Wittgenstein's Account of Truth

Part 2: From “Meaning is Use”to Semantic Antirealism

P A R T I I ; From “Meaning is Use” to Semantic Antirealism We have seen how Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning as use leads to his rejection of transcendent truth: if we conceive of the truth condition of a sentence in terms of the way in which we use the sentence, then a sentence could not have a truth condition which we could not recognize as obtaining. If it had a transcendent truth condition, we would not have come to treat it as being true or false. Michael Dummett reads the dictum that meaning is use as implying the rejection of a truth-conditional account of meaning. He claims that it has inspired a position which he terms “semantic antirealism,” namely that we do not come to understand our sentences by learning what it is that would make them true. For Dummett thinks that rejecting transcendent truth entails rejecting truth tout court. According to Dummett, the crux of the dictum that meaning is use is that what a speaker’s understanding consists in must be manifestable in his use of language. And he holds that there are some sentences which we treat as being determinately true or false, or bivalent, for which we are not in a position to determine their truth values. Therefore, since there is no practical ability through which we could manifest our knowledge of these sentences’ truth conditions, we must reject the thought that we understand these sentences by learning to recognize their truth conditions as obtaining when they obtain. Thus, we must also reject the notion that the general form of explanation of meaning is that the meaning of a statement is its truth conditions. We must hold instead that, in the case of undecidable sentences, we grasp their meanings by learning to recognize conditions under which we are justified in asserting them where these fall short of being decisive for establishing their truth.1 25 26 Wittgenstein’s Account of Truth I will argue that Dummett’s attempt to read semantic antirealism into Wittgenstein is out of the spirit of “meaning is use” as Wittgenstein intended the dictum. First of all, I will show that Dummett’s notion that certain sentences which we treat as bivalent in fact have no truth values rests upon a realist conception of truth. That is, Dummett’s argument rests upon the assumption that the only possible way to construe what it is to determine a sentence’s truth value is in terms of recognizing the obtaining of a realist truth condition. And, thus, his argument ultimately rests on a refusal to recognize an alternative account of what it is to determine the truth value of a sentence which falls out of the dictum that meaning is use: namely, that to determine the truth value of a sentence is to learn to apply a conventional rule which tells us the grounds upon which we may predicate “is true” of the sentence. I will further argue that the premises Dummett requires to draw his antirealist conclusion are in tension with an account of meaning as use. Specifically , we shall see that Dummett’s argument for rejecting a truthconditional account of meaning depends on a commitment to molecularism. Yet, as I shall argue, the notion that meaning is use entails a holistic view of meaning. That is, it implies that a sentence has meaning only in the context of an entire language. And once we accept the holism implicit in an account of meaning as use, Dummett’s argument for semantic antirealism does not go through. Another of my aims here is to show that semantic antirealism in itself is not a coherent position. There is a tension between Dummett’s verificationism and his commitment to truth as correspondence: He is led to reject the possibility of a truth-conditional account of meaning because he is torn between his desire to hold, with the realist, that if something is true there must be something in the world in virtue of which it is true and his desire to say, with Wittgenstein, that if something is true we must be able to know that it is true. But if we do accept that the concept “truth” is internally related to our capacity for knowledge , then the fact that a sentence corresponds to no perceptible segment of reality is irrelevant to the question of whether it is true or false. Wittgenstein’s account of truth is to be preferred...