Truth
Thursday, February 09, 2017
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Monday, November 28, 2016
Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?
This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth. Not that one should be a deflationist. But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.
There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true?
The deflationist, then, is denying that truth has a unitary and substantial nature into which it would make sense to inquire. There is no Truth with a capital 'T.' Does it follow that the deflationist is committed to relativism about truth? Must he say that there is no such thing as objective correctness?
It seems not. For although the deflationist denies Truth, he need not deny truths. There are truths galore on the views of prominent deflationists; it is just that they have nothing non-linguistic in common in virtue of which they are true. The deflationist tendency is to say that there is no more to Truth than is captured in such equivalences as:
Sentence 'S' (in language L) is true iff S
and
The proposition that p is true iff p.
One version of deflationism is Quine's disquotationalism according to which the function of the truth-predicate is to remove the quotation marks from a quoted sentence. Thus "'Snow is white' is true" says exactly what 'Snow is white' says, namely, that snow is white. And "'Grass is green' is true" says exactly what 'Grass is green' says, namely, that grass is green. And so on. There is nothing common to these sentences in virtue of which they are true. 'True' is just a device of disquotation; it does not pick out a genuine property.
It is easy to see that there is nothing here that is inconsistent with the absolutness of snow's being white or of grass's being green, etc. What's more interesting is that deflationary theories of truth would seem to rule out alethic relativism. Suppose a Nietzschean maintains that truth is the property of being power-enhancing, a property of those beliefs that enhance the power of the one who holds them. Deflationism rules out this substantive theory of truth along with every other substantive theory of truth. For if deflationism is true, then Truth has no nature; it is in a sense nothing at all. As such, it cannot be identified with the property of being power-enhancing.
This looks to be a general result. For truth to be relative, it would have to be identified with some relative property such as acceptability or rational acceptability, or rational acceptability by some ideally situated cognizers, or whatever. But such an identification could be made only if truth has an analyzable nature. On deflationism, however, truth lacks a nature. So truth on deflationism is non-relative. Indeed, this seems to be a consequence of the above equivalence schemata. For the schemata imply that every proposition, if true, is true simpliciter, which rules out any proposition's being true-for-X, for some relativizing factor X.
To sum up.
No deflationary theory of truth is a substantive theory of truth. All relativistic theories are substantive theories. Ergo, no deflationary theory of truth is a relativistic theory of truth.
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Thursday, September 08, 2016
Sunday, September 04, 2016
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Does Reality Have a Sentence-Like Structure?
Our problem may be formulated as an antilogism, or aporetic triad:
A. Some sentences are true in virtue of their correspondence with extralinguistic reality.
B. If so, then reality must have a sentence-like structure.
C. Reality does not have a sentence-like structure.
This trio of propositions is inconsistent. And yet one can make a plausible case for each member of the trio.
Ad (A). Consider a true contingent sentence such as 'Tom is sad,' or the proposition expressed by an assertive utterance in appropriate circumstances of such a sentence. Surely, or rather arguably, the sentence or proposition cannot just be true: if true it is true in virtue of something external to the sentence. I should say that I reject all deflationary theories of truth, including Ramsey's redundancy theory, Quine's disquotationalism, and Paul Horwich's minimalism. The external something cannot be another sentence, or, more generally, another truthbearer. Nor can it be someone's say-so: no truth by fiat unless your name is YHWH. So the external something has to be something 'in the world,' i.e., in the realm of primary reference, as opposed to the realm of sense, to invoke a Fregean distinction. The basic idea here is that some truths need ontological grounds: there is a deep connection between truth and being. There is more to a true sentence than the sentence that is true. There is that in the world which makes it true. Call it the truthmaker of the truth. Some truthbearers need truthmakers. As far as I am concerned, this is about as clear as it gets in philosophy. Which type of entity is best suited to play the truthmaker role, however, is a further question.
Ad (B). At a bare minimum, external reality must include Tom, the subject of our sentence. Part of what must exist for 'Tom is sad' to be true is Tom himself. But Tom alone does not suffice since the sentence says, and says truly, that Tom is sad. So it would seem that external reality must also include properties including the property of being sad. How could something be F if there is no F-ness in the world? There are of course extreme nominalists who deny that there are properties. I consign these extremists to the outer darkness where there is much wailing and the gnashing of teeth. Theirs is a lunatic position barely worth discussing. It is a datum that there are properties. One cannot reasonably ask whether they are; the only reasonable question is what they are. Moderate nominalism, however, is a respectable position. The moderate nominalist admits properties, but denies that they are universals. In contemporary jargon, the moderate nominalist holds that properties are tropes. A trope is a property assayed as a particular, as an unrepeatable item. Accordingly, the sadness in Tom is not repeated elsewhere: it is unique to him. Nor is it transferable: it cannot migrate to some other concrete particular. I'll 'turn' back to tropes in a 'moment.' (Get the double pun?)
For now suppose properties are immanent universals and that reality includes Tom and the property of being sad. Could the sum Tom + sadness suffice as the ontological ground of the truth of 'Tom is sad'? I will argue that it cannot. A universal is a repeatable entity. Universals are either transcendent or immanent. An immanent universal is one that cannot exist unless instantiated. A transcendent universal is one that can. Suppose sadness is an immanent universal instantiated by Shlomo. Then sadness exists and Tom exists. But the mere(ological) sum of the two does not suffice to make true 'Tom is sad.' For if the property and the particular each exist, it does not follow that the particular has the property. A tertium quid is required: something that ties the property to the particular, sadness to Tom.
What this suggests is that the truthmaker of a contingent predication of the form a is F must be something that corresponds to the sentence or proposition as a whole. It cannot be a by itself, or F-ness by itself; it must be a's being F. It is the BEING F of Tom that needs accounting. You could call this the problem of copulative Being.
Enter facts or states of affairs. (These are roughly the states of affairs of Armstrong's middle period.) We now have the concrete particular Tom, the property sadness, and the fact of Tom's being sad. This third thing brings together the concrete particular and the property to form a truthmaking fact. Now this fact, though not a proposition or a sentence, is obviously proposition-like or sentence-like. Although it is a truthmaker, not a truthbearer, it is isomorphic with the truthbearer it makes true. Its structure is mirrored in the proposition. It is a unity of constituents that is not a mere mereological sum of parts any more than a sentence-in-use or a proposition is a mere mereological sum of parts. Plato was already in possession of the insight that a declarative sentence is not a list of words. 'Tom is sad' is not the list: 'Tom,' 'sad,' or the list: 'Tom,' 'is,' 'sad.'
This argument to facts as worldly items in addition to their constituents requires the assumption that properties are universals. For this assumption is what makes it possible for the sum Tom + sadness to exist without Tom being sad. To resist this argument for the sentence-like structure of external reality, therefore, one might try insisting that properties are not universals. And here we come to Arianna Betti's proposal which I have discussed in painful detail in a draft the final version of which will soon appear in the journal METAPHYSICA. She suggests that properties are bearer-specific and that relations are relata-specific.
Well, suppose sadness is bearer-specific, or more precisely, bearer-individuated. This means that it cannot exist unless its bearer, Tom, exists. We can depict the property as follows: ____(tom)Sadness. Tom can exist without this property because it is contingent that Tom is sad. But the property cannot exist or be instantiated without Tom. On this scheme there cannot be a difference between the sum Tom + ___(tom)Sadness and the fact of Tom's being sad. Given the particular and the property, the fact 'automatically' exists. Betti takes this to show that some mereological sums can serve as truthmakers. But, as she notes, the bearer-specific property by itself can serve as truthmaker. For if ___(tom)Sadness exists, it follows that 'Tom is sad' is true. This is because it cannot exist without being insdtantiated, and because it is the "nature" (Betti's word) of this property to be of Tom and Tom alone. So if it exists, then it is instantiated by Tom, by Tom alone, and without the services of a tertium quid.
Now the point I want to make is that whether we take properties to be universals or tropes, it seems we have to grant that reality has a proposition-like structure. Either way it has a proposition-like structure. We saw how this works if properties are universals. The mereological sum Tom + the universal sadness does not suffice as truthmaker for 'Tom is sad.' So we need the fact of Tom's being sad. But this fact has a proposition-like structure. To avoid Armstrongian facts, Betti suggests that we construe properties as monadic tropes. But these too have a proposition-like structure. Even if Betti has shown a way to avoid Armstrong's middle period facts or states of affairs, she has not shown that the world is just a collection of things bare of proposition-like or sentence-like structure.
How so? Well, ___(tom)Sadness obviously in some sense involves Tom, if not as a constituent, then in some other way. There has to be something about this property that makes it such that if it is instantiated, it is instantiated by Tom and Tom alone. It is very much like a Fregean proposition about Tom. Such a proposition does not have Tom himself, with skin and hair, as a constituent, but some appropriately abstract representative of him, his individual essence, say, or his Plantingian haecceity.
Ad (C). According to the third limb of our triad reality does not have a sentence-like structure. This will strike many as obvious. Are worldly items syntactically related to one another? Do this make any sense at all? Arianna Betti, Against Facts, MIT Press, 2015, p. 26, italics in original:
Only linguistic entities . . . can strictly speaking have syntax. Facts are neither linguistic nor languagelike, because they are that of which the world is made, and the world is not made of linguistic or languagelike entities at the lowest level of reference. Thus the articulation of a fact cannot be logical in the sense of being syntactical. It is a categorical mismatch to say that there is a syntactical articulation between a lizard and light green or an alto sax and its price.
So how do we solve this bad boy? I say we reject (C).
In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God, and the Logos ex-pressed itself LOG-ically as the world.
Friday, August 19, 2016
Friday, August 12, 2016
Working Draft: The Case Against Facts
Comments appreciated if you are en rapport with the subject matter.
The Case Against Facts
Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 296 + xxvii
If Buridan's contribution to the bestiarum philosophorum was the ass, and David Armstrong's the ostrich, Arianna Betti's is the hedgehog bristling with spines. The hedgehog is an appropriate totemic animal inasmuch as her book too bristles with sharp distinctions and prickly arguments designed to inflict pain upon the friends of facts. In this penetrating and beautifully organized volume Professor Betti deploys her distinctions and arguments against two sorts of facts, compositional and propositional, as she calls them. The states of affairs of David Malet Armstrong's middle period (Armstrong 2007) are examples of the first kind of fact. These items are the main target of Betti's animadversions in the first part of her two-part book. She does not go so far as to claim that Armstrongian facts do not exist; her claim is the rather more modest one that we have no reason to posit them, since the work they do, if it needs doing at all, can be done just as well by a certain sort of mereological sum. (101) Betti ignores, however, Armstrong's very different later conception of states of affairs or facts. (Armstrong 2009; Armstrong 2010, 26-34; Vallicella 2016) This later conception also counts as compositional in her sense and ought to have been discussed for the sake of completeness, especially since it in some ways approximates to Betti's mereological position.
One might wonder how a fact could fail to be compositional. Facts are complex or composite items, after all, not simples. So they must all have some internal composition or other, whether they be truthmaking facts or facts of the Chisholmian-Plantingian sort. At a bare minimum, a's being F is composed of a and F-ness. Thus I find less than felicitous Betti's talk of propositional facts in contrast to compositional facts as “noncompositional objects at the level of reference.” (24) She makes it clear, however, that she is using 'compositional' in a narrow sense that implies that compositional facts and their constituents are “part[s] of the furniture of the world.” (37) We shall soon see that being in the world involves being real as opposed to being ideal. An example of a compositional fact is the fact of Guido's being hungry. This fact has Guido himself, all 200 lbs of him, as a constituent. An example of a propositional fact is the putative referent of the that-clause in a sentence like 'Guido sees that Francesca is serving spaghetti puttanesca.' This putative referent is the fact that Francesca is serving spaghetti puttanesca. This propositional fact is like a (Fregean) proposition, though it is not a proposition, in that it does not have Francesca herself as a constituent, but rather an abstract surrogate that represents her. (170) (This fact-of vs. fact-that terminology is mine, not Betti's. I got it from Milton Fisk.)
Betti describes in marvellous detail seven features of compositional facts (18) and five of propositional facts (170). I will speak of C-facts and P-facts. Here are some salient differences. C-facts are in the world, and thus suited to play the truthmaking role whereas P-facts are not in the world and hence not fit for truthmaking. To be in the world is to be real where to be real is to exist “through time and in time as causes or effects in a causal chain.” (22) So C-facts are real while P-facts are ideal. The ideality of P-facts, however, is not that of propositions since P-facts are not propositions. Betti is greatly and rightly exercised by the curious in-between status of these “ghostly critters” (114) that are neither truthbearers nor truthmakers and yet are championed by such distinguished philosophers as Roderick Chisholm, Alvin Plantinga, and Kit Fine. These “ghostly critters” are not truthbearers because they are neither true nor false. But while they are not bivalent in terms of truthvalue, they are 'bipolar' (my term): while all exist, some of them obtain while some do not. They are not truthmakers since truthmakers are real and 'monopolar': if they don't exist they are nothing. Thus the fact of Guido's being hungry does not exist at all if Guido is not hungry. Propositional facts are neither fish nor fowl. The conclusion Betti arrives at strikes me as correct: “Propositional facts collapse into true propositions.” (179) Propositional facts are thus not a distinctive category of entity. We need them, she thinks, as little as we need compositional facts. Actually, her position is far more radical than this since she denies that that-clauses are referential parts of speech. So her position is best expressed conditionally by the following quotation: “If there were nominal reference to facts, facts would be true propositions . . . . (113) Her view, if I understand it, is eliminativist not identitarian: she is not saying that there are propositional facts and that what they are are true propositions; she is saying that that there are no propositional facts.
Leaving propositional facts to languish in their ghostly realm, the rest of this article will take issue with Betti's critique of compositional facts, the ones dear to my heart, the facts involved in the flux and shove of the real order. On a personal note, I want to thank Professor Betti for her very close attention to my articles on the topic.
The Case Against Compositional Facts
A compositional fact, as opposed to a propositional fact, is an entity fit to play the role of truthmaker. The truthmaker role may be introduced as follows. Consider the assertive utterance of some such contingent sentence as 'Tom is sad.' If true, this assertively uttered sentence cannot just be true: if true, it is true because or in virtue of something external to it. This use of 'because' is not causal which is why philosophers reach for the weasel phrase 'in virtue of,' which, despite its slipperiness, may well be indispensable for metaphysics. I say it is indispensable. (Or do hedgehogs eat weasels?) Roughly, there has to be something that 'makes' the sentence true. This external something cannot be another declarative sentence, even if true. More generally, a truth is a true truthbearer (a Fregean proposition, say, or perhaps an Aristotelian proposition, see pp. 31-32 for Betti's helpful explanation of the difference) and no true truthbearer is made true by another such item in the specific sense of 'makes true' in play in truthmaker theory. Nor can someone's say-so be what makes true a true truthbearer. The truthmaker has to be something 'in the world,' something extralinguistic and mind-independent in the realm of reference as opposed to the realm of sense. The friends of truthmakers are realists about truth: they are convinced that at least some truths are in need of an ontological ground of their being true.1
Truthmaker maximalists hold that all truths need such grounds, but one needn't be a maximalist to be a truthmaker theorist. As for 'makes true,' this is neither entailment nor causation. Not entailment, because entailment is a relation between propositions, assuming that truthbearers are propositions, whereas truthmaking is a relation between extra-propositional reality and propositions. So if x makes true y, then y is a truthbearer, but x is not. If someone says that the proposition expressed by 'Snow is white' makes true the proposition expressed by 'Something is white,' then that person, while talking sense, is not using 'makes true' in the specific way in which the phrase is used in truthmaker theory. Truthmaking is not causation for a similar reason: causation does not connect the extra-propositional to the propositional whereas truthmaking does. As Armstrong says, truthmaking is “cross-categorial.” (Armstrong 2004b, 5) It links the extra-propositional to the propositional.
It is important to note, however, that while truthmakers cannot be Fregean or Aristotelian propositions, and thus must be extra-propositional, they must also be proposition-like on Armstrong's approach. This is a point I think Betti misses. Speaking of compositional facts, she tells us that “facts are neither linguistic nor languagelike entities at the lowest level of reference. (28, emphasis in original) But this is certainly not Armstrong's view, the view that is supposed to be the target of Betti's critique of compositional facts. His view is that the world is a world of states of affairs, a “totality of facts not of things” (Wittgenstein) and “sentence-like rather than list-like.” (Armstrong 2010, 34) If the world is sentence-like, then, pace Betti, it is language-like. Armstrong was profoundly influenced by his teacher in Sydney, the Scots philosopher John Anderson, who held that “reality, while independent of the mind that knows it, has a 'propositional' structure.” (Armstrong 1997, 3) Armstrong goes on to say that “the propositional view of reality which he [Anderson] championed is the facts or states of affairs view of reality.” (Armstrong 1997, 3-4) That Armstrongian facts are proposition-like and thus language-like is fairly obvious when we consider the truthmakers of contingent predications of the form 'a is F.' The truthmaker cannot be a by itself, or F-ness by itself, or the mereological sum a + F-ness. It must be a-instantiating F-ness, which has a proposition-like structure. Armstrongian facts have a logos-like and thus logical articulation contrary to what Betti says in opposition to Kit Fine. (28) But now I am getting ahead of myself.
Suppose you accept the legitimacy of the truthmaker role and the need for some type of entity to play it. It doesn't follow straightaway that the entities needed to play the role must be what Betti calls compositional facts or what David Armstrong calls states of affairs. This is so even if we confine ourselves to the really clear examples of truthbearers in need of truthmakers, namely, synthetic, contingent predications such as 'Guido is hungry' or the propositions expressed by assertive utterances of such sentences. Nevertheless, a powerful argument can be mounted for compositional facts as truthmakers. The argument Armstrong and I consider powerful, however, Betti calls “unsound.” (106) Surprise!
Although she is skeptical of the need for truthmakers, she is willing to grant the need arguendo, insisting only that if we need truthmakers, a certain type of mereological complex can do the job thus rendering Armstrong's facts, as unmereological complexes, unnecessary. (102) This is why she thinks the truthmaker argument for Armstrongian facts is unsound. As she sees it, compositional facts are not givens, but theoretical posits, and unnecessary ones at that. They were invented to solve a problem, the unity problem, that arises only because of certain optional assumptions about relations and properties that one is not bound to make. (94-95) Compositional facts are an ad hoc, indeed a “maximally ad hoc,” solution to a pseudo-problem. (64)
Now let me say something in exposition of Armstrong's argument for facts or states of affairs as truthmakers on the assumption that the truthmaker role is legitimate and needs to be filled by some category of entity or other. I will then consider Betti's counter-proposal.
If it is true that Tom is sad, could the truthmaker of this truth be the item that Betti calls (8) the sentence-subject of 'Tom is sad,' namely, Tom? No, since Tom needn't be sad. So Tom by himself cannot be what makes true 'Tom is sad.' The same goes for the property of being sad. By itself the property cannot be the truthmaker of the sentence in question. (I am assuming, with Armstrong, that properties are immanent universals. Immanent, in that they cannot exist uninstantiated; universal, in that they are repeatable.) Now if Tom exists and sadness exists, then so does the mereological sum Tom + sadness. But this sum cannot be the truthmaker either. For the sum exists whether or not Tom is sad. How so?
Suppose that Tom is not sad, but Shlomo is. If properties are immanent universals, then sadness cannot exist uninstantiated; suppose it exists in virtue of being instantiated by Shlomo. So Tom exists, sadness exists, and their sum exists. But this does not suffice for Tom's being sad. There is a missing ontological ingredient: something to connect sadness to Tom. You might think that the missing ingredient would have to be the worldly correlate of the 'is' of predication. But if you take this correlate to be an exemplification/instantiation relation then you ignite Bradley's relation regress which is unfortunately vicious. Other moves invoking Strawsonian nonrelational ties, Bergmannian nexus, Fregean unsaturated concepts, and benign fact-internal infinite regresses (see Vallicella 2010), are equally unavailing. The unifier of a fact's constituents cannot be a further constituent or anything internal to the fact. This leaves two possibilities: (i) the unifier is external to the fact, which Betti rejects, and (ii) Armstrong's middle-period suggestion that facts are entities in addition to their consituents and it is they who hold fact-appropriate constituents together so that they can exercise the truthmaking function. Betti has mastered the dialectic and considers the least bad solution to be Armstrong's: facts hold their constituents together. Although she doesn't say so, she considers my solution in terms of an external unifier to be the worst. The extant putative solutions to the unity problem of course presuppose that it is a genuine problem. Betti thinks it isn't.
Betti's Dissolution of the Unity Problem
After rejecting the extant putative solutions to the unity problem, Betti proposes to dissolve it by collapsing the distinction between “relations that relate relata and relations that do not: all relations relate relata and carry out their own unifying work.” (95) She means this to apply to properties as well. All properties qualify their bearers and carry out their own qualifying work. Thus there needn't be anything to hold the constituents of a relational or as monadic fact together: nothing internal to the fact, nothing external, and not the fact itself. Betti's point is that there is no need for Armstrongian facts, facts as entities in addition to their constituents. (Cf. Armstrong 1997, 117) Her point is not that there are no facts. There may well be facts; it is just that if there are, they are a special sort of mereological sum. Perhaps we can say that she is an identitarian about compositional facts, not an eliminativist, whereas she is an eliminativist about propositional facts, not an identitarian. More on this in a moment.
What Betti has to do is block a possibility like the following. In the actual world, call it Charley, Tim loves Tina. In a merely possible world w in which Tim and Tina both exist, Tim does not love Tina, but Tim loves Toni. In Charley we have both the relational fact of Tim's loving Tina and the mereological sum Tim + loves + Tina. In w, we have the sum Tim + loves + Tina but not the corresponding fact. This implies that there is more to the fact than the sum of its constituents: the sum can exist without constituting a fact. The something more is that which makes of the constituents a real truthmaking unity. Call it the unifier. Betti thinks that the least bad of the extant proposals as to what the unifier is is Armstrong's: facts hold their constituents together; facts are unmereological complexes over and above their constituents. In short, what Betti needs to do is counter the seductive thought that in an actual relational situation such as that of Tom's loving Tina, the constituents can exist without forming a real truthmaking unity. What she needs to maintain is that, necessarily, if all the constituents exist, then the relatedness exists. If the mere existence of the constituents ensures their connectedness, then there is no need for Armstrongian facts. You would then have real unity on the cheap, real truthmaking unity from mereology alone, or rather from mereology operating upon the right sorts of constituents. The mereological principle of the extensionality of parthood would hold for all complexes. Nice work if you can get it!
Betti can achieve her end if she holds that relations are relata-specific where “A relation is relata-specific if and only if it is in its nature to relate specific relata.” (89) Suppose that the relation loves as it figures in the sum Tom + loves + Tina is necessarily such that, if it exists, then it relates Tom and Tina. Then there would be no distinction in reality between loves as a relating relation and loves as an inert relation that is merely a constituent but not also a unifier of the complex into which it enters.
Betti's contention, then, is that all relations, just in virtue of existing, are relating relations, active ontological ingredients if you will, and none are inert ingredients. A relation cannot exist without actually relating its relata. If so, there cannot be a difference between the mereological sum a + R+ b and the fact of a's standing in R to b. Given the constituents, the fact is given: it is not an ontological extra, something over and above the constituents. There is no possibility of the constituents existing without the fact existing. It follows that there is no need for facts as unmereological compositions, facts as “additions to being,” in a phrase from Armstrong. If a fact just is a mereological complex, then it is an “ontological free lunch,” to employ yet another signature phrase of the late Australian. Of course, not just any old mereological sum is a fact; only those with the right constituents.
And the same goes for properties: all properties, just in virtue of existing, qualify their bearers. There is no need for a tertium quid such as an instantiation relation to tie a property to its bearer. Nor is there any need for monadic facts as entities in addition to their constituents to do this unifying work. There is no difference between the sum a + F-ness and the fact of a's being F. For this to work, all properties have to be “bearer-specific.” “A property is bearer-specific if and only if it is in its nature to be had by specific bearers.” (90) Suppose it is true that Hargle is happy, and that being happy is “bearer-specific.” We can display the property as follows: __(H) being happy. '__' indicates that the property is unsaturated or incomplete or gappy in something like Frege's sense: if it is had by an individual it is had directly without the need of a connector such as an instantiation relation or Strawsonian nonrelational tie or a Bergmannian nexus. '(H)' indicates that the property is bearer-specific or rather bearer-individuated: if the property is had, it is had by Hargle and nothing else. That the property is had follows from its existence: necessarily, if the property exists, then it is had, had by Hargle and nothing else, and had directly without the service of a tertium quid. What this all implies is that the mereological sum Hargle + __(H) being happy suffices as truthmaker of 'Hargle is happy.' There is no need for a fact over and above this sum. Indeed, as Betti points out, the property alone suffices as truthmaker since it cannot exist unless Hargle exists. (101)
Questions and Objections
1. Why is Betti's proposal superior to Armstrong's?
Betti presents us with an alternative way of thinking about truthmaking facts, namely, as mereological sums whose parts include relata-specific relations and bearer-specific properties. Betti's main point is that “mereological complexes are viable as truthmakers; facts are not needed for the role.” (101) When she says that facts are not needed, she means Armstrongian, middle-period facts. She is not denying that there are truthmakers. Nor is she is denying the existence of facts as long as they are assayed as mereological complexes. If a fact is a complex entity that functions as a truthmaker, then her mereological complexes containing relata-specific relations and bearer-dependent properties are facts, though not in Armstrong 's robust sense. She is denying, or rather refusing to countenance on grounds of theoretical economy, facts as unmereological complexes. Her claim is that there is no explanatory need for facts as the middle-period Armstrong conceives of them, namely, as “additions to being.” Betti may bristle at my use of 'facts' in describing her position but surely there is an innocuous and nearly datanic, as opposed to theoretical, use of 'fact' according to which an individual's having a property, or two or more things standing in a relation, is a fact. Indeed, she needs this use of 'fact' just to state her theory, according to which the fact aRb is identical to the sum a + R + b, when R is relata-specific. On her view facts are a proper subset of mereological sums. That is not a denial of facts, but an acceptance of them. Unfortunately, Betti sometimes expresses herself in a misleading way. She tells us, for example, that “the thought that the world is a world without facts – one in which there is no difference between facts and sums – is shown to be perfectly sensible.” (88) This formulation equivocates on 'fact.' What she wants to say is that the world is without Armstrongian facts, not that the world is without truthmaking facts. It is the latter that are no different from sums, namely those sums whose constituents include relata-specific relations and object-dependent properties.
Betti thinks her theory is preferable to Armstrong's. I question whether she is justified in this preference. We face a tough choice. Armstrong's theory violates the extensionality of parthood and countenances unmereological complexes. This is a strike against it. Betti's theory avoids unmereological complexes, thereby upholding the extensionality of parthood, but accepts relata-specific relations and bearer-dependent properties. How plausible is it that all relations are relata- specific and all properties bearer-dependent? Are these notions even coherent? Let's consider the coherence question.
2. Against Relata-Specific Relations and Bearer-Dependent Properties
Suppose Argle is two feet from Bargle. There is nothing in the nature of either relatum to necessitate their standing in this external relation. Each can exist apart from the relation. And as I see it, there cannot be anything in the nature of the relation itself to necessitate that it be precisely these two critters that the relation relates. So on my view a relational situation such as Argle's being two feet from Bargle involves a double externality: there is nothing in the nature of the terms to dictate their standing in the external relation in question, and there is nothing in the nature of the external relation to dictate the terms. But as Betti sees it, it is the nature of this relation to relate Argle and Bargle and nothing else: the relation cannot exist/be instantiated without relating precisely these two. This implies that “as soon as” (105) the relation exists, it relates Argle and Bargle. If this conception is coherent, it has the desired consequence of undercutting Bertrand Russell's distinction between actually relating relations and those same relations as inert, and with it the distinction between a fact as a real unity of fact-appropriate constituents and the 'mere' mereological sum of those very same constituents. If this works, it puts paid to Armstrong's commitment to unmereological complexes: mereology suffices for truthmakers provided the parts of the sums include relata-specific relations or bearer-dependent properties.
It seems to me, however, that the notion of relata-specificity reduces to absurdity by way of the following argument in which R is any relata-specific dyadic external relation, and a and b are its individual relata. (See also my critique of D. W. Mertz in Vallicella 2004.) Generalization beyond the dyadic case is straightforward but unnecessary. Betti's definition of 'external relation' is standard and perfectly serviceable: “A relation is external if and only if it is not grounded in corresponding properties of its relata, that is, is an entity over and above its relata.” (89) An internal relation is then one that is grounded in corresponding properties and is not an entity in addition to its relata. Now to the argument:
P1. R is entirely dependent for its existence on both a and b. (Betti's theory of relata-specificity)
This is because (i) R cannot exist without being instantiated and thus cannot exist without actually relating some pair of individuals or other, and (ii) R cannot, as relata-specific, relate any pair of individuals other than a, b. If dyadic R were an immanent universal, then it could not exist without relating some pair or other; but it would not necessarily have to relate the precise pair, a, b. R's existence would then not depend on its relating a and b. But as it is, R is a particular (an unrepeatable), not a universal (a repeatable); it is a non-transferable relational trope. It is as particular as the particulars it relates. Its being or existence is exhausted by its particular occurrence, unlike an immanent universal the being or existence of which is not exhausted by its instantiation in a particular case. So R, as a relational trope, is entirely dependent for its existence on the exact relata it has: its being or existence is exhausted by its relating of those exact relata, the individuals a and b. Therefore,
C1. R is not distinct in reality from the particular relatedness aRb: R = aRb.
Of course, R can be thought of in abstraction from aRb. But R in reality is identical to aRb. You cannot say that they are different because aRb has constituents a, b while R does not. For R exists when and only when it is relating a and b. Apart from them it is nothing at all.
P2. The particular relatedness or relational fact aRb is identical to the mereological sum a + R + b, given that R is relata-specific. (Betti's theory) Therefore,
C2. R is identical to the sum a + R + b. (from C1 and P2 by Transitivity of Identity)
P3. No proper part of a mereological sum having two or more members is identical to the sum of which it is a proper part. (Principle of mereology) Therefore,
C3. R is not identical to the sum a + R + b. (from P3) Therefore,
C4. R is and is not identical to the sum a + R + b. (from C2, C3) Contradiction! Therefore,
C5. Either P1 or P2 is false; either way, Betti's theory fails.
Betti will presumably reject (C1). But how? She tells us that it is the nature of R to relate exactly a and b. Now if it is the nature of R to relate exactly these relata, then it is intrinsic to R that it do so. But then R is intrinsically relational, relational in and of itself. If this is neither contradictory nor magical, then it involves importing mind (intentionality) into the bowels of R. For if it is intrinsic to R that it relate exactly a and b, then R, quite apart from actually relating a and b, 'pre-selects' a and b as its relata. But this is what mind in its intentional states does. Such states are intrinsically relational: it is their nature to be of or about items that need not exist for the states to be of or about them. But surely there is no intentionality within the non-transferable relational trope R!
But what is the alternative? Will we be told that a and b are constituents of R? But then R is identical to aRb, when it cannot be given that aRb is a + R + b.
Now let's consider bearer-dependent properties. Suppose we grant, along with Armstrong (2004, 49), that some mereological complexes are truthmakers. Is it not also the case that some are not? Suppose that Gargle is lachrymose but Hargle is not. Then the following sum exists: Hargle + __(G)being lachrymose. The sum exists because its two parts exist. But the parts are not connected to form a truthmaker. This implies that on Betti's account there are two sorts of mereological sum: those that are truthmakers and those that are not. It also implies that what makes a mereological sum a truthmaker is not its being a mereological sum. What makes a sum a truthmaker is the nature of its members. Thus what makes Hargle + __(H)being happy a truthmaking sum is its second member.
But this second member has a rather intricate and puzzling structure. It is a bearer-individuated property, a property that exists only if instantiated by Hargle. Hargle can exist without being happy, but the property in question cannot exist unless Hargle exists. It is in the nature of the property to qualify precisely Hargle “as soon as it exists,” (105) i.e., as soon as the property exists. But when does it exist? When Hargle instantiates it. So it is not as if the property has its individuated nature apart from its being instantiated; rather, it receives its individuated nature by being instantiated by Hargle. It is only the existing Hargle that can make the property individuative of precisely Hargle and nothing else. So Hargle supplies the nature that makes the property Hargle-specific, or rather Hargle-individuated.
Does this not smack of absurdity? The nature of an entity is intrinsic to it; it cannot consist in a relation to an item external to it. So it cannot be instantiation by Hargle that gives the property its nature. If, on the other hand, Hargle were a constituent of the property in question, namely, __(H)being happy, then it would make sense to say that it is the nature of the property to be instantiated by Hargle. But Hargle is not a constituent of the property; otherwise the property would not be a property but the fact of Hargle's being happy.
Betti seems to face a dilemma. Either Hargle is not a constituent of the property or he is. If Hargle is not a constituent of the property, then the property has no nature that makes it dependent on precisely Hargle and nothing else. But if Hargle is a constituent of the property, then the property is a fact.
If Betti's account is incoherent, as I have just argued that it is, then it cannot be superior to Armstrong's even if Armstrong's is also incoherent. I should make it clear that I am not defending Armstrong; I admit that his view of facts is problematic. In fact, I argue that it is incoherent in Vallicella 2016. My point is that Betti's theory is not an acceptable replacement for it. Even if her theory is not incoherent, it is problematic as I will now further demonstrate.
3. Digging Deeper: Further Questions about Betti's Theory of Relations
Betti faults me (92-93) for failing to distinguish between externality and relata-unspecificity. A relation is external just in case it is not “grounded in corresponding properties of its relata . . . .” (89) “A rela tion is relata-unspecific if and only if it is not in its nature to relate specific relata.” (90) I fail to distinguish externality from relata-unspecificity in that I hold that, in Betti's words, “A relation is external if and only if it could have related another pair (or triple, quadruple, etc.) of relata.” (93, citing Vallicella 2002, 14-15, 31; 2004, 164). As I see it, no external relation has a nature that dictates that it relate only a particular pair, triple, quadruple, etc. of relata. As against this, Betti envisages the following possibility: an external relation such as being two feet from that holds, if it holds at all, between Argle and Bargle but cannot hold between any other pair of relata. The relation is external in that there is nothing in the natures of the relata that dictates that they stand in the relation in question; the relation is relata-specific in that there is something in the nature of the relation to dictate that, if it holds, it holds only between Argle and Bargle.
Now if Betti's scenario is possible, then I have blundered by conflating externality and relata-unspecificity. But while I grant that Betti's 'possibility' is combinatorially possible given her definitions, it is not metaphysically possible. I gave an argument above. So my conflation of externality and relata-unspecificity strikes me as justified.
I found Betti's theory of relata-specific relations (which draws on the work of her student Jan Willem Wieland) obscure and in need of further development. One intriguing suggestion is that “relata-specific relations can still be universals.” (91) Now there is a wholly uncontroversial sense of 'relata-specific universal' which Betti does not intend. Consider the universal taller than. This is a dyadic relation that is instantiated by ordered pairs of objects, but not just by any old pair. The pairs must be pairs of things having height. Taller than is thus specific to all and only such pairs and not to pairs of numbers or pairs of sets or pairs of propositions or pairs of angels or pairs of acts of thinking. But Betti means something different. She is apparently envisaging the possibility of a relation that is universal but that, say, relates only Guido, Francesca, Giacomo, and Maria in respect of height. Unfortunately, she gives no exemples and I am not sure what she is driving at. She brings this up because she thinks that her solution to the unity problem works whether or not one assays properties as universals or as tropes. (91) But this is all very obscure and here is a lacuna that needs filling.
Conclusion
My interim verdict with respect to compositional facts is that Betti has not provided a viable mereological alternative to the admittedly untenable facts or states of affairs of Armstrong's middle period.
REFERENCES
Armstrong, D. M. 1978. Nominalism and Realism: Universals and Scientific Realism, vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, D. M. 1983. What is a Law of Nature? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, D. M. 1989a. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder: Westview Press.
Armstrong, D. M. 1989b. A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, D. M. 1993. “A World of States of Affairs”. Philosophical Perspectives, vol.7, 429-440.
Armstrong, D. M. 2004a. “How Do Particulars Stand to Universals?” In D. W. Zimmerman, (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 139-154.
Armstrong, D. M. 2004b. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, D. M. 2009. “Questions about States of Affairs”. In M. E. Reicher (ed.), States of Affairs. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 39-50.
Armstrong, D. M. 2010a. Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Armstrong, D. M. 2010b. “Reinhardt Grossmann's Ontology”. In Cumpa, J. (ed.), Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 29-43.
Baxter, D. 2001. “Instantiation as Partial Identity”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1979, 449-64.
Bergmann, G. 1967. Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Butchvarov, P. 1979. Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence, and Predication. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Butchvarov, P. 1986. “States of Affairs”. In Bogdan, R. (ed.), Roderick M. Chisholm. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 113-133.
Butchvarov, P. 2010. “Facts”. In Cumpa, J. (ed.), Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 71-93.
Chisholm, R 1976. Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study. La Salle: Open Court.
Cumpa, J. and Tegtmeier, E. (eds.), 2009. Phenomenological Realism Versus Scientific Realism: Reinhardt Grossmann-David M. Armstrong Metaphysical Correspondence. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.
Frege, G. 1960.”On Concept and Object”. In P. Geach and M. Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 42-55.
Frege, G. 1976. “Der Gedanke”. In G. Patzig (ed.), Logische Untersuchungen. Goettingen:Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 30-53.
Grossmann, R. 1974. “Bergmann's Ontology and the Principle of Acquintance”. In Gram, M. S. and Klemke, E. D. (eds.), The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 89-113.
Grossmann, R. 1983. The Categorial Structure of the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Grossmann, R. 1984. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Grossmann, R. 1990. The Fourth Way: A Theory of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Grossmann, R. 1992. The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology. London: Routledge.
Mulligan, K., Simons, P. and Smith, B. 2009. “Truth-makers”. In Lowe, E. J. and Rami, A., Truth and Truth-Making. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 59-86.
Mumford, S. 2007. David Armstrong. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Plantinga, A. 1974. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, P. F. 1950. “Truth”. In Aristotelian Society Suplementary Volume 24, 136-137.
Vallicella, W. F. 2000. “From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument”. International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 48, 157-181.
Vallicella, W. F. 2002. A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Vallicella, W. F. 2004. “Bradley's Regress and Relation-Instances”. The Modern Schoolman, vol. LXXXI, no. 3, 159-183.
Vallicella, W. F. 2010. “Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition”. Dialectica 64, 265-277.
Vallicella, W. F. 2016. “Facts: An Essay in Aporetics”. In Calemi, Francesco F. ed, Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong. Boston/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 105-131, esp. 115-126.
1It is an interesting question whether one could be an idealist and also a truthmaker theorist. Consider a Kantian who holds that phenomenal objects and events are “empirically real but transcendentally ideal” to employ a signature Kantian phrase. It seems to me that such a philosopher could maintain a need for truthmakers for some truthbearers, namely those synthetic aposteriori, and thus contingent, judgments about empirical objects and events. It seems one could combine realism about empirical truth with transcendental idealism.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
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Sunday, December 21, 2014
Tropes as Truth-Makers? Or Do We Need Facts?
Here is a white cube. Call it 'Carl.' 'Carl is white' is true. But Carl, though white, might not have been white. (He would not have been white had I painted him red.) So 'Carl is white' is contingently true. There is no necessity that Carl be white. By contrast, 'Carl is three-dimensional' is necessarily true. It is metaphysically necessary that he be three-dimensional. Of course, the necessity here is conditional: given that Carl exists, he cannot fail to be three-dimensional. But Carl might not have existed. So Carl is subject to a two-fold contingency, one of existence and one of property-possession. It is contingent that Carl exists at all -- he is not a necessary being -- and with respect to some of his properties it is contingent that he has them. He exists contingently and he is white contingently. Or, using 'essence' and 'accident,' we can say: Carl is a contingent being that is accidentally white but essentially three-dimensional. By contrast, the number 7 is a necessary being that accidentally enjoys the distinction of being Poindexter's favorite number, but is essentially prime.
Some truths need truth-makers. 'Carl is white' is one of them. Grant me that some truths need truth-makers. My question is this: Can a trope do the truth-making job in a case like this or do we need a concrete fact?
Carl is white. That is given. Some say that (at least some of) the properties of particulars are themselves particulars (unrepeatables). Suppose you think along those lines. You accept that things have properties -- Carl, after all, is white extralinguistically -- and therefore that there are properties, but you deny that properties are universals. Your nominalism is moderate, not extreme. Suppose you think of Carl's whiteness as a trope or as an Husserlian moment or as an Aristotelian accident. (Don't worry about the differences among these items.) That is, you take the phrase 'Carl's whiteness' to refer, not to the fact of Carl's being white, which is a complex having Carl himself as a constituent, but to a simple item: a bit of whiteness. This item depends for its existence on Carl: it cannot exist unless Carl exists, and, being particular, it cannot exist in or at any other thing such as Max the white billiard ball. Nor is it transferrable: the whiteness of Carl cannot migrate to Max.
The truth-maker of a truth is an existing thing in virtue of whose existence the truth is true. Why can't Carl's whiteness trope be the truth-maker of 'Carl is white'? That very trope cannot exist unless it exists 'in' Carl as characterizing Carl. So the mere existence of that simple item suffices to make true the sentence 'Carl is white.' Or so it seems to some distinguished philosophers.
If this is right, then there is no need that the truth-maker of a truth have a sentence-like or proposition-like structure. (For if a proposition-like truth-maker is not needed in a case like that of Carl the cube, then presumably there is no case in which it is needed.) A simple unrepeatable bit of whiteness has no internal structure whatsoever, hence no internal proposition-like structure. A concrete fact or state of affairs, however, does: Carl's being white, for example, has at a bare minimum a subject constituent and a property constituent with the former instantiating the second.
My thesis is not that all truth-makers are proposition-like, but that some are. Presumably, the truth-maker of 'Carl is Carl' and 'Carl exists' is just Carl. But it seems to me that the truth-maker of 'Carl is white' cannot be the particular whiteness of Carl. In cases like this a simple item will not do the job. Why not?
1. If it is legitimate to demand an ontological ground of the truth of a truth-bearer, whether it be a sentence or a proposition or a judgment or whatever, then it is legitimate to demand an ontological ground of the contingency of the truth of a truth-bearer. If we have a right to ask: what makes 'Carl is white' true, then we also have a right to ask: What makes 'Carl is white' contingently or accidentally true as opposed to essentially true? Truth and contingent truth are not the same. And it is contingent truth that needs explaining. If a truth-bearer is necessarily true, it may be such in virtue of its logical form, or because it is true ex vi terminorum; in either case it is not clear that the is any need for a truth-maker. Does 'Bachelors are male' need a truth-maker? Not as far as I can see. But 'Tom is a bachelor' does. Unlike David Armstrong, I am not a truth-maker maximalist. See Truthmaker Maximalism Questioned.
2. The trope Carl's whiteness can perhaps explain why the sentence 'Carl is white' is true, but it cannot explain why it is accidentally true as opposed to essentially true. For the existence of the trope is consistent both with Carl's being essentially white and Carl's being accidentally white. If F is a trope, and F exists, then F is necessarily tied to a concrete individual (this is the case whether one is a trope bundle theorist or a trope substratum theorist like C. B. Martin), and so the concrete indiviual exists and is characterized by F. But this is so whether the concrete individual is essentially F or accidentally F.
3. To explain the contingency of a contingent truth it is not enough that the truth-maker be contingent; there must also be contingency within the truth-maker. Or so it seems to me. The fact theory can accommodate this requirement. For in the fact of Carl's being white, the fact itself is contingent, but so also is the connection between Carl and whiteness. Carl and whiteness can exist without the fact existing. (This assumes that whiteness is a universal) The contingency of the connection of the constituents within the fact accounts for the contingency of the truth of 'Carl is white.' But no trope is contingently connected to any concrete individual of which it is the trope.
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
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Friday, November 15, 2013
The Dictionary Definition of Lying Again: Hanson's Counterexample
I dedicate this, and all subsequent posts on lying and the several senses of 'is,' to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who, by their brazen mendacity, have inadvertently fueled the fires of logico-linguistic inquiry.
...........
Tony Hanson e-mails and I comment in blue:
I hope things are well for you. Sorry for the haste of this message but time is a commodity of which lowly adjuncts have little.
Your posts on lying are interesting. You hint at this in one of your posts but I have not seen anyone raise questions about whether a falsehood is a necessary condition for lying. Further evidence perhaps of the family resemblance approach:
Shady, Bonnie and Clyde rob a bank. They stash the loot under the wood pile at the hideout. A few days later Clyde notices the money is gone. Shady and Bonnie, in a conspiracy to take the loot for themselves, bury it under the oak tree at the cemetery. Clyde drags Shady out of the house and demands to know where the money is. In an attempt to deceive Clyde, he says the money is buried under the bridge by the river. Clyde drags Shady down to the bridge and to Shady's chagrin there is the loot. (Bonnie had moved the loot from the oak tree to the bridge in attempt to have it for herself).
So Shady's statement that the loot was at the bridge was true, though he did attempt to deceive. Did Shady lie or not?
Is a false statement necessary [for a lie] or just the belief that a statement is false?
BV: Counterexamples to the dictionary definition similar to Hanson's were proposed by Monokroussos and Lupu in the discussion threads and are familiar from the literature. Here is the dictionary definition (that I was defending):
D1. To lie =df to make a false statement with the intention to deceive.
Given the Shady example, I think we have three options:
A. Take it as a clear case of lying and reject or revise the dictionary definition.
B. Hold fast to (D1) and maintain that Shady did not lie.
C. Maintain that there is no one univocal sense of 'lie' in English but rather a family of related senses at the center of which is the paradigmatic sense, a sense captured by (D1).
Here is a revision:
D2. To lie =df to make an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive.
An untruthful statement is one that is believed to be false by the maker of the statement and hence can be either true or false.
Here is a problem with (D2). Jones is under audit by the IRS. The high number of personal exemptions he claimed flagged him for audit. Jones, who has no children, say to an IRS agent, intending to deceive him, "All of my children live at home." Since Jones has no children, he does not believe it to be false or true that they live at home. And yet Jones is presumably lying to the IRS agent. (Example via Chisholm ia SEP article.)
But back to our metaphilosophical quandary. I suspect that each of (A)-(C) leads to trouble, but (C) leads to less trouble. Philosophers have proposed a number of definitions, see the SEP article on lying and deception, but no consensus has been reached. This does not prove that no consensus can be reached or that the quest for a definition must end in failure. But it is pretty good evidence for this conclusion.
As for the (B) approach, I could just insist that (D1) captures the essence of lying. But lacking as I do special access to Plato's topos ouranos, that insistence would smack of arbitrarity.
So what exactly is wrong with the (C) approach? Peter Lupu in conversation suggested that this leads to the abandoning of the ancient Platonic project of seeking the natures of justice, knowledge, virtue, and so on. But maybe not. If some concepts are family-resemblance concepts, it doesn't follow that all are. It could be that there are incorrect and correct (literal) uses of 'lies' and cognates, but that the correct uses are not unified by one univocal sense, but form a resemblance class. Thus there would be no strict One to their Many. But it would not follow that there are no strict ones-in-manys or ones-over-manys.
Consider this list:
lie
lie
lie.
How many words? One or three? Can't be both. Make a distinction. There are three tokens of the same type. The type is a one-in-many. We could also say that if each token is used in the (D1)-sense, there is exactly one sense common to all three uses.
Friday, November 08, 2013
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
Saturday, November 02, 2013
On Misusing the Word 'Lie'
Keith Burgess-Jackson rightly criticizes Rush Limbaugh for using
. . . the terms "calculated lie," "purposeful lie," "intentional lie," and "knowing lie" (while referring to Barack Obama's claim that Americans could, if they so chose, keep their insurance policy and their doctor). Calculation, purpose, intention, and knowledge are built into the concept of a lie, so qualifying the term "lie" in these ways is redundant and has the unfortunate effect of draining the word "lie" of its meaning. Limbaugh uses "lie" as though it meant "falsehood." It means far more than "falsehood." A lie is a very special falsehood.
Right. I will now take the ball and run with it.
Every lie is a false statement, but not every false statement is a lie. A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. Since intention to deceive is included within the concept lie, 'intentional lie' and its cousins are pleonastic. Someone who speaks of an intentional lie is treating the species as if it were a genus. 'Intentional lie' is like 'true fact.' Use of these pleonasms marks one as uneducated or worse.
There are two related mistakes one must avoid. The first is the redundancy mistake just mentioned. The other is the use of 'lie' to mean a false statement. The temptation to do so is strong indeed. Many of us are inclined to think our opponents not just wrong, but culpably wrong: you lied! Michael Medved speaks irresponsibly of ten big lies about America. But none of his ten falsehoods -- and I agree with him that they are all of them falsehoods -- is properly describable as a lie.
Here is one: "The two-party system is broken, and we urgently need a viable third party."
Like Medved, I consider that to be false. But is it a lie? Do the people who believe the quoted sentence know the truth but are out to deceive us? Of course not. I met a woman once who claimed that the moon was its own source of light. Was she lying? She uttered a falsehood, which is not the same as lying. Once I jokingly said to my wife that she was lying when she said that the room was cold. "You lie!" First of all, there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not the room is cold. Her cold is my hot. So what's to lie about? The only fact of the matter in the vicinity is wifey's feeling cold.
Jethro claims that the bottle is half-empty while Earl maintains that it is half-full. Is one of these yahoos lying? Here there is a fact of the matter but one describable in two equivalent ways.
If a person affirms (denies) the existence of God is the person lying? Here there is a fact of the matter but one hard to make out. It is rational to be a theist, but also rational to be an atheist. So perhaps my definition needs augmenting:
A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive about a definite matter of fact about which knowledge is possible.
To lie is to misrepresent willfully the way things are when the way things are is ascertainable with a fairly high degree of certainty. For example, the way things are with respect to the content of PPACA is easily ascertained: you just read the law. There is a matter of fact as to what is stated in the law and that fact is easily established.
Suppose you and I are discussing some very difficult question in mathematics or metaphysics or cosmology. I assert that p while you assert that not-p. It follows that one of us is wrong. But it does not follow that one of us is lying.
Suppose that A and B each have the intention to deceive the other. A asserts that p, while B asserts its negation. It is a very interesting question whether both are lying. One of them is lying, for at least one of them is saying something false with the intention to deceive. But are both lying? Is the intention to deceive sufficient for lying, or must the content asserted also be false?
Here is a further nuance that will bore some of you. The type-token distinction comes into play. "The two-party system is broken, and we urgently need a viable third party" is not a statement but a statement type. You don't get a statement until some definite person utters or otherwise tokens the type. (To token a type is to produce a token of the type.) But no statement-type can be a lie. For statement-types float free of language users, and to have a statement, an occurrent stating, a particular speaker must use the statement-type -- must token the type -- on a particular occasion. This is another reason to deny that Medved's ten big falsehoods are lies. Note that a falsehood is false whether or not anyone utters or otherwise tokens a sentence that expresses it. But a lie is not a lie whether or not anyone utters or otherwise tokens the sentence that expresses it.
It is also worth observing that the concept lie as I have defined it is not a normative concept. The definition merely tells us what a lie is. A lie is a statement made with the intention to deceive. But it is a further question whether deception is morally impermissible. And if it is, is it so in all cases or only in some?
Is a liar one who lies? No. One can lie without being a liar just as one can get drunk without being a drunkard. A liar is one who habitually lies. Does it suffice for a person to be a liar that he lie habitually about just one topic, or must he lie habitually about more than one topic? Interesting question.
Obama lied repeatedly when he said that under his collectivist scheme every one would get to keep his health plan if he so desired. May we infer that Obama is a liar? Or to judge him to be a liar must we also adduce his other (repeated) lies?
And then there is the epistemology of the situation. How do I know that Obama lied when he made his now-famous asseveration? I didn't peer into his soul. I know, or at least I have good reasons for believing that he lied, because he knows the subject-matter of his false statement and he had a very powerful motive for misrepresenting said subject-matter. Had he spoken the truth, it is a very good bet that the PPACA would not have passed and become law.
So plenty of evidence points in the direction of his being a damned liar.
Addendum 3 November
Dennis Monokroussos comments:
Apropos your post “On Misusing the Word ‘Lie’”, it would be better to say that a lie is (among other things) a statement its utterer believes to be false. Also, similarly, your augmented definition seems to require the same qualification; to wit, that it’s about something believed to be “a definite matter of fact about which knowledge is possible”.
My initial definition was this
1. A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. (That is to be understood as a biconditional: for any x, x is a lie iff x is a statement made with the intention to deceive.)
DM suggests
2. A lie is a statement believed by its utterer to be false that is made with the intention to deceive.
(2), however, allows for the possibility of a true lie. For suppose a statement is made with the intention to deceive but is falsely believed by the utterer to be false. In such a situation the utterer says something true with the intention to deceive. Has he lied?
Well, what are we trying to do here? If we are trying to capture the ordinary language meaning of 'lie' and cognates, then I am inclined to say that (2) fails. For in ordinary English, a lie is a falsehood, though not every falsehood is a lie. I am making an empirical claim about English as she is spoken by people like me and Monokroussos (educated white male Americans not too far apart in age). People like us do not use 'lie' in such a way that it is sufficient for x to be a lie that x be made with the intention to deceive.
Having made an empirical claim, I am open to empirical refutation by a linguist.
If, on the other hand, we are trying to elaborate a systematic theory of lying, bullshitting and related truth-sensitive phenomena, a project that involves replacing the ordinary language concept with a supposedly better one, then perhaps (2) is acceptable.
But now we are headed for the metaphilosophical stratosphere. What is the role of ordinary language analysis in philosophical theorizing? Ought philosophy be theoretical and explanatory at all? Should it perhaps content itself with description? What is analysis anyway? And what about the paradox of analysis? And so on and so forth.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Obama as Bullshitter
While listening the other day to Barack Obama shuck and jive about fiscal responsiblity, shamelessly posturing as if he and not his Republican opponents is the fiscally responsible one, when he is in truth the apotheosis or, if you prefer, the Platonic Form of fiscal irresponsibility, I realized just how uncommonly good our POMO Prez is at bullshitting. He is indeed a consummate bullshitter. But what is it to bullshit, exactly? When is a statement bullshit?
According to Harry Frankfurt, a statement is bullshit if it is
. . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (emphasis added)
Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit. The bullshitter is one who 'doesn't give a shit' about the truth value of what he is saying. He doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.
Now if the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He care about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows. Frankfurt again:
. . . bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis added)
Now what does this have to do with Obama? As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth. But truth and consistency are closely related notions. Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true. Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically. He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now. Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:
. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?
When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.
The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful. Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons. Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency -- these are ethical attributes, properties of persons. Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president. When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it. That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness. But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed. It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'. There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white. Everything's a 'narrative' -- good POMO word, that -- and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it. Hanson has Obama's number:
But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?
[. . .]
The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.
In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.
Monday, August 12, 2013
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Thursday, February 07, 2013
Truth and Truthfulness
The bathroom scale doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell the truth either. It is either accurate or inaccurate. Only a spiritual being can be either deceptive or truthful.
I cannot lie by simply saying something false. I must have the intention to deceive. That is perfectly clear. Rather less obvious is that to tell the truth it does not suffice to say something true: I must also have the intention to be truthful.
"He told the truth but he wasn't being truthful" is not a contradiction. This is no more a contradiction than "He said something false but he wasn't intending to deceive." But how could one tell the truth without being truthful? One way is by saying something that happens to be true while intending to deceive. Another way is by saying something true to distract the hearer from the salient issue. A third way is by saying something true but omitting other truths relevant to the contextualization and understanding of the first.
Suppose the following sentence is true: "Jane shot Sam several times in the chest with a .45 caliber pistol after he came at her with a knife threatening to rape her." Someone who assertively utters the first independent clause while omitting to utter the second has said something true without being truthful.
In sum, one can say what is false without being untruthful and one can say what is true without being truthful.
Persons, not propositions, are truthful or the opposite. Propositions, not persons, are true or the opposite.
And yet there is some connection between truth and truthfulness.
Here is a mere outline of an argument. In a world without mind there could be no truth. For truth is some sort of correspondence or adequation of mind and world. There are no free-floating truths, no Wahrheiten an sich. Truth is moored in mind. But truth is absolute: it transcends the contents and powers of finite minds. The true is not what you or I believe or what all of us believe. Nor is the true the believable. The true is not the rationally acceptable, not even the rationally at the ideal limit of inquiry. The true is not the warrantedly assertible. There no viable epistemic/doxastic analysis of the truth predicate. And yet truth involves mind. Enter divine mind. The truth is grounded in the divine truthfulness. In God, truth and truthfulness colaesce.
Well, I warned you that it was a mere outline. Brevity is the soul of blog.
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From a comment thread:
Here is an excerpt from a forthcoming article of mine to appear in a volume honoring the late David M. Armstrong, widely regarded as Australia's greatest philosopher:
II. The Truth-Maker Argument for Facts
The central and best among several arguments for facts is the Truth-Maker Argument. Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as 'Al is fat.' Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true. There must be something external to a true sentence that grounds its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person. 'Al is fat' is not just true; it is true because there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true, something 'in virtue of which' it is true. There is this short man, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs. There is nothing linguistic or mental about the man or his weight. Here is the sound core, at once both ancient and perennial, of correspondence theories of truth. Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured. The 'because' is not a causal 'because.' The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat. He is fat because he eats too much. The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.' Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true -- given that it is not true in virtue of its logical form or ex vi terminorum -- we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true. I don't see how this can be avoided even though I cheerfully admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear. That (some) truths refer us to the world as to that which makes them true is so obvious and commonsensical and indeed 'Australian' that one ought to hesitate to reject the idea because of the undeniable puzzles that it engenders. Motion is puzzling too but presumably not to be denied on the ground of its being puzzling.
Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker? If we need truth-makers it doesn't follow straightaway that we need facts. This is a further step in the argument. Truth-maker is an office. Who or what is a viable candidate? It can't be Al by himself, if Al is taken to be ontologically unstructured, an Armstrongian 'blob,' as opposed to a 'layer cake,' and it can't be fatness by itself.1 (Armstrong 1989a, 38, 58) If Al by himself were the truth-maker of 'Al is fat' then Al by himself would make true 'Al is not fat' and every sentence about Al whether true or false. If fatness by itself were the truth-maker, then fatness exemplified by some other person would be the truth-maker of 'Al is fat.' Nor can the truth-maker be the pair of the two. For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, by being exemplified by Sal, say, but Al does not instantiate fatness. What is needed, apparently, is a proposition-like entity, the fact of Al's being fat. We need something in the world to undergird the predicative tie. So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory. Veritas sequitur esse – the principle that truth follows being, that there are no truths about what lacks being or existence – is not enough. It is not enough that all truths are about existing items pace Meinong. It is not enough that 'Al' and 'fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. In many cases, though perhaps not in all, truth-makers cannot be 'things' – where a thing is either an individual or a property – or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort. Truth-making facts are therefore 'an addition to being,' not 'an ontological free lunch,' to employ a couple of signature Armstrongian phrases. For the early Armstrong at least, facts do not supervene upon their constituents. This yields the following scheme. There are particulars and there are universals. The Truth-Maker Argument, however, shows or at least supports the contention that there must also be facts: particulars-instantiating-universals.2 There are other arguments for facts, but they cannot be discussed here. And there are other candidates for the office of truth-maker such as tropes and Husserlian moments (Mulligan et al. 2009) but these other candidates cannot be discussed here either. Deeper than any particular argument for facts, or discussion of the nature of facts, lies the question whether realism about facts even makes sense. To this question we now turn.
______________
1If Al is a blob, then he lacks ontological structure; but that is not to say that he lacks spatial or temporal parts. It is obvious that he has spatial parts; it is not obvious that he has ontological 'parts.' Thin particulars, properties, and nexus count as ontological 'parts.' Layer cakes have both spatiotemporal and ontological structure.
2Are facts or states of affairs then a third category of entity in addition to particulars and universals? Armstrong fights shy of this admission: “I do not think that the recognition of states of affairs involves introducing a new entity. . . . it seems misleading to say that there are particulars, universals, and states of affairs.” (Armstrong 1978, 80) Here we begin to glimpse the internal instability of Armstrong's notion of a state of affairs. On the one hand, it is something in addition to its constituents: it does not reduce to them or supervene upon them. On the other hand, it is not a third category of entity. We shall see that this instability proves disastrous for Armstrong's ontology.