Abstract
Alfred Tarski’s refinement of an account of truth into a formal system that turns on the acceptance of Convention-T has had a lasting impact on philosophical logic, especially work concerning truth, meaning, and other semantic notions. In a series of studies completed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Arne Næss collected and analysed intuitive responses from non-philosophers to questions concerning truth, synonymy, certainty, and probability. Among the formulations of truth studied by Næss were practical variants of expressions of the form “p’ is true if and only if p’. This paper calls attention to a series of experimental results Næss overlooked in his original study. These data collectively suggest that acceptance of expressions of the form “p’ is true if and only if p’ varies according to what kind of statement p is.
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Notes
For an explanation of the distinction between Convention-T and the T-Schema, see Putnam 2015: ‘Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1, pp. 312–28, Ulatowski 2016: ‘Ordinary Truth in Tarski and Næss’. In Uncovering Facts and Values. Kuzniar, Adrian and Odrowąż-Sypniewska, Joanna (eds) Brill, pp. 67–90.
Some have argued for a strict interpretation of Tarski’s semantic conception of truth whereby there doesn’t seem to be any room for the informality instances of the T-Schema seemingly present. See Jané 2006: ‘What is Tarski’s common concept of consequence?’. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 12, pp. 1–42. In the paper, Jané has claimed that the ordinary people Tarski speaks of include only those people working within a specific mathematical paradigm. Unfortunately, Jané is silent with respect to the evidence he calls upon in support of his view. For an extended argument against the idea that Tarski’s view of the ‘common concept’ of truth was so limited, see Barnard and Ulatowski 2016: ‘Tarski’s 1944 Polemical Remarks and Naess’ “Experimental Philosophy”‘. Erkenntnis, 81, pp. 457–77.
One notable wrinkle in the criteria is the conflation of the meaning of truth with that of its accepted usage. Perhaps for future experimental investigations there should be a careful accounting of this distinction such that confusions over it need not arise in study participants. I would like to thank Franz-Peter Griesmaier and Marc Moffett for bringing this concern to my attention.
E through G were not asked in all iterations of the questionnaire. For this reason, I have separated them out from A through D using an asterisk ellipsis.
Næss very nicely summarises his own view of the problem in Part II of 1953. He writes:
In order to delimit the predictional field to a surveyable domain, let the convention be made that the field covers Norwegian university students in their relations to declarative sentences in their textbooks, excepting mathematics, and in observational journals worked out as part of their training (Næss 1953, 34).
This paper hasn’t outlined all possible concerns one might have for deflationary theories. One could easily see that the data reported here are telling for prosententialists regarding the view of the operator schema or disquotationalists about the disquotational schema (cf. my ‘The Empirical Adequacy of the Prosentential Theory of Truth: An Empirical Analysis from Franz Brentano to Robert Brandom’). See Grover et al. 1975: ‘A Prosentential theory of truth’. Philosophical Studies, 27, pp. 73--125, Leeds 1978: ‘Theories of references and truth’. Erkenntnis, 13, pp. 111–29, McGee 1993: ‘A Semantic Conception of Truth?’. Philosophical Topics, 21, pp. 83–111.
I am grateful for comments from members of the audience at the 2016 Australasian Association of Philosophy meeting, as well as conversations and correspondence with Jamin Asay, Bob Barnard, Elke Brendel, Filippo Ferrari, Franz-Peter Griesmaier, Paul Horwich, Lloyd Humberstone, Justine Kingsbury, Max Kölbel, Catherine Legg, Marc Moffett, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Alan Musgrave, Shaun Nichols, Nikolaj Pedersen, Charles Pigden, Shawn Standefer, Justin Sytsma, Dan Weijers, Jonathan Weinberg, Cory Wright, and Jeremy Wyatt.
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Ulatowski, J. Is there a Commonsense Semantic Conception of Truth?. Philosophia 46, 487–500 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9941-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9941-x