Richard Rorty: “We don’t need to define the word ‘truth’.”

“What is truth?” Now take Rorty’s deflation: “The word ‘truth’ is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”

“What is truth?”

In response to that question, let me quote the American-English philosopher Gordon Park Baker (1938–2002). In his ‘φιλοσοφια: εικων και ειδος’ (which can be found in Philosophy in Britain Today), Baker wrote:

“We should [] make serious efforts at raising questions about the questions commonly viewed as being genuinely philosophical. Perhaps the proper answers to such questions are often, even if not always, further questions!”

To add something to Baker’s words.

All sorts of (possibly bogus) questions have been deemed to be profound, deep and worthy of very serious thought. However, perhaps it’s just as important — and indeed just as philosophical — to ask questions about these questions. Or as Gordon Baker again put it:

“The unexamined question is not worth answering.”

And Baker added:

“To accept a question as making good sense and embark on building a philosophical theory to answer it is already to make the decisive step in the whole investigation.”

So instead of asking “What is truth?”, perhaps we should really ask this question:

With the ancient question “What is truth?”, is the property (or thing) that is truth simply assumed in the very asking of that question?

What’s more, vast tracts have been written on truth, the “nature of truth” and the word “truth”. Yet the American philosopher Richard Rorty (who died in 2007) appeared to dispatch this endless debate by simply saying that (among other things) the word ‘“true” doesn’t “need[] a definition”.

To conclude this short introduction.

As with literally all philosophical positions and theories, there are, of course, many arguments against Rorty’s general stance on truth (or on the word “true”). Yet it should be noted that this essay is simply an attempt to put his position in both a convincing, critical and fair manner.

William James Defines “True”

The main objective which many 20th century philosophers set themselves was (simply?) to define the word “true”. Yet let’s go back in time here and start with the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910).

Richard Rorty puts James’s position in the following way:

“If we have the notion of ‘justified’, [then] we don’t need that of ‘truth’.”

Rorty went on to claim that James believed that the word

“‘[t]rue’ must means something like ‘justifiable’”.

So was William James setting up a literal identity between truth and justification? Alternatively, was James arguing that the word “true” means (or is synonymous with) “[that which is] justified”? Perhaps both?

Let’s now spell James’s possible position out:

A true statement is a statement which has been justified (or whose utterance is justifiable).

As can be seen, the statement above is about (other) statements.

So what about the the thing (or the property) truth?

Well, we can bite the bullet and argue that truth is indeed a property; but only a property of certain statements. Yet even this isn’t really the case because the predicate “is true” or the word “true” is (as it were) attached or applied to certain statements — it’s not an actual property of those statements. (This is vaguely equivalent to putting a dress on a mannequin: the mannequin and the particular dress don’t belong together.) Thus outside the context of statements we deem to be true (or which have been justified), there is no property that is truth.

Despite all the above, Rorty believes that James was in “error” when he continued:

“The error is to assume that ‘true’ needs a definition [].”

In other words, Rorty wasn’t taking truth to be a thing or even a property. Instead, “truth” (or “true”) is a word which human beings use about certain statements. So beyond what human beings say about these statements, there is no thing (or property) which is truth.

More precisely, when we say that statement S “is true”, this is simply an affirmation of statement S. That said, we may still believe (to get back to James’s position) that statement S is justified (or justifiable) and therefore we’ll go straight ahead and affirm it..

Yet we needn’t necessarily be committed to James’s stress on justification, let alone be committed to believing that the word “true” can be substituted with the word “justified”.

Rorty then went on to claim that idealists too made a similar (or the same) error about the word “truth” (or the thing/property truth). He wrote:

“This was a form of the idealist error of inferring from

      ‘We can make no sense of the notion of truth as correspondence’

to

     ‘Truth must consist in ideal coherence.’ [].”

Of course, if there’s no thing (or property) truth in the first place, then truth can’t be “ideal coherence” either. And the notion of “truth as correspondence” (which idealists had a problem with) fails too — for exactly the same reason.

So there are two things which should be distinguished here:

(1) It is certain statements (i.e., not facts, properties, things, etc.) that are true. (Truth isn’t a thing or a property separate from certain statements.)
(2) By which criterion (or criteria) do we decide that statements are true — even if we accept that truth is not a thing or a property?

The Deflation of Truth

Despite all the above, Rorty’s point is completely deflationary as regards both truth and philosophy as a whole. He didn’t want a new analysis or definition of the word “truth” (or “true”). And he didn’t want a metaphysical account of truth. Rorty believed all these demands and pursuits had become a waste of time — after all, he was a pragmatist.

Despite that, Rorty did still have a philosophical position. And that position was a fairly old one (if re-expressed by Rorty). Thus:

“Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”

Of course Rorty’s position still isn’t really about the property (or thing) that is truth.

So is it simply about the word “truth” (or “true”)?

Yes. It’s (in a strong sense) a sociological and philosophical analysis of how we actually use that word in everyday — and perhaps also esoteric (even technical) — circumstances.

This means that all we need to do is simply account for how people (or communities) use the word “true” (or “truth”) to refer to certain statements in certain circumstances.

Yet can’t we still ask questions about both truth itself?

And can’t we also ask why people (or communities) use the word “true” in such circumstances?

Of course we can.

Thus:

Why does person P (or community C) say that statement S is “true”?

Rorty might well have replied:

That question can easily be answered without assuming that the word “true” (or “truth”) refers to a metaphysical or sematic thing (or property). That is, statement S is deemed to be true by person P (or community C) in this particular circumstance for this or that reason.

In that case, then, the word “true” (or “truth”) isn’t actually being defined at all. Instead, why person P (or community C) is using the word “true” (about statement S) is being explained. So this is a sociological, philosophical and — perhaps partly — psychological explanation as to why person P (or community C) uses the word “true” about statement S.

In other words, the word “true” isn’t being defined at all.

In addition, the existence of a metaphysical or semantic thing (or property) that is truth certainly isn’t being either assumed or accepted by Rorty.

Of course Rorty’s stance on truth (or on the word “truth”) fits very well with the deflationary theory of truth. And in that broad set of theories of truth, it also squares fairly well with the redundancy theory of truth, the performative theory of truth, the consensus theory of truth, the pragmatic theory of truth and with normative theories of truth… But a word of warning here. Before the reader gets too nauseous with all these different theories of truth, it must be noted that not all them are rivals and they don’t all contradict each other. For example, the deflationary theory of truth can sit happily side-by-side with the redundancy theory of truth. And, of course, the consensus theory of truth shares a lot with the pragmatic theory of truth. Indeed it may even be possible to endorse all these theories of truth at one and the same time!

Conclusion

Richard Rorty

So, in all these philosophical definitions of the word “true” (or “truth”), it was always assumed — from the very start — that there is a thing (or a property) that is truth. These philosophers believed that we must get to know what truth is. Alternatively, we must offer a conclusive, definitive and final definition of the word under dispute.

Yet it’s very odd (at least on a Rortian reading) that despite the multitudinous — and often mutually contradictory — definitions of “truth” (or “true) and metaphysical accounts of truth itself, all these philosophers have always simply assumed that truth must have always been there — waiting to be discovered and properly accounted for?

As Gordon Park Barker said at the beginning of this piece: perhaps this philosophical fixation was largely down to the simple fact that the question “What is truth?” has always been a main part of the philosophical diet.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

19th-Century Logic: Augustus De Morgan on Scientific Hypotheses

 Hypotheses as acts of the imagination.

Augustus De Morgan (1806 — 1871) was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated the well-known De Morgan’s laws and introduced the term “mathematical induction”.

De Morgan was influenced Sir William Rowan Hamilton and George Boole. His important work, Formal Logic (1847), developed — among other things — a mathematically precise syllogism.

More relevantly to this piece, De Morgan made contributions (even if neglected later) to the history of science and to explaining the nature of hypotheses.

Scientific Hypotheses and Induction

Augustus De Morgan inverted the first three terms in this image.

The word “hypothesis” comes from the ancient Greek word ὑπόθεσις, which literally (or etymologically) means “putting [or placing] under” [i.e., for later evaluation]. In this Greek sense, the word “hypothesis” is closely related to the word “supposition”. In everyday terms, a hypothesis is a provisional idea which will need to be evaluated, tested and/or scrutinised at some later point.

As for Augustus De Morgan.

De Morgan believed that hypothesis formation (see also hypothesis) is a creative act. Primarily, it relies on the scientist’s imagination just as much as it relies on logic, facts, observations or data.

(De Morgan even held this view — at least partly — about mathematical reasoning. As quoted in Robert Perceval Graves’ book, The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1889), De Morgan said: “The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but imagination.”)

The traditional (or common) view is that a hypothesis is the end result of some kind of inferential and observational process. A process according to which we arrive at a hypothesis which can then work as a basis for further inferences, reasonings or a full-blown scientific theory. (Basically, a scientific theory is very unlike a hypothesis.)

De Morgan, on the other hand, argued (if in circumlocutory 19th-century prose) that hypotheses come before observations, not after. He wrote:

“The question now is, not whether this or that hypothesis is better or worse to the pure thought, but whether it accords with observed phenomena in those consequences which can be shown necessarily to follow from it, if it be true.”

De Morgan is more explicit in his following words:

“Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful results than unguided observations.”

Despite the words above, it’s not clear if there can be “unguided observations” in the first place. That’s primarily because genuinely and completely unguided observations wouldn’t really (or actually) be… well, observations. That is, the observer would have literally nothing to go on in order to make his observations. An observational (as it were) blank slate (or tabula rasa) would simply be a stream-of-unrelated-experiences without either definite form or definite content.

To repeat: De Morgan believed that the hypothesis comes at the beginning of all observations and reasonings. (This chicken-and-egg scenario will be tackled in a moment.) This roughly means that his position isn’t the standard (or traditional) account of a hypothesis, as the following definition shows:

“A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon.”

The definition continues:

“Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories.”

The problem here is one of distinguishing which came first: the chicken or the egg. That’s because even if a hypothesis (as it were) bounces off “a phenomenon” or off “previous observations” (as in the definition above), then that phenomenon might itself have been singled out because of a previous hypothesis (or, more likely, previous hypotheses). And so on and so on.

In any case, if a hypothesis were a logical result of previous reasonings and previous observations, then according to deductive logic itself, that hypothesis would be at least partly “contained” in the sources of those logical reasonings and observations (i.e., even if the scientist — or whoever — didn’t know this or recognise it to be the case). This means that whatever is derived from such a set of empirical premises and observations must somehow have been there from the very beginning. In this, then, such a logic would be no different to mathematics.

Deductive logic (as already hinted at) has traditionally been seen as more or less the unpacking of what’s already contained in the premises, logical truths, principles, axioms, or laws that one begins one’s logical reasonings with. Or in Platonic terms: the whole of mathematics and deductive logic is already there waiting to be discovered. Thus as many mathematicians have said: if, in any given mathematical system, there is information contained in the derived theorems which isn’t implicitly (or explicitly) contained in the axioms, then the mathematician must have gone wrong somewhere.

A hypothesis, on the other hand, doesn’t articulate what’s already there. It often tells us that if thus and thus is the case, then such-and-such (i.e., the hypothesis) may explain it.

Again, if a hypothesis were just a logical result, then, in a strong sense, science would never have moved forward to new and interesting discoveries.

On the other hand, if the process which resulted in a hypothesis were an inductive inferential process, then the hypothesis would still not be strictly logical in nature. It would be a probable hypothesis (see inductive probability). That is, if induction — at least partly — deals with probabilities, then inductive logic isn’t what has been called a “true logic”. Traditionally, true logic was deemed to deal with truth, certainties and necessities, not with probabilities. And inductive inference may well use necessary and certain truths as its premises, and even the inferences found in deductive logic, but it doesn’t thereby become a deductive logic. That’s primarily because its main task is still to generalise from given phenomena and assert certain probabilities about such phenomena. Thus induction is more a case of if…then…, than it’s a case of this is derivable from that.

Finally, if a hypothesis were certain, necessary or even highly probable, then, by De Morgan’s lights, it wouldn’t thereby be a hypothesis.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Thomas Nagel on Bad Language and Good Reason (Part Five)

 Thomas Nagel’s “view from outside language”.

Skip the following square-bracketed introduction if you’ve already read my ‘Thomas Nagel as Philosopher-Priest and New Mysterian (Part One)’, ‘Thomas Nagel on Darwinian Imperialism, Naturalism and Mind (Part Two)’, ‘Thomas Nagel on Good and Bad Philosophy (Part Three)’ and ‘Thomas Nagel on Wittgenstein and Other Deflationary Philosophers (Part Four)’.

[This essay was written quite some time ago. The style is somewhat rhetorical, literary and (as it were) psychologistic. That said, I still agree with much of its philosophical content. Indeed many analytic philosophers would probably regard this essay as one long ad hominem against the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-). Sure; there is an element of the ad hominem in the following. Yet hopefully it will be shown that there’s more to the essay than that. In fact I chose to write in a rhetorical style partly in response to the clear and prevalent rhetoric and “psychologising” I found in Thomas Nagel’s own book, The Last Word.]

Bad Language and Naturalism

According to Thomas Nagel, if we stress the importance of language (which is contingent), we’re in effect stressing the contingencies of psychology, morality and philosophy too. And it’s that stress which “leads to relativism”. What we should want, instead, are things that are objective, absolute, eternal, necessary and certain. What Nagel is after, therefore, is (in a strong sense) something distinctly non-human — or at least non-social. More prosaically, he wants something that’s non-naturalistic. For Nagel, this includes his “mind-independent concepts”. (Just as for Husserl it was the “essences” which remained after the nonformal had been bracketed. For Brentano it was mentality (i.e., intentionality) itself. For Tractarian Wittgenstein it was his “logical objects”. For Kant it was his a priori concepts and categories. For Plato it was his Forms. Etc.)

Again, according to Nagel, language is a mere contingent phenomenon. What we require is the (to use his own words) “logic of thought” instead. That is,

“[] the system of concepts that makes thought possible and to which any language [] must conform”.

Clearly, this also squares fairly well with Gottlob Frege’s notion of what he called a “common stock of thoughts” .

Platonism and Language

Nagel makes the mistake (if tacit) of jumping from the idea that

1) no particular language is necessary for reasoning and the expression of concepts.

to the conclusion that

2) no language at all is necessary for reasoning and the expression of concepts.

This is analogous to the belief that if the same proposition can be expressed in different natural language or sentential formulations, then it must be independent of all such formulations.

At an obvious level, how would reasoning and the use of concepts be expressed without some form of (admittedly) contingent language? (Would it be like rotating a mental image within the mind?) So perhaps Nagel is talking about logical reasoning. However, even if logical reasoning isn’t itself linguistic, then it’s often (or always) embedded within a linguistic context and the result of linguistic reasonings. Even modus ponens will be so embedded in language. And even if we take the variables or letter names as self-referential, we would still be doing so from some linguistic position.

So perhaps Nagel’s point is that not all reasoning is linguistic reasoning. Yet even if modus ponens has some kind of (non-spatiotemporal) Fregean or platonic existence, then acts of reasoning would still need to apply modus ponens occur within various linguistic contexts.

This isn’t a commitment to any kind of (as it’s called) psychologism about logical reasoning. It’s psychologistic about only the reasoning itself.

For example, modus ponens may well have existence before minds. However, that wouldn’t help Nagel’s Platonic position. In any case, even if the letter names and variables are taken as non-referring, we still have the languages of logic. We can say that the logical schemes or forms (or their individual parts) refer to abstract objects. So these (possible) abstract objects may indeed be mind-independent even though the languages or minds which grasp them most certainly aren’t.

Nagel also seems to be taking the (non-naturalistic) position on concepts in which universals are concepts or concepts are universals. The picture he paints of concepts seems to suggest that they’re non-spatiotemporal universals or Forms. More than that: Nagel is a conceptual realist. That is, Nagel’s concepts are mind-independent; though common to many (or literally all) minds. It’s hard to be clear, however, about all this because Nagel rarely goes into the minutiae when it comes to his positions on concepts and the rest.

And it’s not just “concepts” (or Fregean Thoughts) that are non-natural; reason is too.

Nagel on Reason

Nagel was explicit about his anti-naturalistic position when he also wrote:

“We cannot account for reason by means of a naturalistic description of the practices of language [] reasoning [does not] admit of naturalistic or psychological or sociological analysis.”

In other words, Nagel seems to believe that reason is indeed ahistorical. It’s the matrix within which every rational human being must work, whether it’s the mother who’s cleaning toilets at New York University or someone who’s been a professor for forty years. So if the cleaner or Continental philosopher or anti-realist is fundamentally at odds with the The Philosopher — Nagel, it’s because he’s misused his ahistorical matrix — his reason. (In this sense, Nagel is a thoroughbred Kantian despite his realist criticisms of Kant’s transcendental idealism.)

Nagel also quotes the American philosopher C.S. Peirce (1839–1914) who said that reason has nothing to do with “how we think”. Nagel elaborates by saying that if

“we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey the order of the logical relations among propositions”.

Of course this doesn’t take into account where the propositions (some think that these can be “mind-independent” too — as stated earlier) come from in the first place. Even if the entailments, inferences and other relations between propositions are indeed necessary and timeless, most of what we actually think about has empirical content. (As Wittgenstein himself once said, it’s what is left after we’ve got the logic out of the way that’s important.)

Conclusion: Transcendent Philosophy

Many philosophers sympathetic to Nagel would say that the claim that Nagel is trying to dispense with language is simply not on. It’s the position of a straw-man. Nagel, they may say, is simply arguing that there are “concepts” and modes of reasoning which come before — or at least ground — all languages. Then they may go on to say:

Of course Nagel believes that everything (even his own philosophy) needs to be articulated in some language or other.

Put in this way, Nagel opponents may have fewer problems with his position However, Nagel is saying much more than all that.

Perhaps if I compare two quotes from other philosophers it may help matters.

So take Nicolas P. White’s following words:

“[W]e have, in our ability to apprehend [the] Forms, an avenue to knowledge of them which is independent of language.”

Now compare them with Nagel’s assertion that there is a “view from outside of language”.

So let’s get to the primary source of all these views: the Master himself, Plato. In his book Phaedo, Plato wrote:

“[H]e attains to the purest knowledge of them [the Forms] who goes to each with the mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight or any other sense together with reason, but with the very light of the mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each [form] [].”

A “view from outside language” isn’t something I’ve personally experienced. Having said that, it’s hard to even imagine what it could even be like. The apprehension of “Forms” which would be “independent of language” would indeed be strange. That’s primarily because the Forms (the Platonic Forms at least) were the invention of language — that is, Plato’s language. This isn’t to say (a la John Searle’s critique of Derrida) that Forms are “nothing but text” or anything like that. Instead, someone who’d never read Plato (or his surrogates) would never have any idea what Platonic Forms are. It’s language and mind that brings us to the Forms, even if they’re not literal fictions themselves. Even Plato himself would have been brought to the Forms by language and his mind, whatever form his mystical relation to the Forms actually took. And even if there were some kind non-linguistic and non-causal mystical (or intuitive) confrontation with the Forms, it would still have been largely language and mind which took Plato toward them. (This is similar to the New York Zen Buddhist who attempts to “annihilate thought” or “discursive reasoning” during and after much thought and discursive reasoning.)

The positions above are either explicit or implicit on almost every page of Thomas Nagel’s book, The Last Word.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]