Truth, Ascriptions of Truth, and Grounds of Truth Ascriptions

Abstract

Künne outlines Bolzano’s attempt to give a definition of the concept of truth and asks whether Frege succeeded in showing that all such endeavours are doomed to failure. Bolzano and Frege are agreed that the schema ‘That p is true if, and only if, p’ captures an important feature of the concept of truth, and in different ways both went beyond this observation: Frege maintained that the two halves of such biconditionals express the same proposition, and Bolzano (who explicitly denied this Identity Thesis) supplemented the equivalence schema with ‘If it is true that p then it is true because p’. Künne locates this true-because principle in Bolzano’s general theory of grounding and explores whether Frege’s Identity Thesis can be refuted by appealing to it.

Both Frege and one of Europe’s most important Frege scholars read Bolzano at least once. The latter happened when Eva Picardi worked on her pioneering paper on Frege and Kerry (History and Philosophy of Logic 15, 1994, 9–32). It was Benno Kerry, not Husserl, who was the first among Brentano’s students to study Bolzano’s Opus magnum against their nominalistically minded master’s will, and he quoted very extensively from Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre in a long series of papers to one of which Frege replied in ‘Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand’. So I am fairly certain that Eva would have been interested in seeing the grandfather of analytical philosophy (*1848) confronted with its great-grandfather (†1848), as her teacher and fatherly friend Michael Dummett called these gentlemen while she was listening. How sad that at this point I had to use the phrase ‘would have been’.

Appendix

While it has very often been observed that Bolzano’s conception of grounding plays a key role in his work in mathematics and in the philosophy of mathematics, its role in his philosophy of religion and morality is seldom if ever taken into account. Unlike many other theists Bolzano is convinced that our moral obligations do not at all depend on God’s will. Here is his argument:

The proposition that everything that God … commands … is morally good, is not the highest moral law, [A] because not all practical truths can be derived from it, namely not those that determine God’s behaviour, and also [B] because those that can be derived from it do not objectively flow from it as consequences from their ground. For it is not because God … commands something that we ought to will it, but rather conversely, God … commands it because we ought to will it. [Der Satz an sich,] daß Alles, was Gott … gebietet … sittlich gut sey,… ist … nicht das oberste Sittengesetz, [A] weil sich nicht alle praktischen Wahrheiten, nämlich nicht diejenigen, die das Verhalten Gottes selbst bestimmen, aus ihm herleiten lassen, und [B] weil auch diejenigen, die sich aus ihm herleiten lassen, aus ihm nicht objectiv, nicht wie die Folge aus ihrem Grunde, fließen. Denn nicht darum, weil Gott Dieß oder Jenes … gebietet, soll es von uns gewollt werden; sondern umgekehrt, weil es von uns gewollt werden soll, … gebietet es uns Gott. (1834a) I, 247; ‘[…]’ inserted ⁶²

[A] is supposed to show that the predicates ‘is commanded by God’ and ‘is morally good’ are not even coextensive. Bolzano assumes that God’s essence is such that He cannot be the addressee of commands, and yet His actions are always morally good. The interesting point is [B]. Suppose that whatever is commanded by God is morally good, and we have somehow found out that God commands us to try to help somebody who is in need of help. Then the conclusion follows that it is morally good to try to help that person. But even if the premises of this deductively impeccable little argument were true it would not present grounds for the truth that it is morally good to try to help that person. For it is not the case that such an action is morally good because it is commanded by God, but rather conversely, it is commanded by God because it is morally good anyway. Quite generally, take any general term ‘F’ that is declared to be extensionally equivalent with ‘morally good’, the observation ‘Nothing is morally good because it is F, but rather conversely, something is F because it is morally good’ falsifies the claim ‘The statement that something is morally good if, and only if, it is F is the supreme moral law’ even if that statement is true. ⁶³