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Is pluralism about truth inherently unstable?

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Abstract

Although it’s sometimes thought that pluralism about truth is unstable—or, worse, just a non-starter—it’s surprisingly difficult to locate collapsing arguments that conclusively demonstrate either its instability or its inability to get started. This paper exemplifies the point by examining three recent arguments to that effect. However, it ends with a cautionary tale; for pluralism may not be any better off than other traditional theories that face various technical objections, and may be worse off in facing them all.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Haack (2005, 2008) and Horwich (1996, pp. 880–881). For reasons why (UA) isn’t necessarily the fulcrum of the debate between monists and pluralists, see Wright and Pedersen (2010, pp. 206–209).

  2. Acton neglected to articulate what that ‘suitably stated’ correspondence theory is. O’Connor (1975, p. 71) casually alluded to the idea that the nature of the correspondence relation may vary depending on the nature of the relata, but likewise failed to develop this idea. Fortunately, the project has been picked up by Sher (1998, 2004, 2005, 2011), who has worked out a theory under which there are a plurality of ‘forms of correspondence’.

  3. For some of the better, more sustained presentations of pluralism see, e.g., Wright (1996, 1998), Sher (1998, 2004, 2011), and Pedersen (2006, 2010). In my own view, functionalism about truth is a far more developed theory but is not obviously classifiable as a version of pluralism (Wright 2005, p. 14; see also Pettit 1996, p. 886; cf. Lynch 2000, pp. 211–212). For further exposition and criticism of functionalism, see, e.g., Lynch (2001, 2004, 2005), Wright (2005, 2010), Sher (2005), Horton and Poston (2011), and Dodd (2011).

  4. See, e.g., Horwich (1996, pp. 880–881), Dodd (2002, p. 290), Patterson (2004, p. 500), Lynch (2005, p. 42), and Haack (2005, 2008, p. 21 ff.).

  5. See, e.g., O’Connor (1975, p. 13), Wright (1998), Lynch (2001, pp. 723–725; 2004, pp. 384–385), Wright (2005, pp. 1–2), and Pedersen (2006, pp. 102–103 ff.; 2010, pp. 92–94). For an attempt to undermine the use of the standard story as motivation for pluralism, see Dodd’s twist on the basic Quine/Sainsbury argument that the ‘problem’ is only apparent (2011; see also Horwich 1996).

  6. Pluralists would be better off if the scope problem were also unnecessary. An alternative route to pluralism might also be through the issue of truth-bearing or perhaps even valuation, although these options haven’t yet been well-explored (Marian David and Patrick Greenough, personal communication (May 16th 2009)). In the latter case, establishing the contrast between species of indeterminate and determinate truth may be unhelpful if indeterminate or determinate truths turn out to be truths that cross-cut regions of discourse in the uninteresting way that, e.g., literal truths, long-winded truths, and contingent truths do.

  7. The quote itself, which seems to concern the alethic thesis that there is more than one way or property of being true, is preceded by an allusion to the putative ambiguity problem facing the semantic thesis that there is more than one meaning of the lexeme true. However, in the body of the text being footnoted (and elsewhere), Lynch characterizes alethic pluralism as the conceptual thesis that there is more than one concept truth, which he names ‘SAP’. With these semantic, alethic, and conceptual theses being conflated, it is unclear how to interpret the argument. For instance, Lynch’s conclusion is trivially correct if read at face value: obviously, SAP isn’t a pluralist theory of truth at all if understood as a thesis about a plurality of concepts truth 1 , …, truth n . The easiest and most charitable interpretation, I think, construes Lynch as giving an argument that assumes, for the purpose of a kind of reductio, the pluralists’ alethic thesis that there is more than one way of being true.

  8. For versions of this formulation, see Pedersen (2006, p. 107; 2010, p. 98), and Wright and Pedersen (2010, p. 206). For alternative construals of the weak/strong distinction, see Lynch (2004, p. 386 ff.) and Wright (2005, pp. 6–7). For a version under which there is range of more and less moderate pluralisms about truth, see Sher (2004, p. 20).

  9. For example, inflationary theories propounding a reductive analysis of truth are about what truth is being reduced to. Other theories of truth are not about truth, but about some property co-extensive with truth. Theories of truth that remain neutral about the primary and proper bearer of truth are about a family of properties relative to the bearers they allow. Some theories are actually theories about truth-conditions or how to specify them, and some are theories of criteria for detecting truth, while others—like Tarski’s semantic conception—are theories of truth-in-\(\fancyscript {L}\) rather than truth simpliciter (as Davidson famously argued). And a great many others are about the concept truth or about truth predication. And more than a few turn out to instead just be putative solutions to the paradoxes. Suffice it to say that theories of truth are judged against a large array of criteria that go beyond the merely definitional; and not all such theories need be comprehensive to be useful, descriptively adequate, or unifying.

  10. Alternatively, perhaps Pedersen’s challenge is directed only against (WAP), such that, by ‘the introduction of T U’, he really does mean the unveiling of a property already latent in the sequence T 1, …, T n . However, this would make the instability challenge far less interesting or important, and thus doubtfully what was intended.

  11. For further analysis of this issue, see Wright and Pedersen (2010, pp. 206–209).

  12. See also Haack (2005); Horwich (1996) peddles a more trenchant version of what is essentially the same criticism.

  13. See, e.g., O’Connor (1975, p. 13), Lynch (2001, p. 723), and Patterson (2010, p. 13); see also Næss (1938, p. 40).

  14. The problem cannot be solved by appealing to techniques for implicit definition, such as Ramsification, since they face a different problem of epistemically circularity (Wright 2010).

  15. Some discussants—encouraged by Wright’s remarks—have misconstrued alethic pluralism as a view about predicative or attributive uses of the term true. Pluralists about truth should be wary of linguistic pluralism about true, however; whether at the level of genus or species, true is lexically polysemous, de facto—i.e., a single linguistic unit with a variety of related meanings—and its being polysemous is merely a datum about languages like English (as Boas, Acton, O’Connor, Alfred Tarski, Max Kölbel, and others have rightly observed). Therefore, as a description of truth-predication or -attribution in natural language, linguistic pluralism about true has little to recommend it. (Nothing prevents Dorsey, however, from amending his proposal along the lines of alethic pluralism in lieu of its linguistic counterpart.)

  16. Thanks to Sher for bringing my attention to this point, with which I agree: unlike the correspondence pluralist, other versions of pluralism multiply their own problems by admitting a greater number and wider variety of properties F 1, …, F n .

  17. Obviously, the problem generalizes beyond just an account of facts to a metaphysics of situations, states of affairs, truth-makers, or other such substantial determinants, as Sher (1998, p. 143) calls them.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach, McIntosh Humanities Building (917), 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA, 90840-2408, USA

    Cory D. Wright

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Wright, C.D. Is pluralism about truth inherently unstable?. Philos Stud 159, 89–105 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9691-0

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