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I Wasnât Talking about That
1.1 EXCUSES
Carl Hempel, in whose honor these lectures are given, once wrote of some other lectures, given by Rudolf Carnap at Harvard in the 1930s. Carnap is supposed to have introduced his topic as follows:
Let A be some physical body, such as a stone, or a tree, orâto borrow an example from Russellâa dog.1
I wish I could explain my topic the way Carnap explained his, with an example devised by Russell. But I am going to be talking about subject matter, meaning, truth, reasons for truth, contents, parts of contents, extricability of one content from anotherâas in Wittgensteinâs famous example of subtracting My arm went up from I raised my armâand philosophical applications of the above. These sorts of notions do not especially lend themselves to introduction by example, or to the extent they do, the examples wonât mean much except surrounded by so much commentary as to defeat the purpose.2
I will try to set the mood with some stories. They are, to begin with anyway, on the theme of semantic excusesâexcuses that might be given for saying things that are or may be untrue.
âYou never take me out for ice cream any more,â Zina complained recently. I observed that we had been out for ice cream the day before, on her birthday. âI know,â she said, âI wasnât talking about that.â This struck me at the time as not a very convincing reply.3 If you advance a generalization, and there are counterexamples, it seems a lame defense to say that you werenât talking about them. Later, though, I realized matters were not so simple. For I was reminded of another story in which a basically similar excuse did not seem so lame.
The second story concerns a metaphysician named Sally. Her dissertation was on the same sort of topic as Carnapâs lectures: physical objects and their identity over time. This presented a problem when it came to applying for jobs, for one invariably speaks in this area about persistence through gain or loss of properties. And Sally didnât want to take a position on the metaphysics of properties, or even on whether such things existed. She would explain at her interviews that when she spoke, for instance, of a tomato âlosing the property of being green and gaining the property of being red,â this was not meant to express any sort of ontological commitment to redness as an entity in its own right. The issue was really to do with the tomato and its changing color. One of the interviewers took issue with this approach. Properties are not real, he said. To speak of âthemâ as gained or lost is just false; it is advisable at a job interview to stick to the truth.
I will leave the rest of the story to a footnote,4 because the aspect that matters to us is this: Sally made a statement implying the existence of properties, a statement that she knew to be false if properties didnât exist. But she was absolutely unbothered by the possibility that properties didnât exist. Her excuse for this insouciance was that her topic was material objects and how they persist through changeânot the properties, if such there be, of those objects.
But, how is it an excuse for asserting falsehoods (or potential false-hoods) to explain that one was talking about such and such? How is misrepresenting the facts in the course of addressing a certain topic any better than misrepresenting them with topic unspecified?
An answer is suggested by my third story. The third story is due to Nelson Goodman and Joseph Ullian, in a paper called âTruth about Jonesâ (Ullian and Goodman 1977). Jones is on trial for murder and Falstaff is chief witness for the defense. Jonesâs attorney concedes there is a problem with Falstaffâs testimony: It is false. That would seem to make the testimony worthless, but the attorney (Lupoli, heâs called) thinks he sees a way out. The testimony was indeed about his client Jonesâno getting around that. And it was falseâno getting around that, either. But, Lupoli insists, the testimony was not false about Jones. The judge calls this nonsense and declares a recess, threatening Lupoli with contempt unless he can explain how the very same sentences can be (i) false, and (ii) about Jones, yet not (iii) false about Jones.
I hope you see a connection with the earlier stories. Just as Zina and Sally were not concerned if their statements were strictly speaking false, Lupoli does not care if Falstaffâs testimony was false. It is enough for Lupoli if the testimony was partly trueâtrue in what it said about Jones. Maybe that should be Zinaâs excuse, too. âYou never take me to Friendlyâsâ may not have been true overall, but it was true about what usually happens, birthdays aside. And maybe it should be Sallyâs excuse; it is enough for her if âThe tomato lost one property and gained anotherâ was true in what it said about the tomato. Maybe it is enough, in some contexts, if a statement is partly trueâtrue in what it says about the subject matter under discussion.
1.2 PURITANISM
This idea of being partly true is apt to arouse suspicion. It is hard not to share the judgeâs frustration when he threatens Lupoli with contempt. The phrase âpartly trueâ is perfectly good English, of course. Apparently it was decent Greek too; the creation myth in the Phaedrus is described by Socrates as âpartly true and tolerably credible.â When Cratylus tells Socrates it would be ânonsensicalâ to address him using somebody elseâs name, Socrates responds, âWell, but [it] will be quite enough for me, if you will tell me whether the nonsense would be true or false, or partly true and partly false:âwhich is all that I want to know.â That is actually not a bad statement of one theme of these lectures: sometimes whether a statement is partly true is all that we want to know.
Why, then, do I say that it doesnât come naturally to us to settle for partial truth? Consider a fourth story, this one due to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. (She didnât consider it just a story, of course.) Newborns, in Kleinâs view, face an enormous cognitive challengeâthey have to put the things that gratify them together with the things that frustrate them into a single world. They must take it on board, as Klein put it, that the good breast, which turns up when theyâre hungry, and the bad breast, which is withheld, are the very same breast. This hurdle is usually cleared at around four months, she thinks, at which point the infant moves from the paranoid-schizoid position to the apparently far preferable depressive position.
That, anyway, is the normal case. Occasionally, the integration challenge proves too great, and the individual never really wraps their mind around the fact that a thing can have good and bad in it. The result is the cognitive style known as âblack/white thinkingâ or âpolarized thinking.â A black/white thinker is the type of person who loves you or hates you, according to how recently youâve disappointed them. Theyâre the type of person, more generally, who insists on dividing the world up into good, full stop, and bad, full stop.
This kind of attitude is familiar with kids, of course, and forgivable there. I recall my son Isaac squirming around in his seat at the movie Shrek, unable to settle down until he knew whether Donkey (the Eddie Murphy character) was a good donkey or a bad donkey.
But imagine youâre watching the news with full-grown neighbors, and all they want to talk about is: Is this Hugo ChĂĄvez fellow a good man or a bad man? When you try to suggest itâs more complicated than that, they reject this as spineless evasion. Answer the question, they say. That is black/white thinking, and it surely deserves its reputation as pathological.
Our assessment changes, though, when the focus shifts from goodness to truth. Demanding to know whether a statement is true, full stop, or false, full stop, is considered forthright and healthy minded, not pathological in the least. It is almost as if, having lost our Kleinian paranoia about goodness, there was no energy left to outgrow the analogous attitude about truth. A second theme of these lectures is that this is nevertheless worth doing, or insofar as weâve already done it, owning up to doing. Let us put the paranoid-schizoid position on truth behind us, and go boldly forth to the depressive position. (I admit itâs not the best rallying cry.)
1.3 PARTIAL TRUTH AS TRUTH OF A PART
There are two questions at this point: What is partial truth? And why would we be willing settle for it? The second question I want to leave until later. The quick answer is that there are areas where if it wasnât for partial truth, we wouldnât, or might not, have any truth at all.5
But that, as I say, I want to leave aside the time being, to focus on the other question. What is it for a hypothesis to be partly true?6 Here is the naivest possible idea about this:
1 A hypothesis is partly true iff it has parts that are wholly true.
Now we must ask what is meant by part of a hypothesis. The naivest possible idea about part/whole as a relation on hypotheses is
2 One hypothesis is part of another iff it is implied by the other.7
A includes B, in other words, just if it implies B.
The naivest possible idea about partial truth is on the right track, I think; something is partly true to the extent it has (nontrivial) parts that are wholly true.8 But the naivest possible idea about what it takes for A to include B is questionable.
A paradigm of inclusion, I take it, is the relation that simple conjunctions bear to their conjunctsâthe relation Snow is white and expensive bears, for example, to Snow is white. A paradigm of noninclusion is the relation disjuncts bear to disjunctions; Snow is white does not have Snow is white or expensive as a part. This is not predicted by (2). Disjuncts imply their disjunctions every bit as much as conjunctions imply their conjuncts. There is more to inclusion than implication, apparently.
You might say that paradigm case intuitions are a poor basis for theory. But the intuitions here are systematic. A number of things suggest that parthood has an explanatory role to play that requires it to be more than mere implication.
Saying: Someone who says that snow is white and expensive has said, among other things, that snow is white. This is not all theyâve said, but they have said it. To describe snow as white, however, is not to say inter alia that it is white or expensive. Why, when there is implication in both cases? Saying-that transmits down to the parts of what is said more easily than to âmere consequences,â meaning by this consequences that are not also parts.9
Agreement: If I describe snow as w...