Abstract
In this paper, an enriched prosentential account of truth is sketched. An account of the meaning of truth has to pay attention to syntactical aspects, semantic contributions, and pragmatic roles. The enriched view has the virtue of placing together several ideas that proceed from different approaches to truth, and show how they can co-exist in a consistent and powerful proposal. The account put forward here is a consequence of the following three intuitions: (A) The syntactic job of the truth predicate is restoring sentencehood; (B) A sentence that has truth as its main predicate or its main operator is a truth ascription, and truth ascriptions are proforms of the propositional kind, i.e. pro-sentences. The semantic role of prosentences, as that of the rest of proforms, is threefold: to work (i) as vehicles of direct propositional reference, (ii) as vehicles of anaphoric reference, and (iii) as instruments for propositional generalization. Finally, the pragmatic role of truth ascriptions is the endorsement of information, i.e. the explicit acceptance of propositional contents as ready to be used in inferential exchanges. A practical derivation of the prosentential account is related to the place of truth in the debate between realism and antirealism. To say it directly: none. The truth predicate plays a variety of different tasks in natural languages, all of them essential to their expressive power, but both our comprehension of truth and the use we make of truth expressions are strictly independent of our views about the relation between mind and world.
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Notes
- 1.
See [2]. I owe this information and the reference in Bolzano to Göran Sundholm to whom I am deeply grateful.
- 2.
[25, pp. 174–75].
- 3.
[25, p. ivi].
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
By a genuine generalization I understand one that is not equivalent to a finite conjunction.
- 7.
All proforms, prosentences included, have uses of laziness. The truth predicate has this use in all versions of the Tarskian T-sentences. This is the grain of truth behind the redundancy theory of truth.
- 8.
See for instance the explanation about quasi-indicators due to H–N. Castañeda [5, p. 74].
- 9.
We are referring to Indo-European languages, although it is not too risky to suppose that the use of variables of different categories is a semantic universal.
- 10.
Inverted commas have many other uses, not only this one, and when they are the mechanism of reference they do not always refer to a content. They can refer to the sentence itself, either type or token, or to some aspects of it. See, for instance, [4, 7, 17, 22, 24] for different accounts of the way in which inverted commas function.
- 11.
Ramsey, Strawson, Horwich and Brandom offer a separate treatment of the truth predicate, while Grover, Camp and Belnap deal with complex pro-sentences like ‘what he said is true’ as a block.
- 12.
[14, p. 3].
- 13.
The semantic function of prosentences was completely alien to Frege’s views.
- 14.
See [25, p. 182].
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
With the notions of knowledge and objectivity the situation is similar, although an analysis of them lies outside the scope of this paper.
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Frápolli, M.J. (2012). The Neutrality of Truth in the Debate Realism vs. Anti-realism. In: Rahman, S., Primiero, G., Marion, M. (eds) The Realism-Antirealism Debate in the Age of Alternative Logics. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1923-1_5
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