BHA: RE: truth and God's eye

["Wallace Polsom" <wallace@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Doug,

> You ask why people like me prefer to construe
> correspondence as the meaning or, pace Colin,
> the definition of truth as opposed to the explanation of
> truth.  Well, one reason is that before I worry
> about explaining truth, I first want to know what
> it is I would be explaining.

In _The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy_ (1983),
Christopher Norris devotes an entire chapter to the work of Saul Kripke
precisely because it challenges the idea, common to both Anglo-American
linguistic philosophy and French structuralism and poststructuralism (i.e.
theoretical developments based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure), that
"meaning determines reference." Devitt's work, which owes (and acknowledges)
a substantial debt to Kripke, likewise challenges this idea, which lies at
the heart of description theories of reference. The problems with
description theories of reference, and the advantages of causal theories,
are nicely set out in Devitt and Sterelny's _Language and Reality_, which is
an intermediate level introduction to linguistic philosophy written from a
realist perspective.

Devitt and Sterelny want to explain meaning. They do so, in part, by
appealing to truth. They reject description theories of truth in favour of
correspondence. Specifically, they focus on reference, offering a causal
theory, in part because they are committed to physicalism. In other words,
they believe that "Any linguistic facts there are must be, ultimately,
physical. Semantic notions like meaning, truth and reference can be used
only if they can be explained in non-linguistic terms; they are not
'primitive', not theoretically fundamental. Biologists were not satisfied to
leave the notion of gene as primitive, they wanted to understand the
mechanism by which inheritable characteristics are encoded in a cell. Their
search led to the discovery of the structure of DNA. Similarly, we seek a
deeper explanation of semantic notions. We might, for example, hope to
explain them in psychological terms; then, hope to explain the psychological
in neuroanatomical and biochemical terms; then, explain those in physical
and chemical terms" (_Language and Reality_ 8-9).

What's not to like about this?

I'll have to think about your other comments.

Sincerely,
Wallace



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