It is doubtful that – any – mental concepts need conceptual criteria of identity that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient, though it may be the case that certain conceptual criteria are individually necessary (which would be a commitment to some form of conceptual essentialism).
Two people may have the same mental concept without corresponding conceptual criteria of identity:
Person One – conceptual criteria of identity for the concept [philosopher]: [talks rubbish]; [reads a lot of books]; [doesn’t live in the Real World]; [wears a bow tie].
Person Two – conceptual criteria of identity for the concept [philosopher]: [must be clever] (the modal “must” is loose); [wears a bow tie]; [suffers from existential angst]; [smokes a pipe].
As can be seen, there is a “family resemblance” between version one and version two of the concept [philosopher].They share the conceptual criterion [bow tie].So the versions are clearly not identical.We could say that both Person One and Person Two share the same conceptual scheme (CS).This pre-empts the question: What would happen if they belonged to different conceptual schemes but still used the same concept [philosopher]?
If there is conceptual variance (alongside word invariance) between members of the same CS, what of the members of – competing – CSs who still happen the share the same word for possibly markedly different concepts?Perhaps we can say that if two people don’t share identical concepts, even if they have a “family resemblance”, for the same words, then they must be by definition members of different CSs.What if this were the case with just one – important – concept, say, [truth]?Would this itself entail membership of a different CS?Probably not.But how much conceptual variance would entail membership of different CS?Of course this would bring in questions about the vague boundaries between putatively different CSs.The individuation of separate CSs will of course be difficult.
Could we really communicate and therefore understand others with such examples of conceptual variance alongside word invariance? Let’s take a rather unlikely example.
How can an eliminative materialist converse with a Muslim fundamentalist or even a Parisian deconstructor? Perhaps they can’t or don’t, either for the psychological reason that they don’t want to or the philosophical reason that when they do, they don’t (really). People with different CSs do, after all, “speak at cross-purposes”. Often each sees the other as a “brick wall”.
But what of talk about particular unexceptionable subjects? Take Quine’s positive account of the matter:
…yet McX [a believer in the existence of abstract or nonexistent objects like Pegasus] and I, despite thee basic disagreements, find that our conceptual schemes converge sufficiently…to enable us to communicate successfully on such topics as politics, weather… (1948)
The word “disagreement” above itself implies – effective – communication.
So perhaps the eliminative materialist and the Parisian deconstructor could talk about politics and the weather (if they both spoke English), according to Quine’s positive forecast. And, one might say, that if there is conceptual invariance or at least agreement when it comes to talk about the weather or politics, then why not – eventually – in other more esoteric and recondite areas?
But what a strange choice of Quine’s to hint at conceptual invariance when it comes to politics! It may be highly unlikely that there will be conceptual invariance in political talk between McX and Quine, or the eliminative materialist and the deconstructor, or between anyone else for that matter. I can accept the weather example, but politics… Think of these political concepts: [liberty], [democracy], [equality], [the Market] and so on. A big bunch of platonic abstract objects, according to some. What would McX say?
If someone were to say to me, “We are all born free”, I wouldn’t know what to say in return. Not many people involve themselves with the conceptual analysis of the molecular concept [born equal] or the atomic concept [equality].
Perhaps there are no concepts to analyse. And wouldn’t we need to be some kind of Platonist to believe that we somehow share the same concept although we may disagree on its entailments, relevance, general ramifications, moral implications etc. Wouldn’t we be Platonists if we believed that there is a single correct version of each concept?
To repeat.
Do abstract concepts (or abstract objects for that matter) have conceptual criteria of identity in the same way in which concrete objects do? Or is this a Platonist mistake and the cause of so many philosophical problems, dead ends and hard work? And this may be the reason why conceptual invariance is impossible when it comes to such concepts. (Is it just a case that, say, [truth] and [right] “mean more to people” than, say, [cat] or [shoe]?)
Belief in conceptual invariance may also bring in a commitment to conceptual essentialism. That is, talk of necessary conceptual criteria of identity for object x brings in essentialism. And this makes conceptual invariance even harder. We may openly, or implicitly, be asking which conceptual criteria of identity are essential for concept [C] of object x and, therefore, which are contingent. We could of course ask whether it is essential or necessary in any way to accept the dualism of essential versus contingent conceptual criteria of identity for concept [C] of object x.
Take Rey’s account of liberal anti-essentialist Quine:
'Sameness of concept’ for Quine becomes by and large an ‘indeterminate’ issue. The best one might hope for it is a similarity of inferential role between symbols in different theories or symbol systems…(1985)
Quine’s almost – or literally – pragmatist view of concepts may seem a little vague to those with magnificently determinate notions of a concept in general and of particular concepts.
To recapitulate.
If concepts, abstract or concrete, require necessary and even sufficient conceptual criteria of identity, then it is likely that few – or no – people will share the same concept. Take a concrete example this time.
People may share the same word “dog” but not share the same concept [dog]. One may solve this problem by being essentialist on the matter and say that [dog] must have necessary or essential conceptual criteria – or even a single criterion – of identity.
And is there “a public concept of a dog”? For a start, how would we know? We share the word “dog”, but this doesn’t mean that we share the same concept of a dog.It could be said that in order to recognise a dog as a dog, different people must be sharing the same concept [dog]. But we could still recognise a dog as a dog and yet have different concepts of a dog. Different conceptual criteria of identity could be equally successful at individuating, differentiating and identifying dogs as dogs. It could even be the case that no two people share a single conceptual criterion of identity for a dog. This wouldn’t automatically stop either one recognising a dog as a dog.
It could be just an assumption that we share the same concept [dog]. What may matter is not the concept or concepts as such, but our behavioural and sensory interaction with dogs, which we do share, and, of course, the physical identities of dogs, which dogs share. The conceptual flux surrounding dogs, if there is one, may not matter (that much).
However, without some conceptual connectedness with other people how would we know that we are interacting with the same animal at all?
Again, if people don’t share the same necessary and sufficient conceptual criteria of identity for a concept, then their concepts can’t be identical. Perhaps we shouldn’t cry over this. Many of us do, after all, share the same world, similar cognitive structures, the same language or inter-translatable languages, the same sensory receptors, the same needs and desires, etc. Despite all that, perhaps one’s confidence shouldn’t be so robust as Susan Haak’s when she dismisses…well, a lot of people as “conceptual relativists”:
…from enthusiasts of the latest developments in neuroscience, to radical self-styled neo-pragmatists, radical feminists and multiculturalists [sic], and followers of…Paris fashions.” (1999, although its “standards of evidence” she is mainly talking about.)
Our hope, on the other hand, is
rooted in human nature, in the cognitive capacities and limitations of all normal human beings.
We are defending ourselves against
hyperbolic scepticism, or a hopeless relativism or tribalism…
Conceptual Variance and Universals
It may seem rather old-fashioned to be talking about universals, at least in the following semi-strict Platonist way. But universals are always there, lurking in the bushes. Or, I should say, that universals are tacitly/implicitly believed to be there, even if a belief in them is not overtly articulated. Indeed platonic universals are needed to justify many everyday beliefs. They make sense and clarify so much and also solve many philosophical problems. But admitting all that doesn’t mean that I think that they exist. Similarly, the assertion “Without God everything would be permitted” doesn’t bring God into existence. (And there is an ontological position that if you can talk about an object, it must exist in some shape or form.)
(I am a conceptualist in that I take – some – universals to be concepts, which themselves depend on already conceptualised concrete objects.)
So I use Platonist augments to argue against Platonism, despite how old-fashioned some of the terms may appear (for example, capitalising Truth may hint at postmodernist irony). Instead of finding “hidden platonist assumptions” here, there and everywhere, like, say, Quine (even he is a platonist about numbers), I will apply Platonism to Platonism.
Perhaps only a Platonist, of some description, would accept – the possibility of – conceptual invariance. The Platonist would have otherworldly truth-conditions of all the contentious concepts.The concept [C] would effectively become the universal U, which would exist in a non-spatio-temporal realm.
We could talk about what people mean when they use the words, say, “truth” or “goodness” or “justice” or even “cat”, or we could talk about the references or extensions of these words as they are “in themselves”, as it were. The things behind the words “truth”, “justice”, etc. On a Platonist reading, the abstract objects that are untouched by us and therefore mind-free.
A Platonist could say that we have the concept [C] wrong. Would it make sense for a non-platonist to say the same? Why would a particular person’s concept [C] of x be the correct one without it matching the otherworldly archetype or universal U? The correct account of [C] would be the one that matched the non-empirical truth-conditions in this other world. A philosopher, if not a Platonist, could say that his concept [C] of x should be the concept of x we use. He couldn’t say that his concept [C] of x is the correct one.
Perhaps we need to commit ourselves to the universals in order to guarantee conceptual invariance when it comes to particular concepts. Or perhaps universals somehow explain our ability to communicate using words like “truth”, “fact” “justice” and other such terms.
We ask: What do all cats share? We get a Platonist answer.
Cathood. All cats partake in the universal Cat.
Similarly we ask: What do all truths share?
Answer: Truthhood. All truths partake in the universal Truth.
These answers are really non-answers or even evasions. Saying that all cats share cathood is not really telling us anything about what it is that cats share and why they share it. As it stands, a brick could share cathood with a particular cat. But we could bring forward conceptual criteria of identity for cathood and therefore cats. There may of course be peripheral disagreements about cathood. But it is possible that everyone must accept the following conceptual criteria of identity: a cat must be an animal; it must have fur (an inessential criterion?); it must not live under water etc (an unacceptable negative criterion?). (All this a commitment to cat essentialism.)
Abstract Concepts, Universals and Conceptual Variance
The Platonist theory of universals doesn’t work so well when it comes to abstract concepts like [liberty], [fact], [truth], [wrong], etc., as it may do for concrete concepts like, say, [house].
The particulars, houses, all share something. Or, in Platonist terms, they all partake in the form or universal House. Do Truth or Justice, seen as universals, have particulars? Do all the putative particulars of abstract universals or abstract concepts partake in the same thing? If so, what is it? The answer is easy for houses. Arbitrarily, they all share the property of sheltering people. What do all the particulars of, say, Justice share?
Perhaps the crux of this problem is that the particulars of [house] or House are concrete objects (literally, in some cases), whereas the particular of Justice or Fact or Proposition would be abstract too. And whereas concrete particulars have readily and easily describable and acceptable conceptual criteria of identity (in most cases), this is not the case with abstract particulars (if they exist at all).
It’s all a problem of a lack of particulars. We can accept Wittgenstein’s famous account of why the “similarities, relationships…resemblances” of games make us think in terms of universals. But there are really no particulars of Liberty, Truth, Fact, etc., as there are for Wittgenstein’s Game. So whereas Wittgenstein says that there’s “not something that is common to all” (1953) the particulars of Game, I could say that certain concepts or universals don’t have particulars which are instantiated, so they can hardly have “something that is common to all” of them. This disanalogy with Game, the lack of particulars, makes the platonic explanations of the concepts [truth], [fact] etc. even more problematic. Again, as with cat, [game] could be deemed concrete.
Can we do the same for Truthhood as we did for Cathood as Wittgenstein did for game? Do non-philosophers have implicit or explicit conceptual criteria of identity for Truthhood in the same way in which they have readily available and often acceptable conceptual criteria of identity for cathood? Many people intuitively offer correspondence-to-fact-like criteria for Truthhood. But as all philosophers know, such conceptual criteria are problematic, unlike, say, the criteria of fur, being an animal, not living under water etc for cathood.
Think about what the above entails for conceptual invariance. After all, the concepts [freedom], [society], [fact] etc. are all abstract too.
Do abstract concepts apply to abstract non-mental objects? It may seem that they must do, otherwise what are they concepts of? (I suppose you could have an abstract concept of a concrete object.) But what if we don’t accept abstract non-mental objects in our ontology? If we don’t, we seem not to be able to accept the abstract mental concepts that would be applied to them.
Again: What are abstract mental concepts, concepts of? You can clearly have an abstract painting of a non-abstract concrete object or event. Is there a parallel with abstract concepts?
Indeed it may not even make sense to say that abstract universal can have particulars. Therefore, on my conflation of concepts and universals, it may not make sense to say that abstract concepts can have particulars. And we can’t really have the abstract universals without their abstract particulars (as a class requires members); therefore perhaps we can’t even have abstract concepts in the first place. (Universals and particulars, according to traditional metaphysics, are mutually dependent on one another, and for good reasons. This distinguishes universals from classes, some of which can be empty.)
Take the abstract object or universal Knowledge. Perhaps one reason the epistemologist is a Platonist vis-à-vis knowledge, is that he
thinks of knowledge in very much the way the scientific realist thinks of heat: beneath the surface diversity there is structural unity. (1991)
I am not saying here that the epistemologist realist is a Platonist, full stop. I’m saying that he’s a Platonist about knowledge. That is, knowledge has specific conceptual criteria of identity. It is an abstract object – a universal. It has non-empirical truth-conditions. It can be known in all its fullness by analysing its particulars. And, in a sense, the particulars are more concrete than the universal itself. However, they still partake in the universal. We get to know the universal, Knowledge, by analysing its particulars.
Although Michael Williams doesn’t use the term “platonism”, I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t object to it.
The problem is that abstract objects (say Knowledge) or universals aren’t anything like concrete objects. (Perhaps, in that case, there’s a philosophical argument for rejecting the word “object” – or rejecting, alternatively, the very existence of abstract objects.)
Williams spots this problem:
[the epistemological realist] assumes that ‘knowledge of the external world’ is like ‘chair’ rather than like ‘witch’ (or ‘analytic’)…
But, of course, we do have the words for abstract concepts (lots of them). Therefore we may be under the illusion of sharing – or having – the corresponding abstract concepts.
Perhaps we are just as likely to have conceptual variance with concrete concepts as we are with abstract mental concepts. (I use the term “concrete concept” as shorthand for concepts of concrete objects in the way I talked about criteria of identity for concepts not objects. The philosophical reasons should be clear here too.)
The problem with abstract concepts is that there may not be anything to apply the concepts to. That is, there may be no abstract objects. And as a result, all abstract concepts about abstract objects may be entirely fictitious.
And yet we have Superman – a nonexistent or abstract object according to some. Strangely enough, the nonexistent object Superman lends itself to possibly more agreement conceptually than, say, truth, fact, liberty, society, etc. (These are not equally abstract. Truth, for example, is, in my view, more abstract than society is.) Not many people agree, in and out of the platonic Philosophy Department, on the correct concepts applicable to, say, truth or justice or fact or proposition. Again, there is possibly more agreement on the concepts applicable to Superman. At least Superman had a precise baptism on the page or in the head at a particular time and by a particular person. No such thing has really happened to many non-fictional abstract concepts or objects. (Although the correspondence theory of truth, rather than truth itself, had a precise baptism.)
You can make incorrect statements about Superman. You could say that he is/was from Mars. This is not the case with truth, fact, justice, etc. We have theories of truth or liberty or fact, but we don’t have theories of the nonexistent object Superman (though we may have theories of his actions and statements etc).
Armstrong says that “universals…must be the ground [of] objective resemblances” (1989). That’s no problem for me because there are no particulars of, say, [truth], [liberty], [fact] etc, and, therefore, there are no “objective resemblances” either. Or, rather, there is one definite resemblance – the shared worditself. And even if concepts of a word are shared they do not do so because of a universal that “grounds the resemblances”. The concepts that are shared, like [round square] may be always seen as objectively irrelevant to the word(“round square”) itself. For example, there may be conceptual correlates of the word “truth” which the majority of philosophers would laugh out of court. Similarly, the conceptual correlate of “liberty” may not be [liberty], which doesn’t tell us anything anyway, but, say, [Nelson Mandela] or a mental image of a peace sign. Even non-philosophers wouldn’t take these as true conceptual correlates of the word “liberty”.
Truth: Mental Concept or Universal?
I shall not use the phrase “theory of truth” in the following. Instead I shall use “concept of truth”. A theory is, after all, a sequence or series of linked concepts. Similarly, I shall write “concept of truth” rather than the plural “concepts of truth” knowing that a single concept (e.g., a concept of truth) will be built-up of constituent concepts. This is a mereological point. Particular concepts can make up another single concept. Nearly all concepts can either be built-up or broken down. As with facts, this can be a business of gerrymandering determined by one’s objectives.
When we accept truth or the word “truth” as determined by a particular concept, we can articulate its conceptual criteria of identity. But the correlate or correlates of a particular utterance of the word “truth” will only be a particular concept of truth. A platonist could well ask what right we have to use the word “truth” if we state that what determines such an utterance is only a particular mental concept of truth which doesn’t, or may not, match up to either the abstract object truth or the universal Truth. Unless we can match up our utterances of the word “truth” with the universal Truth, or any abstract object, then we may well be misunderstanding each other when we use the word “truth” or even when we explicate a particular concept of truth which doesn’t match an abstract object or the universal Truth.
Communication, and perhaps a kind of understanding, is facilitated by our projecting our particular mental concept of truth, if we have one, into the minds of those we are conversing with and who are also using the word “truth”. We know that they not only share the same word “truth”, but we also assume, in some kind of way, that they share the same concept of truth. The same may be true of the words “God”, “fact”, “proposition”, “justice” “wrong” etc, and even, to a lesser extent, words with empirical correlates like “dog”, “house” etc (perhaps the difference is one of degree and not of kind).
There are particular mental concepts of truth. There is no “The concept of truth”. Many people may indeed share a particular concept of truth, but they don’t do so in virtue of the fact that it matches the concept of truth.
We use the word “truth” in order to facilitate communication. We still share the word “truth” (like we share “Tony Blair”) even with those we know to have a different concept of truth, which may be a concept of truth that states that truth is in fact a non-mental phenomenon. Perhaps we use the word “truth” pragmatically or instrumentally. Sometimes, or most times, it may not even be a cognitive pragmatic move; after all, only philosophers, generally, have concepts of truth. The use of the word “truth” shows other people our intentions and what enterprise we are involved in: the “pursuit of truth” (which, I suppose, can be undertaken even if we don’t have a concept of truth or know what truth is). It shows other people that we may be sharing a philosophical enterprise. We may even share a particular mental concept of truth. Again, we wouldn’t do so because this concept matches up with the concept [Truth].
A Platonist could say:
Your ‘mental’ concept of truth shares properties with other concepts of truth in virtue of the fact that such properties partake in the universal Truth.
The reply could be that the similarities between particular concepts of truth could be accounted for by contingent and/or natural phenomena.
So just because we all share and use the word “truth” or “true” it doesn’t mean that we all have a concept of truth which partakes, wholly or in part, in the universal Truth or the concept [Truth]. We can all use the phrase “The round square” without committing ourselves to the existence of a round square either as an abstract or a concrete object. Similarly, we all happily use the name “Superman” or even refer to Superman without believing he exists. He may exist as a nonexistent object or mental idea, but people don’t refer to Superman as an abstract object or mental idea. Or, as Quine put it:
If Pegasus existed he would indeed be in space and time, but only because the word ‘Pegasus’ has spatio-temporal connotations, and not because ‘exists’ has spatio-temporal connotations. (1948)
So Superman is a man-like being who can fly, etc. Mental images aren’t made of flesh and blood and abstract objects can’t fly. Indeed, Superman has more static conceptual criteria of identity than truth.
Two people could share the word “truth” and not share the same particular mental concept of truth. They communicate successfully by projecting their particular concept into the other person’s mind (not literally, of course). It may even be the case, or it could possibly be the case, that no two people on earth share precisely the same mental concept of truth.Even when Man on the Street 1 shares something like the correspondence theory of truth with Man on the Street 2 (although they wont use the phrase “correspondence theory of truth”), they only do so because their shared concept is very minimal by virtue of the fact that they haven’t actually ever analysed the concept to see what it consists in. So let them analyse this statement:
Truth is the correspondence of what we say or write with facts in the external world.
Perhaps the more they scrutinise the above statement the less they will share regarding the concept’s ---- acceptable - criteria. And the same can be said of highly technical and recondite concepts of truth. Indeed, the more technical and complex a concept of truth is, the fewer the people who will share it. A particular philosopher’s concept of truth may be shared by himself and himself alone (although this intellectual loneliness alone wouldn’t itself make his version false).
So if concepts are mental, it may follow that we must be concerned with what people mean by the word “truth”. And, consequently, whether or not the mental correlates of the words are variant or invariant.
To assume that the concept [truth], or the different concepts of truth, is separable from what people think or mean by their concepts of truth or their word “truth”, is essentially a Platonist position. It is the belief that truth, or fact, or justice, are mind-independent abstract objects with, presumably, clearly defined necessary and sufficient conceptual criteria of identity which themselves don’t depend on minds and are determined by the truth-conditions supplied by the abstract object. And Plato, through the voice of Socrates, explicated many abstract concepts in such a way.
So it may well be that a belief in abstract concepts leads us to a belief in abstract objects, which itself leads to a belief that such objects exist mind-independently and therefore, perhaps, in a non-spatio—temporal realm.
A commitment to universals may not always in itself make one a platonist, but a commitment to abstract concepts, therefore to abstract objects, may well do so.
Perhaps we could say that there must still be something shared by all concepts of truth, call it “truth” if you like, but this something certainly doesn’t exist simply in virtue of the fact that millions share the word “truth”. This something, therefore, doesn’t guarantee or even help the possibility of conceptual invariance when it comes to truth. The fact that millions share the word “truth” may be completely irrelevant to a particular mental concept that we call “a concept of truth”. This something, this concept, we simply christen “a concept of truth” (we may even call it “the concept of truth").
Take the concept – or theories (which are linked concepts) – of truth. They, perhaps, often share nothing, or next to nothing, yet we all happily use the word “truth”. Take these concepts of truth:
a) Truth is the correspondence between statements and facts in the external world.
b) Truth is internal coherence.
For argument’s sake, let’s say that a) and b) share precisely nothing (though in fact they share a lot). Why, therefore, do the utterers of a) and b) use the same word “truth”? Do they share the same concept [truth] too?
The utterer of a) (Person 1) thinks of his concept of truth when talking to the utterer of b) (Person 2) and, perhaps, vice versa. Or Person 1 thinks of his concept of truth when Person 2 talks to him about truth or uses the word “truth”.This would mean that they effectively communicate only because Person 1 projects his concept of truth into the mind of Person 2 and vice versa. They are, therefore, effectively – or actually – misinterpreting or misunderstanding each other’s concepts of truth. Person 1 is applying a micro “principle of charity” to the utterances of Person 2 in order to understand him, if he is, in fact, understanding him (although I assume the “principle of charity” needs to be cognitively applied). But, on this account, he may be wrong to do so. Their concepts are not the same. They share nothing but the word “truth”.
In the above example, communication, not understanding, between people can give the false impression of conceptual invariance. All this amounts to is the sharing of the same word. (This could be the case with people within the same conceptual scheme.)
Both D. M. Armstrong and David Lewis believe that something – a universal – must be correlated with – all? – words, even words like “humility”. Lewis says, “we need entities to assign a semantic values to these words [e.g. “humility”]” (1983). And Armstrong says, “there has to be an object that constitutes or corresponds to the meaning of the general word” (1989). He even says, “there has to be something called horseness or triangularity”. He then discusses the problematic word “unicorn” and concludes that it is a “uninstantiated universal”. I actually think that the concept [unicorn] is less problematic that, say, [truth] or [fact]. The nonexistent (see Parsons, 1979) unicorn is pretty determinate entity, whatever we think of its ontological status. So we could vaguely accept its “uninstantiated” status as a universal. But [truth] and [fact] are problematic instantiated and problematic if uninstantiated.
We share the word “round square”, does it need a “semantic value”? We may even share a concept or molecular pseudo concept [round square] made up of two genuine atomic concepts: [round] and [square]. All this fusion amounts to, possibly, is the swift succession within a mind of a square mental image followed by a round mental image. And I have no problem with mental images being the constituent, or even the whole, of particular concepts (see Loar and Tye).
I suppose I could be a Predicate Nominalist with regards to the predicate “is true”. For example, if a is an “example” of truth this would simply mean that it falls under the predicate F (Armstrong, 1989), where “F” equals “is true”. In other words, “is true” is entirely linguistic and nothing more. The concept [is true] is nothing more than the linguistic “is true”, therefore not a bone fide concept at all. So a, an example or particular of truth, is simply christened with the linguistic predicate “is true”. It shares, therefore, a linguistic predicate and that, effectively, is the universal
However, because of the lack of real particulars, or “members”, being a Class Nominalist vis-à-vis the concepts [truth], [fact], etc. means that we can’t really get off the ground in the first place. There are particular games or cats, which could be deemed to belong to a class (despite problems for the idea that class can be a substitute for universal), not so, again, for abstract concepts.
Michael Williams spots certain problems with “deflationist” and anti-platonists positions on truth:
On a deflationary view…true sentences constitute a merely nominal kind.
Although Williams thinks that truth nominalists, or some of them, still believe that
there are endlessly many truths, [but] there is no such thing as truth. (1991)
The obvious thing to ask here is: If “there is no such thing as truth”, how can there be “many truths”? Mustn’t the “truths” partake in Truth in order to be truths? Or, where there are particulars, there is a universal somewhere on high.
The alternative to truth nominalism, or deflationary truth, is represented, according to Williams, by the “traditional theorist”. He believes that
truth is the name of an important property shared by all true sentences…
Not only that, but he believes that truth is common to widely different particulars of truth:
The property [of truth] may be correspondence to fact, incorparability in some ideally coherent system of judgements, or goodness in the way of belief…
Why assume that all these particulars or theories share something other than the word “truth”? Indeed, they probably do share certain things, but why must it be truth?
Williams spots the traditional theorist’s riposte. He would say that the deflationist, or nominalist, offers us
theories of the concept of truth (or…accounts of the use of ‘true’…
He, on the other hand, offers us
[genuine] theories of truth…
That may be the case when it comes to nominalist and deflationary theorists, but what if we reject both sides of the divide? There is no “the concept of truth” to offer “theories of”. And, similarly, without the abstract object truth, or the concept [truth], or the universal Truth, there can’t be theories of truth. If there were an acceptable the concept of truth, it would close the book on truth. Theories of truth would simply flow, algorithmically, from the concept of truth. Indeed, why should we accept a distinction between the concept of truth and a theory of truth? This would be an example of concept/object dualism. An assumption that an unconceptualised object, truth, has concepts (of truth) applied to it. Not only can an object not be unconceptualised and cognised at the same time, but truth may not be an object, even if abstract, in the first place. I say that an object can’t be unconceptualised and cognised at the same time. However, a concrete object can exist uncognised and therefore unconceptualised. Truth may not even have that going for it. It may not exist uncognised (and unconceptualised). If we accept that it does, we are accepting that it is indeed a non-spatio-temporal platonic object. And if that’s the case, how do we have causal access to it and how does it generate its particulars (i.e. theories of truth)?
So instead of deflationism, or nominalism, we could be eliminativists about truth, even if we accept the word “truth” for pragmatic or instrumentalist reasons. In fact the deflationary account of truth doesn’t make sense, or, at least, it upholds hidden platonist assumptions (them again). According to Williams, he can accept the truth-predicate (“…is true”), without “thinking that there must be some ‘truth-making’ property that all true sentences share”.
As before, why use the word “truth” or “is true”? More correctly, what gives Williams the philosophical right to bundle all the usages of the truth-predicate together? What do they all share? If we can “Occam’s razor” (Williams’ own words) “truth-making properties”, perhaps we can use the same razor to get rid of “true” or “is true” too. Or, if we do allow or accept the word “true” or “is true”, let’s accept them as words and words alone. That is, let’s be pragmatic or instrumentalist about it, not deflationary. We use the word “truth” to display to other people that we are pursuing an enquiry into certain areas, without acknowledging that something, truth, will help us do so, or that it will be something that we shall find. Correspondence exists. But not truth. Coherence exits. But not truth. Warranted assertibilty exists. But not truth. And so on.
But is it true that truth doesn’t exist? Is it true that A corresponds with B?
But what do you mean by “true”? And then we are back on the grand pursuit of the platonic object once again.
*) The abstract concept [truth], on my reading, must be a mental concept (it needn’t be the same for different persons).
Certain mental concepts can be applied, in intentional terms, to the non-mental. And mental concepts can be applied or have as their intentional objects other mental objects. So we could have a mental concept (also a mental object) and a mental object that would be in the same mind. For example, the abstract mental concept [truth] could have as its object the mental objects/acts/states/events that determine its nature. The mental objects could be thoughts, reasonings, propositional content, etc, which are themselves made-up of mental concepts.
There may be many things outside of the mind that determine the nature of a mental concept [truth], but they are not [truth] itself. This is the mistake platonists and perhaps Fregeans make. There is, in fact, a three-way journey. The journey begins with conceptualised objects, events etc. in the external world, to mental acts and states (e.g. thoughts and reasonings) to the final destination [truth]. The external concrete objects, events etc. are already conceptualised, as I said, before this three-way process. But the real object, intentional objects, of the abstract mental concept [truth] are not external, but the mental act (possibly events too) and states of the mind itself.
