The Possibility of Relative Truth

An Examination of the Possibility of Truth Relativism Within Coherence and Correspondence Host Theories of Truth

Peter Davson-Galle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429810770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1998, this book is an investigation of the possibility of articulating a coherent thesis of truth relativism within first, a host correspondence theory of truth and second, a host coherence theory of truth. The type of relativism addressed in the book is what is sometimes called 'framework relativism' - that where truth is relativised to a framework of belief or conceptual scheme. A further restraint is that a global relativistic thesis is sought - one which is relativistic about all truths. The book does not set itself the task of defending relativism but just that of seeking a coherent articulation of it.

Part One

CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH RELATIVISM

1

The correspondence theory and relativism

Correspondence truth

George Pitcher (1964, p. 2) poses the question:

If a person thinks or asserts something true, what is there about what he thinks or says that makes it true? What, in short, is truth?

He immediately (p. 2) continues:

These questions can seem unspeakably deep; they can also seem unspeakably trivial. That is one good sign that they are philosophical. Another is that they are puzzling. On the surface, they are not puzzling, but the deeper one goes, the more puzzling they become.

Pitcher (p. 4) introduces the correspondence theory of truth by noting:

The move which comes to mind at once, of course, is to construe it as designating a relation between what people assert or think, on the one hand, and something else — a fact, situation, state of affairs, event, or whatever — on the other; and the relation which seems called for is that of agreeing with, fitting, answering to — or, to use the traditional expression, corresponding to.

He continues (p. 4):

There can be no denying the attractiveness of this view; it seems to be just right. It struck the first of the great philosophers to consider the problem of truth — viz., Plato and Aristotle — as so obviously the correct one that the question of possible alternatives to it never occurred to them.

Indeed, Aristotle’s famous statement that ‘to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true’,¹ conveys just the sort of obviousness that leads Pitcher (p. 4) to observe:

If there were such a thing as the common sense view of truth, it would be the Correspondence Theory ... [that is] ... at the outset... [ it] ... appear[s] to be straight-forwardly and undeniably correct.

Similarly, Alan White, in commenting on the Correspondence Theory, speaks of it as not just popular but indisputable (1970, p. 102) and attributes this to ‘its insistence that there be something other than what is said which makes what is said true’ (p. 103).

When attempting philosophical explication of this starting intuition, its initial plausibility can seem to vanish into thin air. Brian Carr (1988, p.80) asserts:

Different versions of the Correspondence Theory clearly offer different answers to the problem of spelling out the intuitive thesis that factual truth is a matter of saying how things in fact are. Most importantly they differ in their interpretations of the relationship of correspondence; of the bearer of truth and falsity (that which is said to be truth or false), and in their understanding of what, in the world, makes the bearer true or false.

In partial taxonomic expansion upon this, let me focus on truth bearers, or truth vehicles. The range of candidates is wide. Sentences (unspecified), sentence tokens, sentence types, Quinean eternal sentences, statements, the content of statements, assertions, utterances, judgements, beliefs, theories, remarks, ideas and speech acts have all been put forward as candidates. As Richard Kirkham (1992, p. 54) remarks:

Even if all philosophers reached sufficient agreement to identify by name the one right bearer of truth, our problems would hardly be at an end, for there is also disagreement about the nature of the things named by each of these terms.²

Following tradition, I employ ‘proposition’ as a convenient label for the bearers of truth. Though, in agreement with Kirkham, C. J. F. Williams notes “it is easier to be persuaded that it is indeed propositions which are properly called ‘true’ or ‘false’ than to have a clear idea of what a proposition is” (1976, p. 32). For the most part it will not matter precisely what truth bearers, or truth vehicles, are. Where greater specificity is demanded, I will clarify matters.

Similarly, the “truth maker” has been variously conceived and, although broadly it is the world, or objective reality, which is intended, what this comes down to has proved troublesome. Thus one has facts, situations, states of affairs, or events as possibilities favoured by some theorist or other. Given the standard difficulties posed by hypothetical, modal, negative³ and disjunctive propositions, I follow many others (e.g. Pitcher, 1964, White, 1970 & Carr, 1988) in speaking of facts, or “facts that” as truth-makers.

It might seem from this that a corollary of a correspondence theory of truth would be ontological realism. Or, more carefully, that a realist construal of the truth maker was part⁴ of a correspondence theory. ‘Realism’, even ‘ontological realism’, is not without ambiguity.⁵ In particular, it is not absolutely clear cut just how mind independent the facts must be for a conception of reality to be realist.⁶ And, in any event, it is not clear that a theory ceases to be a correspondence theory if its accompanying ontological conception of what facts are allows them to be mind dependent. As Kirkham remarks, it is perfectly possible to hold that truth consists in correspondence with facts and to hold also that facts are mind dependent entities (1992, p. 134). Indeed, as I note in Part Two, having states of mind, experience, or whatnot, as truth makers is strongly akin to having external objective reality’s facts as truth makers: in each case, one can speak of a relation of correspondence between truth vehicle and truth maker. I follow Kirkham concerning the inclusive tolerance of ‘correspondence theory’; and him and Nola concerning the variety of views plausibly labelled realist.

This is, admittedly, an inclusively tolerant view but it has a key feature for my purposes. Even if in some manner the creation of minds, facts would still be distinct in type from the truth vehicles, the propositions. (And this would remain so if we had something like beliefs as truth vehicles.) This is a key feature in distinguishing the theories of this section from the coherence theories of the next. It will emerge that stretching the correspondence theory conception to include mind created realities as truth makers is of less assistance in formulating truth relativism than at first seems the case.

So far then, we have propositions as truth vehicles and facts as truth makers and truth is to be a correspondence relation between the two. What is this relation though? Kirkham is of the view that it is unfortunate that so much attention has focused upon the correspondence relation and judges talk of propositions corresponding with the facts as just ‘a handy summing up of a theory in which no special relation makes any appearance’ (1992, p. 135). He quotes (p. 135) D. W. Hamlyn (1962, pp. 201-204): “nothing turns on the use of the word ‘corresponds’ here. All that is meant is that wherever there is a true statement, there is a fact stated by it and wherever a fact a possible true statement which states it”.

As Kirkham (p. 136) goes on to say, just how one specifies the relation would depend upon what one took the truth bearer to be. If it is a statement, the relation could be ‘says that’; if it is a belief, it could be ‘is the belief that’, and so on. And just what those relations are is, as Kirkham observes, no special problem for a correspondence theory of truth; they are also problems within philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and so forth. In short, it is no catastrophic objection to a correspondence theory if it cannot manage to clarify everything at once. As Kirkham observes “some progress is made by reducing truth to ‘saying’ ... [though] ... philosophy will eventually want an analysis of ‘says that’...” (p. 136).

However, many correspondence theorists have attempted to clarify the relation between truth vehicle and truth maker. Two broad analytical variations dominate the literature. In White’s words (p. 105), one can think of a proposition corresponding to a fact or corresponding with a fact. Pitcher (p. 10) uses ‘correspondence-as-correlation’ for correspondence to and explains it as ‘a “weak” relation, a mere pairing of members of two or more groups in accordance with some principle’ (p. 11). Contrasted with this, correspondence with is correspondence-as-congruity (p. 10) which is explained as ‘a “richer” relation of harmony or arrangement between two or more things.’ (p. 11). Bertrand Russell (1912) and the early Wittgenstein (1918), are notable modem instances of the “congruence” variation; and J. L. Austin (1950) of the “correlation” view.⁷

Of these two variations, White remarks that, although much of the discussion of the correspondence theory ignores such niceties, ‘most have undoubtedly thought of what is truly said as correspondence with a fact’ (p. 106). Pitcher (p. 11) echos this:

...there can be little doubt that the main impetus of traditional correspondence theories has been ... to think of a proposition and the fact it states as two separate complexes which exactly fit each other... . The congruity that exists between a proposition and the reality it describes is thus considered to be of the same intimate kind as that which exists between a perfect representation of something and that of which it is the representation.

In the face of various difficulties confronting even well worked out versions of correspondence-as-congruity, like that of the early Wittgenstein, White (p. 108) and Pitcher (p. 14) favour the abandonment of the idea of part by part structural matching of proposition and fact. They favour the weaker relationship of correlation of what is said, that p, with the fact that p.

Clearly then, a satisfactory correspondence account of truth may end up rather different from its initial conception in which, as Pitcher (p. 11) puts it:

In the proposition ‘the cat is on the mat’, ‘the cat’, designates the cat, ‘on’ designates the relation of being on, and ‘the mat’ designates the mat. The proposition asserts that the first (the cat) and third (the mat) in that order are related by the second (the relation of being on). The fact that the cat is on the mat consists of the cat and the mat, related so that the former is on the latter. The agreement is perfect.

It might even be, as C. J. F. Williams suggests (1976), that correspondence truth is not to be straightforwardly conceived of as a relation at all. Rather, it might be best analysed by use of an existential quantifier binding two conjoined variables (Ch. 5, Sect. 3). But, even if so, Williams allows that ‘philosophers may be forgiven for diagnosing a concept as relational when all that was really in evidence was the less specific phenomenon, a function of two arguments (p. 91). Further, although Williams’ analytical ‘apparatus does not include anything explicitly relational ... the analogies which exist between the (analysans) sentences we are enabled by its means to construct and sentences which can properly be called relational are sufficient to make talk of a relation of correspondence understandable and natural’ (p. 96).

Pursuing the detail about how the relation (or “relation”) of correspondence is most satisfactorily analysed is beside present concerns. (I will talk of the relation of correspondence merely as a convenient turn of phrase). The task of Part One is to investigate the possibility of formulating a coherent thesis of truth relativism within the broad constraints of a correspondence theory. Such a host theory of truth will be assumed for the sake of argument as common ground between for truth relativism and its rival, truth absolutism, with each be being conceived of within this shared host theoretical framework. The point of this introduction to that host theory is to simply note that there is no canonical and precise characterisation of the correspondence theory of truth. The core notion is that of truth vehicles and truth makers such that a true proposition is fact stating and that will do for now.

What is important for this book’s purposes is that this shared ground between absolutist and relativist is one which accords truth making power to a different category of things than the truth vehicles.⁸ The facts are being construed as the source of a proposition’s truth. Absolutist theories and relativist theories will be distinguished by their detailed accounts of what correspondence truth amounts to. But, given this truth making power of the world in any correspondence account of truth, the challenge is whether any version of truth relativism can be consistent with this? Perhaps ‘correspondence truth relativism’ is oxymoronic?

Relative truth and reality

The version of truth relativism with which I am concerned is so-called framework or conceptual scheme relativism. If truth is seen as a truth vehicle’s correspondence to (or with) a truth maker (that is, a proposition successfully “capturing” some aspect of reality, or fact, or whatnot), then how can a framework (or conceptual scheme) intrude upon this relationship? If there is a way things are, a determinate reality⁹ “out there” then how can a framework¹⁰ mediate the relationship of proposition to reality to generate a viable truth relativism?

The situation looks particularly difficult if we focus upon one of a pair of versions of relativism distinguished by Chris Swoyer. He contrasts ‘stron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Correspondence Truth Relativism
• Part Two Coherence Truth Relativism
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index