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Experimenting with Truth

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Abstract

In the last decade Robert Barnard and Joseph Ulatowski have conducted a number of experimental studies in order to better understand the ordinary notion of truth. In this paper I critically engage their ecological approach to the study of truth, and argue for a wider perspective on how truth should be empirically studied: in addition to the experimental data that they emphasize and collect, there should also be a substantial observational element to conceptual ecology. I then critically evaluate the conclusions they draw from their data, as they relate to correspondence, pluralism, and objectivity. Along the way, I offer suggestions for future lines of research for a more expansive and effective ecological exploration of truth.

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Notes

  1. See, respectively, Goldman 1976, Thomson 1985, Thomson 1971, Davidson 1987, and Kant 1996.

  2. Which is not to say that thought experiments never play a role in the theory of truth. For instance, they can be used to generate potential counterexamples to various substantivist theories, as I discuss in Sect. 3.1.

  3. This is also true of the data collected by Arne Næss in the 1930s (Næss 1938a, b).

  4. Devitt (2012) also advocates the use of corpora within experimental philosophy.

  5. Mankowitz (2023: 97) makes use of corpora in arguing against the gradability of truth; Égré (2021) and Henderson (2021) appeal to corpus examples to argue in favor. Moltmann (2021) uses natural language examples of ‘true’ to argue for theses about truth predicates and truth bearers.

  6. I leave it as an open, historical question how traditional ordinary language philosophy (and particularly the ordinary language philosophy focused on truth, such as Strawson 1949 and 1950 and Austin 1950) fits in here, and how systematic its concern with ordinary language was. For recent accounts of how experimental methods can inform ordinary language methods, see Fischer 2023.

  7. See, e.g., Sosa 1993, Alston 2002, and Bar-On and Simmons 2007.

  8. See, e.g., Reuter and Brun 2022, which talks about the concept of truth, not the word, being ambiguous.

  9. See Chaps. 1 and 2 of Machery 2009 for an overview of how concepts are used in psychology and philosophy.

  10. Likewise, if ‘true’ is ambiguous (as per Kölbel 2013), then we ourselves express different concepts when we deploy the different meanings—in which case it’s misleading to speak of the concept of truth: there is no single concept expressed by ‘true’.

  11. Naturally, plenty in this paragraph about the theoretical role of concepts is debatable, but hardly idiosyncratic. My aim is to make plain what I (and I presume much of the extant theory of truth) am presuming about the role of concepts in philosophy. Note that Barnard and Ulatowski appear to endorse this general line of thought (2021: S727).

  12. Cf. Horwich 2010: 3 and Ulatowski 2017: 66–67.

  13. Participants were asked to judge agreement by way of a Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Barnard and Ulatowski report the finding as follows: “In the Anna condition, the mean response to ST was 2.81 out of 5. In the Bruno condition, the mean response to ST was 3.63 out of 5. This difference was statistically significant (N = 83, t (81) = − 2.943, p < .004)” (2013: 630).

  14. Note that Barnard and Ulatowski also connect the notion of correspondence to Aristotle’s dictum that “a truth is a statement of that which is that it is, or of that which is not that it is not” (Aristotle 1966: 70; 1011b25-28). Deflationists are happy to endorse that claim, or even see it as an early statement of their view.

  15. They also found some variation with respect to gender in a related experiment.

  16. See also Wyatt 2018: 178.

  17. In their 2019, Barnard and Ulatowski report on a different study that does provide evidence of folk support for the weaker sense of correspondence I’ve identified here.

  18. It could also be useful to test the acceptability of what Azzouni calls “Putnam modals”, such as ‘The sentence ‘The rug is green’ might be warrantedly assertible, even though the rug is not green’ (2000: 111). Someone who agreed with that, but disagreed with ‘It might not be true that the rug is green, even though the rug is green’ is someone who likely abides by what philosophers have in mind by the correspondence intuition.

  19. Of course, it’s an open question what the actual implications are of any particular substantive view of truth.

  20. Ulatowski presents data he collected with Barnard that suggest there is little folk support for pragmatic perspectives on truth (2017: 106–111).

  21. See Ulatowski 2018 for his interpretation of Næss’s study, and Asay (2024) for challenges to it.

  22. The connection to pluralism is more salient in Ulatowski’s solo work (particularly his 2017). In the discussion of the data found in Barnard and Ulatowski 2019, the implications for deflationism and Tarski are more in focus.

  23. I contest this particular point (see Asay 2024), but will assume it’s correct for the time being.

  24. See Wyatt 2013 for a critical examination of the role of domains in alethic pluralism.

  25. This I take to be the major takeaway from the mountain of qualitative data collected in Næss 1938b.

  26. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/books/book-review-reader-response-coronavirus.html.

  27. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/technology/coronavirus-food-stamps.html.

  28. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/politics/crying-politicians-leadership.html.

  29. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/opinion/coronavirus-church-christianity.html.

  30. https://web.archive.org/web/20200512094240/https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/30/business/30reuters-health-coronavirus-tests-specialreport.html.

  31. In the month I surveyed, I found 59 instances of ‘true for’ (so about two per day, on average), none of which fit the relativistic sense intended for (U). Most were of the “indexical” variety, and others were not genuine uses of ‘true for’, as in ‘This is a dream come true for Sophie’.

  32. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/us/youth-homelessness.html.

  33. At one point, Barnard and Ulatowski suggest that people might be reading (U) as saying “When I think a claim is true, everyone must agree with me”, though I find this rather implausible (2021: S727). They must agree with me on pain of what? Later, though, they seem to adopt the ‘believed by’ interpretation: “For the non-philosopher to agree with a statement like [‘It is true for everyone that the Red Sox have a deeper bullpen than do the Yankees’], or U as it was in the experiment, is for them to hold that everyone agrees with [i.e., believes] the statement mentioned therein” (2021: S728).

  34. Suppose two groups of people, say, a collection of bankers and a set of riverboat captains, are asked to interpret ‘Pat is by the bank’, and they systematically diverge in their interpretation. The simplest explanation for the divergence is not that the groups have competing conceptual schemes.

  35. See Barsalou and Prinz 1997, Barsalou 1999, and Ulatowski and Wyatt 2023.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Max Deutsch and the referees for the journal for their contributions to this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Jamin Asay

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Asay, J. Experimenting with Truth. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-024-00728-x

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