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The concept 'truth' has troubled philosophers for ages. We are in the habit of using the predicate "is true" of some statements we utter, but not other ones. In fact, other statements are considered the very opposite. We come up with statements such as "it is true that Boston is in New York" or “it is true that there is a knife on the kitchen table”. When we talk about logical propositions or about beliefs, we say that they are “truth-apt” in that these statements are a special kind of statements insofar as they can be true or false. But what does it mean for a statements to be 'true'?
If your answer was something to the effect of “well all it means is that Boston actually is in New York and that there actually is a knife on the kitchen table”, then you may endorse the correspondence theory of truth. This theory seems to be intuitive to many people at first glance. A statement P is true just in case P corresponds to the world (to some fact/states of affair). In this sense, all it means for it to be true that the knife is on the kitchen table is for the the knife to be on the kitchen table, where the statement ‘the knife is on the kitchen table’ pictures the state of affairs in the world where a knife is sat on top of a kitchen table.
In other words, the words ‘knife’ and ‘table’ pick out certain objects in the world and the preposition ‘on the’ denotes a relation in space between the two objects, such that the proposition ‘the knife is on the table’ is true just in case it corresponds to that state of affairs. Merriam Webster defines ‘truth’ as much, suggesting that it is “the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality” and The Oxford English Dictionary says of truth that it is “Conformity with fact; agreement with reality”. According to the Philsurveys, most philosophers, indeed 51.78%, agree with this notion of ‘truth’.
Pragmatists, on the other hand, hold that only statements can be true or false, not ‘states of affairs’ or ‘a world out there’, and, crucially, statements are elements of human languages, and languages, in turn, are human constructs. Thus, truth is a human construct. There is indeed a world “out there” that causally exists independent of human minds, but ‘truth’ is not an element of that world. It is an element of human creation.
And so, all that can be said about 'truth', in any important way, is the role it plays in our communicative practices, in our discourses. So when someone says “it is true that the knife is in the kitchen”, all that is interesting about the predicate ‘is true’ in that statement is the speakers’ communicative intent; her intentional state and what she is trying to do when invoking the predicate ‘is true’.
In reply to the correspondence theorists, pragmatists maintain that there is no way to formulate an independent test that captures the accuracy of correspondence of a statement with reality. They argue that we cannot test our language and beliefs based on something other than our language and beliefs; we cannot reach out from under them into a God's eye point of view. It is as if correspondence theorists, so the pragmatists argue, think that the world is arranged in some kind of set-theoretical model, and there is a logical relation between the set theoretical symbols (our language) and things as defined by classical categorisation (the world), such that the symbols can be true or false just in case they represent those categorisations correctly. But language (or minds, if you will - these notions are used interchangeably after the linguistic turn in philosophy) is not a deductive machines, but a human construct (and, what is more, physical brains reveals itself in human beings, not a mirror of reality).
Pragmatists therefore like to rid the notion of ‘representation’ and ‘correspondence’ altogether and instead affirm the notion of ‘usefulness’; there are only more useful statements and less useful ones.
To reiterate, pragmatists do not deny the existence of an external reality that is causally independent of our descriptions of it and which exerts causal pressures on us. What they insist on is that, to make sense of the world in relation to our needs and interests, we can only produce discursive constructs of those causal pressures. There are infinite ways of producing these discursive constructs, and so pragmatists ask: “should our best causal account of how things work include the relation of X to Y, or merely an account of the relations of X to Y-talk?” (Rorty 1993). What is therefore denied by the pragmatists is that there is something additional to the world that is “the truth about the world”, and which is further explicable as “a correspondence relation between some sentences and the world”.
Consider the statement, "The Earth revolves around the Sun." A correspondence theorist would argue that this statement is true because it accurately represents the state of affairs in the world. The truth of this statement is determined by its correspondence to the behaviour of the Earth and the Sun in our solar system.A pragmatist might argue that the statement is true because it has proven to be useful and successful in our scientific practices and everyday experiences. The truth of the statement is about its practical utility in our efforts to navigate the world. The pragmatist would emphasise the role that the statement "The Earth revolves around the Sun" plays in our scientific theories, predictions, and explanations, as well as how it helps us coordinate our actions and make sense of our experiences. The truth of the statement is closely tied to its usefulness in our linguistic and social practices.
As mentioned, in rejecting the correspondence theory, some pragmatists may also affirm a positive semantic thesis of the concept ‘truth’ as being a ‘useful statement’ in which usefulness is measured as the coherence of a statement with a web of other prior statements that achieved justification by a group of language users (or by an individual language user). Pragmatists argue that correspondence theorists can't tell us whether a given statement is useful because it stands in a relationship of correspondence or whether the statement is useful independent of this relationship, just in the same way theists can’t tell us whether the good is loved by God because it is good or it is good because it is loved by God.
This attitude towards truth was originally construed by the American philosopher William James. Before becoming a philosopher, William James was a psychologist that was writing during a time (late 19th-early 20th centuries) where psychologists did not usually conduct empirical research but were gathering data through introspection (n=1). In his Principles of Psychology, James says that we always experience the world subjectively, through our subjective lenses/interpretive frameworks (think of the Blind Men and an Elephant parable).
To illustrate this, think of a car. We like to imagine ourselves, like the car, as being brutally 'there'. But there's also this world that exists outside of us. Not being a solipsist, James acknowledges brute objective facts outside of us that exist mind-independently, but his idea was that, whenever we contemplate about anything, we are always positioned as the drivers of the car, looking out into the world from our subjective experience. It is not that we aren't part of the world, it's just that every time we do anything, we always begin from our subjective experience, looking out into the world.
For James, truth is not a property of the world, or a property of an idea that mirrors the world but rather a subjective experience we have of an idea that makes us think of it that "it is true". His concern was: What is it about an idea that has to happen in order for us to experience this idea as ‘True’? James says:
You can say of it [the idea] 'it is useful because it is true' or 'it is true because it is useful'. Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing.
We know that there are objective facts about the world, again James does not deny that, but for us to call an idea 'True', the word takes an adjectival form, just as the word 'beautiful' does. Looking at a rose, one might either say 'it produces that effect in me because it is beautiful' or 'it is beautiful because it produces that effect in me'. Both those phrases mean exactly the same thing. In the first instance, I am saying that 'beauty' is a property that produces that effect on me; a descriptor of the rose rather than a descriptor of my experience. But in the second instance, 'it is beautiful because it produces that effect on me', 'beautiful' here is just a descriptor that I use to describe the things that produce that effect on me.
Likewise for James, truth is not a property of an object or an idea, but a descriptor that we use to describe a certain effect that is impressed on us. When we experience an idea as being true, it is not because it is True in a substantialist metaphysical sense (that is, that truth is a fixed, objective quality inherent in statements or ideas), but it is to give the idea an adjective; truth becomes a descriptor to communicate our subjective experience of the idea to an audience. What are we communicating about an idea when we call it 'true'? According to James, we are communicating something to the effect that it is useful, that it works, it helps us reach a goal. This perspective emphasises the role of human practices and experiences in shaping our understanding of truth, rather than positing truth as a static property of the world.
The neo/pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty added a postmodern and Wittgensteinean slant to this. Rorty's neo/pragamtism is a variation of 'traditional' pragmatism but is more conscious of language, instead of experience, and is accompanied with a kind of Nietzschean perspectivalism and a Kantian contextualism.
Roughly speaking, Rorty’s attitude towards the notion of 'truth' is that we should move on from talking about truth at all and just talk about justification. Instead of the subject-centric approach to experience as in James’ pragmatism, Rorty replaced it with Wittgenstein’s language-games which begins with people as communities. To him, justification is always a social enterprise and does not happen in isolation among the solipsistic subject “I”. In other words, whereas James’ answer to “works for whom?” is the experiencing subject, Rorty answers’ is the broader linguistic community.
Later in his career, it seems that Rorty rejected the cohereintist and pragmatist accounts of truth (but accepted fallibilist coherentism about justification), and any theory of truth for that matter, instead adopting what might be called 'truth minimalism'.
This idea is that, yes, we should have some account on how truth functions in our language games, but it should not be a substantialist account. It should rather be a ‘deflationist’ account, so that all it means for a given statement S to be true, is that S. All it means for the statement 'it is true that the book is in the cupboard' is that the book is in the cupboard. This isn't the correspondence account where behind the linguistic statement S there is a non-linguistic representation 'the fact that S' or 'the state of affairs of S' that is independent of language which makes S obtain the property 'true'. Rather, the predicate ‘is true’ is merely a figure of speech for asserting S indirectly. Rorty almost reduces meaning and truth to assertions and speech acts. In other words, meaning and truth supervene on ‘use’.
To Rorty, we cannot reach out from under our linguistic practices into a thing-in-itself and be able to make intelligible the correspondence relation between our language and the world. We can only speak of truth and falsity with respect to a particular linguistic practice. Language is a prerequisite to thought; there is no way to think first and then map that thought onto a linguistic construct. And so, there is no way to stand in an outside relation to language. Whatever relations there is between language and the world are not epistemological or explanatory, but causal; our environment causes us to construct representations through language in certain ways. And so on this construal, there is no way for some statements to be unrelated or less related to the world than others (as the correspondence theory claims), all statements are necessarily related to the world.
Let us return to truth-as-justification. If truth is “what works”, as James would argue, then the obvious question is, “works for whom?”. Indeed, this was the central premise behind the postructuralist movement in which Foucault was the leading figure. Foucault saw that power carries an enormous influence on what counts as truth, dispersed throughout society through a variety of social and institutional discourses as well as structures such as state apparatuses.
Rorty - though not entirely disagreeing with Foucault - did not take quite so black a view and thought justification is a communitarian enterprise. If you are familiar with the Gettier problem in epistemology, you will also probably be familiar with how knowledge is commonly defined as justified-true-belief. Rorty wanted to get rid of the notion of truth as it is commonly construed in mainstream analytic philosophy and focus on justification. ‘Truth’, he says, is ineffable, beyond recognition; we will never know whether a given belief is true, in the conventional substantialist sense. Whereas justification is recognisable. For example, we can know whether a given belief has received intersubjective agreement or when a given belief, at the present moment, has not received any objections. So if truth is ineffable and justification is what is aimed at, the question is then asked: justification from who? Given this derivative component of justification, Rorty’s answer is that justification must always derive from the society—the discursive community, or the democratic community—which the statement is presented to.
We can think of what Rorty means by justification as analogous to the workings of language in general. Take for instance Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of private languages where he says that language is irreducibly social. It is logically impossible, he argues, for there to be a language that is in principle unknowable to anyone but the creator of the language. Language is a system of criteria-in-use (like a game with rules for playing); there must be public intersubjective agreement on the criteria of how to use words and their meanings (i.e., for the game to be playable) and they cannot simply refer to an individual’s psychological processes. Similarly, justification—while fallible and always open to revisions by future audiences or audiences with different needs and uses—is always contingent on intersubjective agreement of a public audience. In both instance, unlike ‘truth’, intersubjectivity is the aim and not objectivity or mind-independence.
Back to Wittgenstein. So if language is not simply to communicate internal states, Wittgenstein argued that it serves a social pragmatic function: we use language to ‘Do Things with Words’. Here is where John Austin comes in with his ‘speech act theory’. Rorty’s ‘justification’ can be thought in terms of the relation between a speech act and an audiences’ uptake of the act. If I make a performative utterance which fails to be recognised as such—in technical terms, does not receive sufficient ‘uptake’ to reach ‘felicity’—then the illocutionary component of the act (the performative force of the statement) fails. For example, I aim to warn my village about the presence of a wolf, but issuing a warning requires the villagers to recognise my utterance as a warning. I am a known prankster in the village and no one ever takes anything I say seriously, so when I utter ‘there is a wolf coming!”, the villagers ignore me and do not recognise my utterance as a warning.
Likewise, Rorty says that justification for beliefs must always secure acceptance from an audience in order to succeed, and unlike truth (which he says is too sublime), audience recognition is recognisable. Rorty says that “there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart form descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society — ours — uses in one or another area of enquiry” (p.23).
Rorty, being Rorty, labels this audience ‘ethnos’. He notes that “to be ethnocentric is to divide the human race into the people to whom one must justify one’s beliefs and the others”. The first group—one’s ethnos—comprises those who share enough of one’s beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible. In this sense, “everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate, no matter how much realist rhetoric about objectivity he produces in his study” (p.30). For instance, we do not normally care to justify our statements to three year olds, because a fruitful conversation will not ensue.
Again, to be clear, 'ethnos' here does not refer to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender or any particular social group; it merely refers to a group which shares enough background beliefs with the appraiser such that engaging in a debate or discussion or conversation is made possible in the first place. For instance, I would hardly find it worth my time to try to engage a Nazi in a discussion about animal ethics and veganism because her frame of reference will be considerably different from my own, so I do not feel compelled to justify my beliefs to her. This doesn't mean I should not debate her, it just means that she is not part of my ethnos. Similarly, if I am a scientist, I would equally not find it fruitful to attempt to justify persuade a layperson - who is unenculturated into my disciplinary matrix - of the findings of my experiments on quantum mechanics. The point is that whatever speech community that you share a presupposed inter-subjective frame of reference with in which to appeal to in order to justify your beliefs, then that speech community would be considered, under Rorty’s rubric, your ethnos.
Philosopher/Historian Thomas Kuhn, well known for his revolutionary ideas about the progress of scientific knowledge, also shared a pragmatist posture towards ‘truth’ when he wrote that
Evaluation of a statement’s truth values is, in short, an activity that can be conducted only with a lexicon already in place, and its outcome depends upon that lexicon. If, as standard forms of realism suppose, a statement’s being true or false depends simply on whether or not it corresponds to the real world—independent of time, language, and culture—then the world itself must be somehow lexicon-dependent.
In other words, the truth value of a statement is dependent on the lexicon used in formulating the statement. If truth is a matter of correspondence to the world, and not based on our linguistic practices, then the world itself must be language-dependent. That is to say that truth presupposes words and concepts where statements can be so formulated; but there is no way of making statements independent from a conceptual scheme, and the world does not have our conceptual structure built into its fabrics.
The correspondence theory, in claiming that true statements "carve nature at its joints", seems to require that there are some statements that "speak the language of the world", corresponds to the worlds' own language, so to speak. It requires for there to be a set of 'right' concepts which humans discover; but human languages are historically evolving symbolic systems that, not only yield different conceptual schemes, but every conceptual scheme develops as a way to cope with an incredibly complex world, and it seems rather silly to say that our conceptual schemes represents the world as it 'really is'. And even if such a notion is somehow made intelligible, it seems highly unlikely given our knowledge of the history of languages.
In Scientific Revolutions Kuhn contends that normal science is when scientists argue by reference to shared exemplars and that agreement is possible because no one questions this paradigm as a set of shared assumptions. He also expands a bit further on his anti-representationalism in saying that "one often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalisations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.” He adds:
Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. [..] I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s.
Kuhn asserts that the notion of 'truth' is difficult to apply to whole scientific theories, as it is challenging to find a theory-independent way to determine the correspondence between the ontology of a theory and the 'real' world. He highlights the lack of a coherent direction of ontological development in the succession of scientific theories, exemplified by the fact that Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's than to Newton's in certain aspects, despite representing a progression in scientific understanding.
As can probably be guessed, I am a pragmatists in that I hold that a capital T ‘Truth’—i.e., a metaphysical and substantialist account of truth—is not the goal of inquiry; that all that can be said about truth—from natural sciences to ethics—is that there are more useful description and less useful ones. There is no criterion to know ‘truth’, they affirm, apart from justification, and justification (by definition) is always relativised to the standards of some audience.
Meaning is use-conditional, and the way the term ‘truth’ operates in or our ordinary language will vary, including as a tool of approbation and commendation, or as a compliment paid to beliefs that are well justified, or at any rate some kind of social practice, as opposed to ‘sentences that represent “Reality” accurately’. This is not to deny that ‘truth/false’ play a useful role in our language-games which we may continue to deploy, it is rather to say that giving them metaphysical and substantialist weight, like ‘correspondence to reality’, has lost its power to convince and amounts to the retention of old language games that, normatively speaking, should be thrown out because it commits us to an authority other than ourselves.
And I agree with pragmatists that, in any case, no one has been able to define what an independent ‘Reality’ is in a non-question begging way, let alone what it means to ‘represent’ it. That will require us to step outside of our linguistic practices into something transcendental to test the correspondence of our linguistic practices against. But there is no possible way of doing this.
Scientific pragmatists, for instance, would say that all we have are practices and descriptions that are judged based on theoretical virtues (simplicity, ontological economy, explanatory power etc.) designed to generate expectations. But generating expectations is not ‘representing reality’. The scientific pragmatist gives the word ‘reality’ an operative meaning with respect to her goals: predicting the future.
Answers to many questions posed in ontology are therefore pointless if the goal of enquiry is social utility as opposed to, in Plato’s words, ‘carve nature at its joints’. For pragmatists, the agent’s point of view has primacy over any appeals to something non-human and transcendental such as God’s Will or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality or History.
This shakes off the epistemological and metaphysical assumptions that were ascribed to enquiry by what Heidegger called the onto-theological tradition, and says that all we owe justification for our beliefs and action to, all we are answerable to, are other actual and possible sentient beings, and not a transcendental entity called Truth or Rationality or God etc., to which the scientist or the priest keeps humanity in touch with.
I am growing more and more suspicious about analytic philosophy broadly as a non-trivial area of enquiry, much in line with Wittgenstein. Many philosophical disputes seem to me to be pseudo-disputes that are better off ‘dissolved’ than solved. The Pragmatist William James once said, “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference [to practice] elsewhere”.
Take metaethics as an example. McPherson and Plunkket (2018: 1) admirably summarised the representationalist underpinnings of the subfield in the introduction to the latest Routledge Handbook on Metaethics. These authors take for granted that there is an antecedently given reality to which “actual ethical thought and talk […] fits into” and to which metaethical enquiry illuminates and explains. This is taken as important even if metaethical questions don’t make a difference to practice; i.e., don’t get us any closer to how we ought to act or how we should change or retain our current practices. Most normative disputes, for example, do not call into question whether there are moral facts, whether they contain semantic content, whether they are externally or internally motivating, whether they give us reasons for acting morally, etc.
Likewise, whether people are realists or anti-realist about the metaphysics of numbers does not tell us what we should do with numbers, and mathematicians can go on with their job as mathematicians without taking a position between Platonism or Empiricism vs whatever the competitive positions are, be they nominalism, intuitionism or whatever.
The same pragmatist critique can be translated perfectly easily to the field of meta-epistemology, too. Metaepistemological questions, when given a second-order reading, do not stretch into normative first-order questions about (for e.g.) how we should form justified belief nor do they account for our various sources of knowledge.