Abstract
I continue to explore the language of Crusoe 5, an isolated rule-follower. I show that his language, just like our language, can sustain the use of truth and falsity attributions. That is, it is useful to Crusoe 5, just as it is useful to us, to be able to say that certain groups of statements (or utterances) are true or false. Furthermore, if Crusoe 5 is so inclined, he can develop a truth-conditional semantics for his own language. This is the case even though the sentences of his language are not all underwritten by correspondence facts. These points apply to the natural languages we speak as well.
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- 1.
There are many kinds of truth deflationists; for needed distinctions among them, see Azzouni (forthcoming). For arguments for my favorite brand of the position, see Azzouni (2006, 2010b).
- 2.
This is a grammatically correct question of my language—English—just as “Does ‘Chaque champignon est vénéneux’ correspond to a fact?” is a grammatically correct question of English. My thanks to Douglas Patterson (9/24/09 email) for his complaints about an earlier formulation.
- 3.
Notice that the force of this claim turns (in part) on the rejection of reference magnetism that I give in Chap. 4. This doesn’t mean, however, that translating Crusoe 5’s words to ours is ruled out. It isn’t ruled out as long as we don’t delude ourselves into thinking we’ll solve the rule-following paradox by doing so. I’ll address this in 6.4, but I can say this much now: the rule-following paradox applies to us as well as Crusoe 5 (although not to God). Because of this—provided other constraints are in place—we can justify a translation, although not one that provides grounding facts.
- 4.
I don’t think this can be made to work, but I won’t pause further to give details now.
- 5.
For purposes of argument, I’m adopting the position in this book (except for occasional demurrals) that truth-conditional semantics is both a useful (and informative) semantics, and one that applies to natural languages. Many linguists (and philosophers familiar with linguistics) will disagree with the second assumption. See the discussion of Chomsky and Pietroski in Sect. 4.4. As far as the first assumption is concerned, see Azzouni (2008) for worries about the possible triviality of (most) truth-conditional semantic analyses of languages.
- 6.
See the citations in footnote 1, both for my particular truth-deflationist position and for discussion of the surrounding truth-deflationist literature. I discuss my truth-deflationist position somewhat briefly in what follows.
- 7.
Some philosophers—in denying truth to be a correspondence notion—also deny that any truths correspond to facts. But we don’t have to assume that drastic position as far as Crusoe 5 is concerned. All that’s required is that not all his truths correspond to facts. This fits well with my general deflationist position—as I’ll indicate shortly.
- 8.
- 9.
As I’m using “refer” here, it characterizes a real metaphysical relation between words and objects, and not a pleonastic one. In this substantial sense of refer, “Mickey Mouse” doesn’t refer to Mickey Mouse, because there isn’t any such thing. “Refer,” so used, isn’t natural language (since it’s natural in natural language to say that “Mickey Mouse” refers to Mickey Mouse). It’s instead a terminological convention that I’ve introduced. See Azzouni (2012a) for a full discussion of how we should understand “refer” in natural languages, and how we should refine that notion for philosophical regimentations.
- 10.
- 11.
Kripke (2013), famously, has an influential competing view: fictional names operate pretendedly (in fictional contexts—novels, plays, and so on) and they also refer to abstracta—“characters.” They have a third use in, for example, negative existentials. Kripke’s view is complex and attributes ambiguity to these sorts of names.
- 12.
With some exceptions: for example, facts about whether a character is famous or worshipped, and so on. These are induced by the reactions of actual people to the stories or depictions of the characters.
- 13.
Priest (2011, 361), with respect to how truth outstrips proof in mathematics, argues that “it will often be the case that we can establish neither A nor ¬A. So it would seem that we have truth-value gaps of some kind. How, then, can we justify using classical logic? … Classical practice establishes everything of the form A ∨ ¬A. So the classical account of disjunction would seem to go.”
- 14.
This is important. As I indicate in the work cited in footnote 10, it isn’t that our implicit inference practices actually exemplify one or another instantiation of classical logic. It’s rather that our implicit inference practices are best regimented by classical logic. They’re best treated as obeying those principles as a norm.
- 15.
I call this view of the “don’t know” phrase, the “broad ignorance thesis.” See Azzouni (2010b, 91–93). This particular way of handling truth value gaps—that can be labeled “The compatibility of classical logic with de facto truth-value gaps by means of expressions of ignorance”—is one I first offered in Azzouni (2000), Part IV, § 6.
- 16.
Recall the concern raised in the general introduction, footnote 4, about Kripke’s phrase “meaningful declarative sentences must purport to correspond to facts,” and notice that there is a sense in which this can be accepted. We can express ignorance about what those facts are even when we (otherwise) think there are no such facts.
- 17.
Some qualifications. The reader familiar with these sorts of theories will notice a large number of liberties that I’ve taken. Among them, I’ve suppressed discussion of the metalanguage/object language distinction, I’m using variables within quotation marks, and I’m burying details about the quantifiers—including issues about satisfaction. All of this can be cleaned up nicely, of course—and it’s been done in numerous places, including in many places in my own work, e.g., Azzouni (2008) or Azzouni (2010b).
- 18.
- 19.
I draw this approach from Ludlow (1999), chapter 3.
- 20.
This isn’t an ideal way of putting the matter. See Azzouni (2012a) for the best way to speak about this.
- 21.
It may be that the content of “she”—being female—must be demoted to “presents as female.” This will depend on what properties are to be attributed to hallucinated objects; and this isn’t something I can discuss further now. See Chapter 2 of Azzouni (2010b).
- 22.
(i**)–(iv**) are meant to be simple illustrations of a broadly characterized family of approaches. In particular, and among other things, in formulating them I’m not attending to issues about exactly how conditionalizations are supposed to be characterized, and in what detail; I’m skirting over issues about exactly how content that appears in the utterance (e.g., “vase”, “he”, etc.) is supposed to contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance, and I’m also skirting over mismatch issues between demonstrative non-referring expressions—not because an hallucinated object is demonstrated, but because (say) the object someone intended to demonstrate was moved elsewhere—and the definite description on the right side is false as a result. The data are complicated, and the options are numerous, debated, and debatable. See Lepore and Ludwig (2000, 230–238), for discussion and criticism of various approaches to the conditionalizations of complex demonstratives. It should be clear already, however, that my points about non-referring expressions in such truth-condition clauses will be unaffected by the replacement of my (i**)–(iv**) with appropriately complicated alternatives.
- 23.
Contrast this, for example, with the otherwise similar facts about Donald Trump and how he’s depicted (in various media). These are facts about Donald Trump—the object Donald Trump that exists. And notice this. In the case of real entities—like a Donald Trump—the reasons for why they’re depicted the way they are in such-and-such a place may have a lot to do with them. But that’s never the case for Superman, and other “fictional entities.” That Superman has such-and-such properties never explains anything. (There is no Superman and so he has no properties.)
- 24.
See Azzouni (2008), if you’re interested.
- 25.
In my view, however, this hope is dashed with respect to natural languages (although not for certain artificial languages). See the discussion of Pietroski and Chomsky in Sect. 4.4, and recall the important claim, in particular, that it’s an empirical possibility that language-world relations are likely to be theoretically intractable—regardless of whether terms (as used) refer to real objects or not. I’ve borrowed much of the discussion in this section from Azzouni (2012b, 264), while modifying statements that were far too strongly put in that original article. (This last sentence is for readers interested in such matters.)
- 26.
For the purposes of the rest of the discussion in this section, I’m now distinguishing Crusoe 5’s words with c-quotes from otherwise homophonic uses of such words by God and by us.
- 27.
In this case the c-quotes aren’t signalizing quotations of Crusoe 5’s sentences but instead characterizations of his thoughts.
- 28.
- 29.
I should note that these points—in a way—are anticipated by Kripke’s Wittgenstein. Kripke (1982, 86) attributes to Wittgenstein the view that talk of truth and falsity, and even the use of a “calculus of truth functions,” is compatible with his sceptical solution to the rule-following paradox. That means, I must add, that this talk is compatible with a notion of truth sans correspondence or fact. The additional insight I attribute to the truth-deflationist is that a notion of truth sans correspondence or fact is actually all the “truth” anyone needs; that includes the need to use it in truth-conditional analyses of languages. (See Azzouni (forthcoming), for details.) Such a fully-functional notion of truth is only mistakenly seen as requiring either correspondence or facts.
- 30.
Kripke describes his own misgivings about Wittgenstein’s sceptical solution this way: “But may the individual doubt whether the community may not in fact always be wrong, even though it never corrects its error? It is hard to formulate such a doubt within Wittgenstein’s framework, since it looks like a question whether, as a matter of ‘fact’, we might always be wrong; and there is no such fact” (Kripke (1982, 146), italics his). Kripke then notes that he has avoided a more extensive discussion because in doing so he “might have to abandon the role of advocate and expositor in favor of that of critic.”
- 31.
Kripke (1982, 21–22) writes, “Sometimes when I have contemplated the situation, I have had something of an eerie feeling. Even now as I write, I feel confident that there is something in my mind—the meaning I attach to the ‘plus’ sign—that instructs me what I ought to do in all future cases. I do not predict what I will do … but instruct myself what I ought to do to conform to the meaning. (Were I now to make a prediction of my future behavior, it would have substantive content only because it already makes sense, in terms of the instructions I give myself, to ask whether my intentions will be conformed to or not.) But when I concentrate on what is now in my mind, what instructions can be found there?”
- 32.
I revisit this theme of waxing and waning with respect to what might be called “higher-level” terms in the next chapter.
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Azzouni, J. (2017). Truth and Falsity Attributions and Truth-Conditional Semantics in Private Languages. In: The Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics. Synthese Library, vol 382. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49061-8_6
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