Abstract
I defend the deflationary theory of truth and reference I have proposed from the objections raised in Vann McGee’s “Thought, Thoughts, and Deflationism,” trying where possible to use arguments that other deflationists might find useful.
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Notes
To illustrate, here is my analysis of propositional truth:
(ST) For any x, (if x is a thought, then x is true just in case (Σp)(x = the thought that p and p)),
where (Σp) is an existential substitutional quantifier, p is a variable that takes thoughts as substituends, and the expression “the thought that” stands for an operator that attaches to thoughts to form names of thoughts.
For discussion see Schneider (2011, pp. 104–133).
Anil Gupta reports that Roderick Chisholm proposed (CP) as a principle of individuation for Fregean propositions in a seminar he taught at the University of Pittsburgh in the early seventies.
My use of the expression “the state of affairs that” is sometimes misunderstood. It might seem to stand for a function mapping thoughts onto states of affairs; but if that were true, (SC) would in effect presuppose a correspondence relation. Taken as a definition of semantic correspondence, it would be circular. The right way to understand “the state of affairs that p” is as an abbreviation for the description “the state of affairs y such that, necessarily, y obtains just in case p” (Hill 2002, pp. 46–48). Like many other philosophers, I take states of affairs to be classes of possible worlds.
Horwich also defines a deflationary correspondence relation between thoughts and states of affairs, but his definition leads quickly to unnecessary complexities, since it presupposes explanations of the idea of logical form and the structure of states of affairs. See Horwich (1998, p. 107).
The notion of a state of affairs that is in play here is a highly generic one. Classes of possible worlds count as states of affairs in the present sense (since they involve objects and properties), but so do the structured entities that are sometimes called “Russellian propositions.” What matters for present purposes is just that states of affairs involve extraconceptual entities.
There are a number of problems associated with trying to explain meanings in terms of states of affairs. Thus, for example, there is the familiar problem about logical structure. If meanings are identified with classes of worlds, then all logically equivalent sentences have the same meaning, which seems quite wrong. On the other hand, if we try to block this concern by identifying meanings with structured Russellian propositions, we wind up with entities that seem quite artificial—quantifiers and variables are not natural bedfellows of things like oak leaves and noses.
McGee is of course right in saying that linguistics as it is actually practiced is principally concerned with assigning truth conditions to sentences. Moreover, he would be right to deny that the operative notion of truth condition is the one that is captured by (SC). As I see it, what linguists actually aim at doing is constructing model theories for natural languages—interpretations for natural languages that are much more complex than model theories for artificial languages, but that are cut from the same cloth. In effect, they are doing a kind of mathematics. This is not to deny that there are empirical constraints: the goal is to be able to predict assertions and acceptances of sentences on the basis of assumptions about truth conditions and assumptions as to whether language users believe that truth conditions are satisfied. There is much to be said in favor of this enterprise, but it is clearly much more abstract, and much less empirically constrained, than studies that focus on the concepts and thoughts that words and sentences express, and informational properties that words and sentences inherit from these concepts and thoughts. As I see it, it is desirable to seek linguistic theories that explain assertions and acceptances on a more empirical basis, insofar as possible.
For an important qualification, see Hill (2014, pp. 90–93).
There is an explanation of why principles like (P*1) and (P*2) hold—that is, an explanation of why the deflationary concept can be used to track robust informational relations. To see this, notice it is possible to use substitutional quantification to state generalizations about the informational properties of concepts—for example, generalizations that have the form (Πa)(if the concept of a is a concept of type C, then the concept of a bears the informational relation I* to a). Given (R), which defines deflationary reference in terms of substitutional quantification, generalizations of this sort are equivalent to generalizations with objectual quantifiers that link deflationary reference to informational relations. (There are more detailed formulations of this point on p. 64 and p. 76 (footnote 8) of Hill 2014.)
References
Fodor, J. A. (1990). A theory of content and other essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1994). The elm and the expert: Mentalese and its semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hill, C. S. (2002). Thought and world: An Austere portrayal of truth, reference, and semantic correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hill, C. S. (2014). Meaning, mind, and knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horwich, P. (1998). Truth (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schneider, S. (2011). The language of thought: A new philosophical direction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Anil Gupta, Richard Heck, Jack Lyons, and especially Vann McGee for extremely helpful discussions.
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Hill, C.S. Deflationism: the best thing since pizza and quite possibly better. Philos Stud 173, 3169–3180 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0655-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0655-x