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Overview
In addition, the author considers how these theories of truth might be relevant in contemporary debates surrounding truth, as well as in the context of theories of truth in the history of philosophy, both in Western and Indian thought.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783483464 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Series: | Critical Inquiries in Comparative Philosophy |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Theories of Truth in Chinese Philosophy
A Comparative Approach
By Alexus McLeod
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Alexus McLeodAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-346-4
CHAPTER 1
Truth, Philosophy, and Chinese Thought
TRUTH IN CONTEMPORARY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
Truth is fundamental in all philosophical traditions. The frame within which I approach truth in the Chinese tradition uses multiple traditions, as part of my comparative approach in general, discussed in the introduction. In this section, I outline the contours of thought on truth in contemporary analytic philosophy, in order to understand how early Chinese conceptions of truth fit into contemporary categories.
One may ask at this point: "Why begin with contemporary analytic theories?" There are a few reasons for this. First and foremost, perhaps, is the fact that I come from a background shaped by contemporary analytic philosophy, and I assume most of my readers have similar backgrounds. It is truth and its consideration within this tradition from which we begin in our own thinking about truth and its relevance in early Chinese philosophy. Second, since we as contemporary Western academics (or Western-influenced academics, at least) speak the language of contemporary English-language philosophy (in the sense of having the technical background, not in the sense of natural language), Even if we do not consider ourselves part of the "analytic tradition," we are inevitably saddled with certain conceptions of truth as part of the background against which we think about the concept. Since this is so, we might as well use rather than resist these categories and ways of thinking about truth, using them to our advantage. We certainly can understand early Chinese theories of truth in the light of the categories, concepts, and theories of contemporary analytic philosophy. Third, understanding early Chinese theories of truth against the background of contemporary categories (even while these categories do not perfectly fit Chinese theories) will allow us to more easily integrate insights and arguments from early Chinese thinkers into contemporary debates on the topic.
The account I offer in this section is a very rough overview of major developments and theories in contemporary analytic philosophy on the issue of truth, and much of what I say here is filled out in more detail in later chapters, in which I consider particular early Chinese theories of truth and their connection to contemporary theories.
Philosophical reflection on the concept of truth in analytic thought really has its beginnings in the early stages of the "analytic" movement with philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Gottlob Frege in the early twentieth century. These philosophers focused on analysis of language, and looked for the concept of truth as a linguistic concept, having to do with evaluations of linguistic entities with assertoric content. Philosophical thought about the concept of truth in the West certainly did not begin with the analytic movement and these philosophers — indeed truth has been a central focus of Western philosophy since its beginnings in ancient Greece — but the consideration of truth as primarily an issue in linguistic and conceptual analysis has its beginnings here. This is significant for us because it is by and large still in this way that most contemporary academic philosophers think about the concept of truth. As we will see in the Chinese tradition (as well as the Indian tradition), there are a number of no less important ways of thinking about the concept of truth as independent of evaluating linguistic entities with assertoric content, and it may turn out that getting things right concerning this linguistic sense of truth requires getting things right about truth in other contexts and in the concept's fullness. However, the way in which the early analytic tradition and most contemporary analytic philosophers envision the issue of truth, and by and large the way in which I approach and discuss it in this book, is as a property or function associated with assertoric linguistic entities. When we ask "what is truth?" in this sense we are asking "what does it mean to say that x is true, where x is a statement, proposition, or assertion?"
The question of just what kinds of linguistic entities take truth values is an important one, but the one that we will see is more disputed in the contemporary analytic tradition than in the early Chinese tradition. Still, it is useful for us to look at the issue of the proper bearer of truth values, as this issue comes up again when we consider various issues in Chinese theories of truth.
To call something a linguistic entity with assertoric content is relatively vague. What kinds of entity have such content, and are each of these able to have truth values? One view holds that it is sentences that have such content, where sentences are concrete linguistic constructions, such as "the sky is blue" or "I woke up at 6am today." What makes these sentences true is a matter of theory independent of this issue, which I get into in depth below, but the sententialist view takes them to be the primary truth value-bearers. In the early development of the analytic tradition, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell recognized that there might be a problem with taking sentences to be truth-bearers. One issue is whether we take sentence types or tokens to be the bearers of truth value. It seems clear that sentence types will not work. The reason for this is that a sentence type may mean very different things in different tokens, or utterances, of it. How do we make sense of the truth of the sentence "I woke up at 6am today" as a type, given that two different utterances of the sentence, one of which is made on a Tuesday on which I did wake up at 6, the other on a Wednesday on which I didn't wake up at 6, will have different truth values? Because of the indexicality involved in the sentence (both "I" and "today" refer differently depending on the individual who utters the sentence and the time of its utterance — or writing), we have to say that the two sentence tokens, which have different truth value, also have different meaning, that they say different things. And thus not only can it not be a sentence type that bears truth value, but it also looks like we have a problem making sense of how two tokens of the same type can have (possibly very) different meaning.
Another problem with sentences, as Russell pointed out, is that there are certain sentences for which the truth value seems undetermined. Sentences referring to nonexistent or fictional individuals, for example, seem to fall into this category. Russell's famous example of such a sentence was "The current King of France is bald." We cannot seemingly accord this sentence token any truth value, not because of any failure of the predicate, but because there is no current King of France, and thus the first part of the sentence fails to refer. But if this can be the case, that we have sentences that cannot take a truth value, how do we make sense of sentences as the primary truth-bearers? There must be some way to analyze this sentence, Russell and others thought, that could make sense of it as false, rather than simply as meaningless or without truth value.
The answer for Russell was to move to an alternative view of assertoric linguistic content, one that held propositions to determine the content of sentences and to be the primary bearers of truth value. Propositions, according to Russell, are expressed by sentences but not identical to sentences. One way we might think of them is as the content of sentences, what the sentences say or convey. Thus, if we return to an above example, the sentence "I woke up at 6am today" uttered by me this day expresses the proposition that [Alexus McLeod woke up at 6am on September 11, 2014] — a proposition that just turns out to be true. The move to propositions allows us to analyze the problematic sentences that Russell considers, because propositional content is in some sense hidden in some sentences. That is, the straightforward reading of a sentence does not always suggest the proposition expressed by the sentence. Russell analyzes "the present King of France is bald" as expressing the propositional content [there is some x such that x is the present King of France, and x is bald]. This proposition is clearly false, because the first clause of the first conjunct is false. There is no x such that x is the present King of France. Since this is the case, the entire proposition takes the value of false. The propositional view here transforms this sentence into an existential statement and a predicative one.
Propositions, however, have their own difficulties. One of the biggest is specifying just what kinds of thing propositions are. They seem unacceptably mysterious. Propositions are the content expressed by sentences, but are not themselves sentences. How do we make sense of a linguistic content that is expressible in sentence form, but analyzable independently of sentences? How do we approach the existence and identity of such things? It seems like we can only really work with sentences and get at propositions through them — but then how do we make sense of what propositions are in the first place, beyond the claim that whatever they are, they are what make sentences (derivatively) true? This lack of clarity led some to reject the idea of propositions.
The right position concerning truth-bearers should be largely independent from theory of truth, although we will see that there tend to be connections between these views. Indeed, one of the major points of contention in the debate on truth in early Chinese thought is whether there are any linguistic entities discussed by early Chinese philosophers that are capable of being truth-bearers. When we discuss theories of truth proper, we generally have in mind the kinds of views concerning how we understand the predicate
Part of the difficulty here is that, in general, when we seek an account of truth we are looking for that which all statements that are true have. We want to discover what it is that truths (in plural) share in common that makes them true. We say that it is true that "the sky is blue," that "2 + 2 = 4," that "harming others is wrong," and that "slavery was an important issue underlying the American Civil War." If there is a predicate of truth that expresses a robust property, then there must be some property held by all true statements, and the task of the philosopher is to discover and give an account of just what that property is and how a statement comes to have such a property.
Of course we will see that, in the early Chinese tradition no less than in the analytic tradition, there are those who disagree that there is a property of truth at all. In contemporary philosophy, this is most often held by those who deny that
Realist theories of truth come in a variety of forms. In general, realists hold that there is a genuine and robust property (whether more or less robust) expressed by the predicate
I identify here four major categories of the realist truth theory. First, there are what might be called correspondence theories. In this type of theory, truth is taken to be a relation between statements (propositions or sentences) and facts or states-of-affairs. Many of the proponents of correspondence theory claim for it the status of most consistent with common sense. There is a strong intuition underlying our notion of truth, one we might call the "correspondence intuition," that a statement is true when the world is as it claims the world is, when reality lines up with a statement. While this is probably the case, even across traditions, it turns out that there is no privileged connection between the correspondence intuition and the correspondence theory. It may not be the case that the best way to flesh out the intuition, or explain why we have such an intuition, involves correspondence theory. Perhaps, as some claim, the correspondence intuition can best be explained on a deflationist account of truth!
In general, correspondence theories take states-of-affairs to make statements true (generally thought of as propositions here, but there can be alternatives as well), in virtue of standing in the relation of correspondence. There are a few problems here, however, that the correspondence theorist will have to deal with. First, what does it mean for a state-of-affairs to correspond to a statement? It is not that the statement describes or otherwise expresses the state-of-affairs (it may do this as well, but this is not what its truth consists in). It is unclear how we ought to understand this relation, and what explanation of it we could possibly give beyond the basic claim of correspondence. The relation seems hard to define. In addition, we have the problem of specifying states-of-affairs. What is the scope of a state-of-affairs? Does a statement correspond to the entire "way the world is"? Or instead to some part of it? But how do we make sense of correspondence with some narrowly specified state-of-affairs unless we already have a concept of truth prior to correspondence, to specify the proper contours of the state-of-affairs? That is, it cannot be something within our statement itself that determines the states-of-affairs — these have to be independent of our statements. But then is it plausible to think that states-of-affairs are distinguished in the world in discrete ways that can be captured by statements? That my act of pouring coffee this morning is ontologically distinct from other acts, including that of lifting the mug to avoid spilling while pouring my coffee? As we will see, while something like a correspondence intuition may have been widespread in early Chinese philosophy (although certainly nowhere near universal), the correspondence theory as understood in contemporary Western philosophy was less influential (although we may take some early Chinese views as radically different versions of a kind of correspondence theory, such as what we find in Zhuangzi and Huainanzi, discussed in chapter 5 below).
(Continues...)
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