Abstract
My answer will be ‘no’. And I’ll defend it by: (i) distinguishing a concept’s having normative import from its being functionally normative; (ii) sketching a method for telling whether or not a concept is of the latter sort; (iii) responding to the antideflationist, Dummettian argument (extended in different directions by Crispin Wright, Huw Price, and Michael Lynch) in favor of the conclusion that truth is functionally normative; (iv) proceeding to address a less familiar route to that conclusion—one that’s consistent with deflationism about truth, but that depends on the further assumption that meaning is intrinsically normative; and (v) arguing that this further assumption is mistaken.
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Notes
Deflationism is articulated and defended in Horwich (1998a), Field (1994), and in the first three chapters of Horwich (2010). The subtly different forms of this general perspective on truth aren’t relevant here. But for a discussion of their relative merits, see “Varieties of Deflationism” (the third of those chapters).
A third thing one might mean by calling a given concept “normative” is that the fact about a word in virtue of which the word expresses that concept is articulated in functionally normative terms (e.g. that the word ought to be used in some specified way). But whether truth in particular is “normative” in this sense is not an especially interesting question. For if its answer if ‘yes’, that will almost certainly be because concepts in general are normative (in that sense)—that is, because every word’s meaning what it does is constituted by some distinctive fact about how it ought to be used (rather that some fact about how it is used). However, if this turned out to be so, then—by a line of argument that we’ll examine later—one would have reason to think that meaning is functionally normative; and that would in turn provide grounds for concluding that truth is functionally normative too.
The view is due to Ewing (1939). Let me repeat that although I’m supposing (for ease of exposition) that Ewing’s view is correct, nothing of importance here hangs on that assumption. My main line of argument is consistent with there being a collection of fundamental normative concepts (including perhaps the objective ought).
“\({<}\hbox {p}{>}\)” is an abbreviation of “the proposition that p”.
Let me emphasize that the norms at issue here concern the value for its own sake of true belief. They are not assertions of what we should do for practical reasons, i.e. for the sake of achieving our non-epistemic goals. They apply across the board—even to beliefs whose truth or falsity can obviously have no practical implications. This is not to deny that we do also respect certain relatively restricted instrumental belief-truth norms. This respect probably can be explicitly justified by showing how it promotes the satisfaction of our desires. But that justification cannot transfer over to the non-instrumental belief-truth norms under discussion here. The most that can be conjectured (as suggested in the text) is that our justified acceptance of the limited instrumental norms might help explain our attachment to ‘the value of truth for its own sake’. For further discussion, see Horwich (2014).
I’m leaning here on Hartry Field’s ingenious step-by-step reconstruction of our commitment to the full disquotation schema. See Field (1986). It might be objected to both of us that even in applying the basic, restricted idiolectal schema, a person must appreciate that her quoted sentence (to which “true\(^{*}_\mathrm{me}\)” is attributed) has the same meaning as the sentence she uses (on the right hand side) to specify its truth condition. So she must already possess the concept meaning! And so there would appear to be no disquotation schema that’s stripped down to the point that a grasp of that concept isn’t presupposed. But such a concession would be premature. One way of avoiding it is to restrict the basic schema to idiolects in which there aren’t any ambiguities. And an alternative way (—see Horwich, “A Defense of Minimalism”, chapter 3 of Truth-Meaning-Reality, op. cit.) is to let the basic schema take the form, “The immediately following sentence is true iff p”. (My thanks to an anonymous Synthese reviewer for pressing me on this point).
It might be thought that a simple alternative route to the conclusion that meaning is not normative could proceed by arguing (following Mill and Russell) that word-meanings are just objects and properties, and that sentence-meanings and propositions are just ordered n-tuples of such things. But this would be to confuse (i) the fact in virtue of which a word has certain meaning, with (ii) whatever is meant by the word. It may well be that the meaning itself, the thing meant, is picked out by a non-normative concept, whilst the relational property of possessing that meaning is normative.
Gibbard (2012) argues, on the contrary, that normative meaning-properties can after all explain non-normative facts of word-use, because those properties are constituted naturalistically. But, although it’s indeed plausible that the ways we ought to use our words depend on how we tend to use them, the view that this dependence is just like the dependence of water on H\(_{2}\)O—i.e. that it’s a matter of constitution, or grounding, or reduction, or property identity—strikes me as quite implausible. Even if the fundamental moral norm were that pleasure (and only pleasure) is good, we surely couldn’t conclude that pleasure and goodness are exactly the same thing. For detailed discussion see Horwich (forthcoming).
Needless to say, the above critique of the view that meaning is normative doesn’t at all do justice to the voluminous literature advocating that view (including the works cited Kripke 1982; McDowell 1984; Gibbard 1994, 2012; Brandon 1994; Hawthorne and Lance 1997; Boghossian 2005; Ginsborg 2011). But I hope to have at least supplied the outlines of a promising strategy of refutation. For a fuller treatment see Horwich (forthcoming). Some earlier reactions against the normativist perspective are: Horwich (1998b), Wilkforss (2001), Horwich (2005), Hattiangadi (2006) and Gluer and Wilkforss (2009).
See footnote 1 (above) for some references to works in which the merits of the deflationary view of truth are elaborated.
This paper is based on presentations at the University of Venice workshop on “Truth” (September 2014), at the University of Connecticut conference on “Alethic and Logical Pluralism” (April 2015), and at the Monte Verita meetings on “Truth and Ground” (May 2015). I would like to thank the organizers of these events for giving me the opportunity to try out my ideas on this subject, and the participants for helping me to kick them into better shape. In addition, I’m grateful to Cory Wright, Joe Ulatowski, and the Synthese reviewers for further suggestions as to how my initial draft could be improved.
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Horwich, P. Is truth a normative concept?. Synthese 195, 1127–1138 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1208-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1208-8