Truth predicates, truth bearers, and their variants
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Truth predicates, truth bearers, and their variants Friederike Moltmann1
Received: 4 March 2017 / Accepted: 16 May 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Theories of truth can hardly avoid taking into account how truth is expressed in natural language. Existing theories of truth have generally focused on true occurring with that-clauses. This paper takes a closer look at predicates of truth (and related notions) when they apply to objects as the referents of referential noun phrases. It argues that truth predicates and their variants, predicates of correctness, satisfaction and validity, do not apply to propositions (not even with that-clauses), but to a range of attitudinal and modal objects, objects we refer to as ‘claims’, ‘beliefs’, ‘judgments’, ‘demands’, ‘promises, ‘obligations’ etc. As such natural language reflects a notion of truth that is primarily a normative notion, which, however, is not action-guiding, but rather constitutive of representational objects, independently of any actions that may go along with them. The paper furthermore argues that the predicate true is part of a larger class of satisfaction predicates whose semantic differences are best accounted for in terms of a truthmaker theory along the lines of Fine’s (A companion to the philosophy of language, Wiley, Chichester, 2017b) truthmaker semantics. Truthmaker theory also provides a notion of partial content for attitudinal and modal objects, which may exhibit partial correctness, partial satisfaction, and partial validity. Keywords Truth · Truthmaker · Propositions · Partial content · Satisfaction · Correctness · Normativity
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Friederike Moltmann [email protected] CNRS-IHPST, Paris, France
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Synthese
1 Introduction Natural language bears on a range of philosophical issues, and it fails to bear on others. The notion of truth is certainly one on which natural language bears a lot. Many theories of truth are focused on the way truth is conveyed in natural language, on the syntactic status of true as a predicate, connective, operator, or other linguistic ‘device’, as well as on the sorts of object that true, if considered a predicate, applies to, whether it is a proposition, an utterance, an act, or some other kind of object. Theories of truth generally care about what sorts of expressions true goes along with, that-clauses, referential NPs, quantifiers, or pronouns. Thus, a focus on true with thatclauses has given rise to views according to which true does not act as a predicate or express a property, but rather has the status of a connective or operator (Mulligan 2010), an anaphoric device (Grover et al. 1975), or a semantically empty predicate, which may just serve the purpose of stating generalizations regarding propositional contents using quantifiers or pronouns (Ramsey 1927; Horwich 1990; Künne 2003 among others). Clearly then, a closer look at the way the expression true actually applies in natural language can be very important for the philosophical debate itself. This pa
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