Wittgenstein's Account of Truth

Part 3: Why a Revisionist Account of Truth?

P A R T I I I ; Why a Revisionist Account of Truth? It is part of our understanding of the concept of knowledge—or as Wittgenstein would say, it is part of the grammar of “knowing”—that knowledge entails the truth of what is known. An epistemology which denies the entailment will accordingly seem to most of us to be one that we should reject.1 We have seen that Wittgenstein held that truth conditions are determined by criteria, that is, by conventional ways of finding out whether our statements are true. Many commentators, beginning with Rogers Albritton, have assumed that criteria are defeasible . That is, they have held that it is possible for the criterion of a claim to be satisfied and for the criterially governed claim to be false. Thus, they have held that criteria determine what counts as good evidence for a statement that some state of affairs obtains, but do not strictly define what it is for that state of affairs to obtain. For since they hold that it is possible for a criterion to be satisfied and a criterially governed object to be absent, they take the criteria of our various statements as falling short of being decisive for establishing them as true. That is, they hold that our criteria provide “necessary evidence” or “noninductive evidence” for our statements, but fall short of being decisive for establishing their truth. And, thus, they argue that criteria should be taken as determining the conditions under which we are justified in asserting our statements rather than as determining their truth conditions. However, Crispin Wright has argued that if criterially based knowledge does not entail the truth of what is known, then criteria cannot provide the requisite notion of entitlement for our assertions and hence cannot play any role in a theory of knowledge or of meaning. And John McDowell has gone in the other direction and argued that since defeasibility is incompatible with the thought that 59 60 Wittgenstein’s Account of Truth knowledge entails the truth of what is known, then if a criterially based epistemology is to preserve this thought, it must interpret criteria as being similar to realist truth conditions. I will argue that criteria ought to be taken as providing an alternative and novel conception of truth conditions. They are not to be taken as realist truth conditions, nor are they to be taken as conditions which justify our assertions but fall short of establishing them as true. As I will argue, the resistance to seeing criteria as the basis of a novel conception of truth conditions springs from a refusal to take our uses of “is true” as relevant to our conception of a truth condition. Or to put the point more broadly, it springs from a refusal to take our uses of “is true” as relevant to the concept of truth or to the meaning of “is true.” For it is, in part, this refusal that leads to the view that criteria are defeasible. But, as I will argue, once we acknowledge the relevance of the way in which we use a given sentence in the context of predicating “is true” of it to our conception of its truth condition, we will not hold that we treat any sentence’s criterion as being defeasible. What we will hold is that we treat our criteria as being in principle revisable. The difference between defeasibility and revisability is significant enough that once we interpret criteria in the latter way, it is open to us to take them as providing truth conditions. And an epistemology based on criteria allows us to uphold the thought that knowledge entails the truth of what is known, albeit in an unusual way which calls for what I will argue is a necessary and justified revision in our traditional picture of truth. In chapters 8 and 9, I distinguish criteria from defeasible assertibility conditions and realist truth conditions. In chapter 10, I show how we might reject the argument for the view of criteria as providing defeasible, necessary evidence. In chapter 11, I discuss how a criterial change can take place within a community, and I outline the revisionist account of truth which follows from the fact that we treat criteria both as providing truth conditions and as being in principle revisable. Finally, I consider some objections to the account of truth put forth here, and I contrast the Wittgensteinian view with an...