, or any number of other things—it wouldn’t do just to cite and recite the law of non-contradiction. An ‘explanation’ that consisted just in ostensibly pointing to schemata like \(\lnot (\mathrm{p} \wedge \lnot \mathrm{p})\) would be unsatisfying to someone for whom instances of the law of non-contradiction are cognitively abstruse: rather than heeding the very call for explanation, doing so would merely ignore the elenchus. What we desire to know about is not that the instance instantiates a regularity or general pattern, and no explanatory advance is made by pointing to the general pattern of negating conjunctions of statements with their negations; for that just is the law of non-contradiction, not what explains it. Mutatis mutandis for the ‘laws of truth’.
See Lynch (1999) for an argument that all facts are relative to conceptual schemes, given certain plausible assumptions about content.
Even if inflationism were explanatorily inadequate, we’d be justified in supposing that the disconnect owed instead to \(\mathcal {T}\)’s having mistakenly just targeted the wrong explanandum. But then one appropriate response would be—not to reverse explanatory direction—but to correctly identify the facts that \(\mathcal {T}\) initially ought to have been explaining in the first place.
Oddly, Horwich (2005, p. 39) suggests that Equivalence is merely definitionally adequate. This suggestion is incompatible with minimalists’ attempts to establish Adequacy.
Minimalists think that, because truth has ‘a certain purity’, it’s appropriate to restrict the explanatory scope of minimalism—hence the switch from Puritanical (wide) to Puritanical (narrow). So minimalists will contend that, if minimalism is wholly wrong, the wrongness of minimalism cannot grow out of its failure to account for facts about truth’s relationships to other phenomena. But consistency then demands that this contention be applied to inflationism as well. Indeed, inflationism may be wholly wrong, but minimalists’ complaint cannot be that wrongness of inflationism grows out of \(\mathcal {T}\)’s failure to explain facts that minimalists themselves exclude from the target explananda. This point lends further support to the argument at the end of §3 that Explanation (external) is strictly orthogonal to minimalists’ main objection; minimalists should rescind this part of their criticism of inflationism.
If good supplementary theories of meaning, validity, lying, etc. only provided the resources to adequately explain meaning, validity, and lying, then the extrinsic relationships between meaning and truth, or validity and truth, or perjury and truth, etc. would be left unexplained. So the minimalist’s strategy cannot be applied across the board. It asymmetrically demands of other theorists that they perform the explanatory labor, since, in offloading the burden of explaining the relationships between those phenomena and truth back onto the minimalist theory of truth, minimalists would just shift the burden right back.
Some deflationists suppose that one central fact about truth is that truth isn’t a property designated in predicative position at all, but a (prosentence-forming) logical operator that functions attributively and anaphorically. This claim pits prosententialism against the minimalist conception, and with it, Adequacy; for if truth isn’t a property, then it isn’t an insubstantive one either. This divergence of antecedent commitments between prosententialists and minimalists further highlights just how important it is to settle on what the facts to be explained are. It’d be much more than a little logical wrinkle, after all, if the central fact explained (deduced) by minimalism—that truth is an insubstantive property—turned out to be a pseudo-fact.
Because unknowable facts are unknowable, it’s unclear what to gesture at. Perhaps a paradigm case would be facts about the use and meaning of alethic terms in obsolescent languages.
It seems that minimalists who endorse such claims are guilty of a rather simplistic red herring—their explanations of truth per se turn out to be explanations of anything but. Moreover, it’s a rather strange one, at that. A language that dispensed with all truth predicates wouldn’t thereby eliminate the facts about truth per se, which would still be the facts about what’s needed to convert our sufficiently justified beliefs into knowledge, and to be preserved in valid inference, and the like. The substantive noun truth may very well be Austin’s camel of a logical construction, but the truth of a bearer doesn’t dematerialize simply because we take leave of the material mode of speech—however pleasant the view of the desert is from the formal mode up above.
See David (2004) for a vigorous critique of Lewis’s argument.
Minimalists presume that another ‘fact involving truth’ is that propositions are the proper bearers of truth—the existence of which, they contend, follows from there being something that is said or expressed by utterances of sentence types. So from the minimal theory it follows that there are propositions; from which it follows that it’s a fact that propositions exist. We can then say that the invocation of Modified explains the fact that the proper bearers of truth are propositions if it is one. So should non-propositionalists about truth-bearing—Brentano, Field, Grover, Kitcher, Quine, Churchland, Rojszczak, Collins, etc.—be led to infer that the minimal theory adequately explains the fact that the proper bearers of truth are propositions? Surely not. For it’s patently unclear that there is any such fact. No one taking up a neutral perspective would suppose for a minute that the minimal theory is sufficient for explaining any of the facts involving truth independent of the minimal conception that sets its explanatory agenda. If there are fact-makers about truth, they ought not be our own theories of truth.
Of course, the minimal theory can always be conveniently shielded from falsification by rejecting one or more of its supplementary theories (see Duhem 1914/1954).
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Wright, C. Truth, explanation, minimalism. Synthese 195, 987–1009 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1129-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1129-6