Re: BHA: truth

[Louis Irwin <lirwin1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ruth,

Judging by the following 47 messages from the list in my queue since last
Friday, this topic is really taking off!

>>Roughly, I think Bhaskar is saying that the truth of surface phenomena is
>>their underlying structure.  Certain molecular structures comprise the
truth
>>of the phenomenon of liquidity, etc.  He thinks this, alethic truth, is a
>>necessary ingredient in all other uses of "truth".
>
>Yes, this does seem to be what he's saying, but (among other things) what,
>then, is the difference between the concept of "truth" and the concept of
>"cause"?

In other words, if the truth of something is its cause, you ask what is the
difference between truth and causality?  I think one answer is that
causality is a broader concept than truth.  Alethic truth seems to be
causality operating at a more basic level than the phenomena explained,
whereas causality also operates on a single level in a non-explanatory way.
Event A can cause event B without being the alethic truth of B.

>>The problem is that we need concepts in order to identify things in the
world
>>that match up with out concepts!  I suggest that any correspondence we have
>>between concepts and the world has to be derivative, at least in part, of
>>more basic matters.
>
>Could you explain a little more what you mean here by derivative?  Sorry to
>be so dense, but I really want to understand what you're saying!

My suggestion is that correspondence between language and the world is bound
to be a truism, but that truism cannot be EXPLANATORY of what truth is.
Instead, we need a genuinely explanatory theory of truth from which the
truism would follow as a result.

>>If the concept of "truth" is tied exclusively to the question of
epistemology, >>the only recourse a realist has is to opt for a
correspondence theory and then >>to go round in circles with idealist or
positivist conceptions.
>
>I don't quite understand this.  It reads like I should agree with it(!), but
>I want to say something like if we can refer to a reality that is
>extra-linguistic/not-dependent-on-us when we're talking ontology, or
>science, for that matter, why not when we're talking about the meaning of
>the term "truth"?

A correspondence theory asserts, roughly, that truth consists in a match
between our thoughts and the facts described by our thoughts.  This
formulation loads the deck against the correspondence theory by making it
out to be completely actualistic.  So let's true to break it down a bit.
The correspondence theory says that we can refer to one kind of thing, say
concepts, then refer to a second kind of thing, say things we want to
conceptualize, and truth consists in matching them up.  To assert that the
cat is black, you first have to have the concepts referred to by "cat" and
"black", then you have to be able to refer to the cat in question and the
property of blackness.  The correspondence theory says that the thought
expressed by "The cat is black" is true just in case the thing matched by
our concept of "cat" has the property matched by our concept of "black".

To simplify my objection, consider a correspondence theory of reference,
which would claim that reference consists in the match between our concepts
and the things to which they refer.  An idealist or positivist will say
that the only way we can pick out a cat from the other things in the world
is to deploy our conept of "cat".  How, then, could we believe that a
correspondence between our concept of "cat" and a cat is what EXPLAINS
reference?  That would be circular.  I think the same problem occurs for
the correspondence theory of truth, even if it does avoid the actualism of
the initial formulation above.

Empirical realism does not have an alternative to the correspondence
theory.  Critical realism will bring in natural kinds and alethic truth.

>Who wants to come over for some pizza so we can hash all this out once and
>for all?!

We're on our way.  Colin, you bring the beer. :)

Louis Irwin



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