Abstract
The recent ‘minimalist’ view of truth is in fundamental respects very close to the account offered by Alfred Tarski in 1933.1 It agrees with him that—putting the matter informally—just about the whole story of what it is for the statement or belief, < snow is white >, to be true is given by the equivalence:
< snow is white > is true ↔ snow is white
It agrees with Tarski that a full theory of truth should do nothing more than in some way generalize this thesis. It agrees that such an account will implicitly capture the idea that ‘truth is correspondence with reality’, but without having to resort to the obscure notions of ‘correspondence’ or `reality’ : thus it will qualify, in Jan Wolaiski’s terms, as a “weak correspondence theory” And it agrees that an even worse mistake would be to attempt to define truth in terms of ‘coherence’ or ‘verification’ or ‘utility’.
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Notes
See Alfred Tarski’s ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’ in his Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, Oxford University Press, 1958; and his ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, 1944, 241–275. For a presentation and defense of minimalism see my Truth (2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 1998).
See J. Wolernski, ‘Semantic Conception of Truth as a Philosophical Theory’, in J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), pp. 51–65, Kluwer, 1999.
Objections resembling this fourth one have been made by Hartry Field (‘Tarski’s Theory of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy 69, 1972, 347–375), Donald Davidson (‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy 87, 1990, 279–328), and Hilary Putnam (‘On Truth’, in his Words and Life, Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 315–329).
Various further objections to Tarski’s approach are considered and rebutted by Jan Woléski in his ‘Semantic Conception of Truth as a Philosophical Theory’ (in J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), pp. 51–65, Kluwer, 1999). In particular, he succeeds in answering the following complaints: (1) Black’s point that Tarski’s theory is counterintuitive in relativising truth to languages; (2) Kripke’s point that infinitely many truth predicates are needed to deal with the liar paradox; and (3) Etchemendy’s complaint that Tarski’s definitions have implications that do concern the concept of truth. But the problems I emphasize here are distinct from these objections.
Alongside Tarski’s theory and the minimalist approach, another form of deflationism about truth is given by the ‘disquotational’ account (See, for example, Hartry Field, ‘Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content’, Mind 94, 1994, 249–285). This point of view resembles minimalism in rejecting the need for, or possibility of, an explicit or finite account; but it diverges form minimalism in focussing, like Tarski, on sentential truth and in giving central place to the schema, “p” is true ↔a p. What is wrong with this, from a minimalist perspective, is that once the goal of a finite account has been rejected, there is no longer any good reason to focus on sentential truth and thereby to miss our ordinary concept. Granted, one may feel that the notion of proposition is problematic, and so one may want to avoid it for reasons unrelated to the desire for a finite account. But given the need to accommodate the truth of foreign sentences and context-sensitive sentences, it is going to be impossible for the disquotationalist to avoid relying on that notion—or at least on notions (e.g. translation) from which a coherent notion of proposition could easily be built. Thus disquotationalism strikes me as rhetorically unstable.
For example, let “D 1 is not true” abbreviate “The proposition expressed by the second quoted sentence in footnote 6 of Paul Horwich’s ‘A Minimalist Critique of Tarski on Truth’ is not true’.
Needless to say, this proposal is the merest of sketches and requires considerable development. A well-known worked-out approach based of the notion of grounding is given in Saul Kripke’s, ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth’ (Journal of Philosophy 72, 690–716), but in way that invokes Tarski-style compositional principles. The present suggestion is that such principles can be avoided, offering a solution that squares with minimalism.
Although this strategy works for “All propositions of the form < p-→ p> are true”, one might well wonder whether all general facts about truth can be explained in that way. But I think that we have some reason to think that they can be. For it would seem that any such fact could be put into the form: All propositions of type K have property J. For example: (1) Given any conjunction, if it is true then so are its conjuncts; (2) Given any proposition of the form < p -→ q >, if it and its antecedent are both true, then so is its consequent; (3) Given any atomic proposition, it is true if and only if its predicate is true of the referent of its subject; etc. Now, for any such generalization, if we can show, with the help of the equivalence schema, that it holds of an arbitrary proposition, we can then invoke the proposed additional premise to explain our acceptance of that generalization.
I have been stressing that any decent account how the meaning of “true” is engendered must show us how generalizations about truth may be derivable. But there is another reason for demanding such derivations: namely, that a good theory of truth (as opposed to a theory of the meaning of “true”) is a body of basic axioms that can explain all the facts about truth—and such facts include generalizations. With respect to this variant of the problem, the Tarskian (as before) can solve it. As for the minimalist—who claims that the basic facts about truth are all of the form, ‘< p > is true ↔ p’—he does need to show how general facts about truth could be explained in terms of them. But, he is of course licensed to cite further explanatory factors (as long as they do not concern truth). And this license yields a solution. For it is plausible to suppose that there is a truth-preserving rule of inference that will take us from a set of premises attributing to each proposition some property, G, to the conclusion that all propositions have property G. And this rule—not logically valid, but nonetheless truth-preserving given the nature of propositions—enables the general facts about truth to be explained by their instances. For more detail see my Truth (op. cit.).
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Horwich, P. (2003). A Minimalist Critique of Tarski on Truth. In: Hintikka, J., Czarnecki, T., Kijania-Placek, K., Placek, T., Rojszczak, A. (eds) Philosophy and Logic in Search of the Polish Tradition. Synthese Library, vol 323. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0249-2_1
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