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4 Truth
- University of Notre Dame Press
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chap ter 4 Truth The trouble about truth comes in part from taking features of sentences to be features of thought, from imagining that something other than thinking causes truth,1 and from expecting to find a single basic, even reductive analysis of “it is true that” and “it is false that.” Truth,globally,is right thinking,detectable as right to thought alone, as to what is or is not.2 Thus, what I think is true just when what I think really is what is so. But there are lots of ways that can come about, for instance , by sight or by report; the most fundamental is our own perceptual knowing. The other ways are derivative, as will become clear. “True”is a plastic notion, adapting in diverse contexts3 and needing multiple analyses to articulate its diversities of meaning.4 Though the expression “is true” has general all-purpose meanings—“is so” and “is what to think” and “is what to say,” for example5 —and though it applies denominatively to statements, sentences, reports, theories, and the like, its signification adapts in diverse practices like arithmetic, logic, sciences, law, and even in contrary-to-fact speculation, so that (i) a univocal analysis won’t express the diverse, even divergent, context-bound meanings; and (ii) there isn’t a“core”notion with only“accidental”differential features, as Crispin Wright () proposed, though that is a very helpful idea. Rather, the meanings have different“overflow”conditions in differing practices. For instance, sometimes bifurcation is required — — Thought and World for truth or falsity (in applied classical logic); sometimes there can be no truth-value gaps (cf. chapter ); and sometimes one or another form of cognitive accessibility is required (e.g., constructive proof). Further,cognitive accessibility requirements can be diverse—for instance , “warranted assertability” versus “constructive provability” versus “pragmatic verifiability”—and sometimes such conditions are part of what one explicitly means, and sometimes they are overflow conditions in the context or practice. The textbook theories of truth (e.g., correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, redundancy, disquotational, etc.) aren’t generalizable into a unified global theory, and, as usually expressed, fail to explain what they purport to. For instance, the correspondence theories6 that are “same thing” theories don’t explain how what is true is the same as what is so (see below). Sometimes there are no independent standards for verification or comparison:“The Industrial Revolution was more destructive than Colonialism .”What is the measure among movements of relative destructiveness ? Is it determinate? Truth, there, may be a craft-based matter among historians, or perhaps a matter of interpretation of other data. Sometimes,in fact frequently,there can be truths and falsities even when we don’t acknowledge any independent fact of the matter: “That’s an exact fit” (clothes), where length and cut varies with fashion, and “fit” varies with culture and class. Judgment flows and swirls, as sensible awareness does; our awake cognitive states are continuous. Judgment includes whatever is contained in one’s habitual locked-on and flowing reality commitment. Philosophers tend to scab that over with sentences to match-up with pairings from reality that we call “facts” or “states of affairs.” We need such sentential formulations to explain the formal structures of reliable reasoning. But the commitments of flowing intelligent consciousness don’t often divide up into such neat units, except by obtuse abstraction. The continuous judgment of a pianist’s cadenza or a reader’s comprehension can only be crudely imagined as a rapid fire of verbalized sentences . It is instead intelligent commitment, recognition, and execution in action. “Belief”among philosophers has, however, become associated with sentences, whereas judgment, the maker and bearer of truth or falsity, [3.90.242.249] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:36 GMT) changes like images on a turning mirror, being many at once, continuous , and mixed among reality commitments (existential commitments), characterizations (attributions/conceptions), and identifications (that “x is the same as y,”and“that’s whatY is, a human”). Judgment in action is more like the flowing response of a video camera than the imperceptible stuttering of celluloid film. When we isolate commitments by reflection, we get something more like sentential still photographs. The stills are immensely useful, but they are not phenomenologically fundamental. Real things, events, and their conditions are intentionalized, enveloped ,by animal awareness and by human judgment (chapter ).The independent ,even physical,realities are coincidently intentional when perceived . Yet only intelligent awareness involves...