▶︎ 0:00 Welcome to lecture five, Truth. I've been emphasizing in these lectures the ways in which metaphysics has become dysfunctional. And dysfunctional by not paying enough attention to the different ranges of functions, the different parts of our discourse serve, especially those parts of our thought and talk that play a central role in metaphysics.
▶︎ 0:24 And I've emphasized the idea that we should start a step back by trying to examine how the relevant part of language functions, whether we're talking about numbers or properties or morality or possibility, before we jump into asking metaphysical questions about what the things are or what their natures are and so on.
▶︎ 0:45 So far, I've tried to show how taking this approach, which I've characterized as a kind of conceptual engineering involving both a reverse engineering that involves understanding those terms and a constructive form of engineering, how that can help us unravel some old problems in metaphysics. And so far, I've talked about problems to do with the existence of properties and numbers and about morality, about understanding moral discourse and moral obligations, moral facts, and moral properties.
▶︎ 1:16 In this lecture, I'm going to talk about truth. Now, there's an additional reason for talking about truth here. Not only are there classic metaphysical problems about what truth is, about the nature of truth and so on, but there's also reason why we need to think again about truth, given that in lecture one, I raised problems for truthmaker theory.
▶︎ 1:42 So back then, I noted that those who think that the job of metaphysics is to find truthmakers for all of our truths, what aspects of the world make true our claims about morality, about possibility, about numbers, et cetera, that they rely on a false assumption that all of our ways of talking work in the same way to describe features of the world that are suitable to make them true. And I know that there have been huge problems in trying to identify anything like worldly truthmakers for moral or modal talk, for example, or even talk about abstract properties and numbers.
▶︎ 2:21 But if you give up truthmaker theory, then many people are going to get worried. They're going to say, well, how can you retain the idea that our claims about the possibility of rain tomorrow, or about the morality of waterboarding, or even about numbers, that these can be true or false if you don't keep the idea that the world's got to make them true. So we need another way of understanding truth in order to keep our functional pluralist outlook, while also maintaining the idea that, wait, there are standards, and we can still apply the idea of truth or falsehood to talk of all these types. So that's what I'll be talking about in this lecture.
▶︎ 3:09 There's another reason, though, that I think that talk about truth and understanding how it works is really important. Not just because by properly understanding it, we can avoid old metaphysical problems about truth and still maintain that there are truths. But also, there's been a lot of talk lately about the value of truth. There's been talk in the media lately about us living in a post-truth era.
▶︎ 3:36 And in the face of this, and in a situation in which well-researched journalism is often dismissed as fake news, in which well-tested vaccines are rejected, thinking that they are effective is just rejected as political, and so on. There's been a real call to say we need to reassert the value of truth and talk about the value of truth, and the idea that it's not just a matter of what anyone or those in power or whatever say is true. Now, that's not wrong. We do need to have a better understanding of the value of truth.
▶︎ 4:19 But if you just put it in those bare terms, we've got to reassert the value of truth, it can sound like empty words or mystical, as if we think of truth as some kind of golden idol out there that we're going to shine up and preserve. And if you think of it in these mystical terms, it's harder to take it seriously and to see what it really means and to feel the pull of it.
▶︎ 4:43 So one of the things that I'll come back to at the end is to try to show how the way of understanding the functions and the value of truth talk can give us a way of understanding why truth is important and how we can preserve these kinds of standards, as well as dispelling some old metaphysical puzzles and problems about truth. So I'll come back to that at the end. That's the payoff.
▶︎ 5:08 But first, let's skip back to some traditional metaphysical problems about truth, because the main theme of this series of lectures is why metaphysics has become dysfunctional and what we can do instead. Traditional metaphysical debates about truth ask what look like world-oriented, worldly questions. What is truth? What is its nature? How is truth grounded in the world? What explains what it is that makes our statements true? We talked about some of the problems with getting answers to those questions, especially for types of talk that don't obviously track worldly features, that have other functions.
▶︎ 5:45 Now, there have been traditional responses to this line of questioning. Probably the classic one is a correspondence theory of truth that would say, look, truth is a relational property. It's a property that a sentence or a proposition has when it corresponds in the right sort of way to features of reality or to the facts, when the world makes it true. And as I mentioned, this way of thinking about truth runs into a lot of traditional difficulties in accounting for the truth of moral statements, modal statements, mathematical statements, et cetera.
▶︎ 6:22 So in line with the general approach of this series of lectures, I want to insist that we should start a step back, not asking what truth is or what this property consists in or is grounded in, but instead asking questions about the functions of truth talk.
▶︎ 6:41 Why do we even have a term like true or truth in our vocabulary to begin with? What does it do for us? How do we, and can we introduce it on the basis of simpler forms of talk? There have been some prior answers to questions about the functions of truth talk. The traditional correspondence view just presupposes an answer, that truth is a predicate that serves to describe some property that some sentences or propositions have and others lack, and they have it if they correspond to the facts of the world.
▶︎ 7:16 But there've also been some other approaches to understanding the functions of truth talk that don't rely on thinking of it as just describing some property of the world, like anemic describes some property of people's health, their blood, or like furry describes a property of some dogs. There's been instead a range of different, what you might call deflationary or pragmatic answers to the question: how does truth talk function? One of the most famous is developed and defended by Paul Horwich. And what Horwich says is, look, we don't have to go searching for the nature of a property of truth. The term true is a device of generalization, as he put it.
▶︎ 7:57 Why would we want a term like true in our vocabulary? Well, it enables us to generalize in some really handy ways. So you can listen to what your friend Sally, who's very trustworthy, says, and you can nod along, and you can say, Sally said that today is Thursday, and today is Thursday. Sally said that the price of corn is going up, and the price of corn is going up, et cetera. And you can say yeah to all of that. But with the term true in your vocabulary, you can generalize, and you can say things like, everything Sally said is true.
▶︎ 8:32 And importantly, you can say that without having to repeat everything Sally said, like I just did, even without having to know it. You could say whatever it was that Sally said, and I don't know what it was, but it's bound to be true. So you can even make what Horwich calls blind generalizations. That is, without knowing or repeating the content of what was said, and can say that it's true.
▶︎ 8:55 Now, Horwich develops this as an explicitly deflationary or minimalist understanding of truth and insists that there's nothing more to uncover about the nature of truth than that it serves these functions and that it can be introduced by the simple rule, known in philosophy as a T schema, that you're entitled to move from any statement T, like snow is white, to say that snow is white is true, and back and forth. Others have said, though, that Horwich doesn't get the whole story.
▶︎ 9:24 The pragmatist philosopher Cheryl Misak says true has a role in amplifying what we assert and in making generalizations, like Horwich said. But how could we possibly think that these are the only functions of is true that we need to account for? And she goes on to identify several other roles of having a term like true in our vocabulary.
▶︎ 9:50 One thing we do is we use true or truth to specify what we aim at when we make assertions or when we deliberate. What we're trying to do is to reach the truth. Suppose you're in a jury. What you want to do is to reach the truth in making a verdict. We also need it to describe improvements in belief, say, as we gain more scientific knowledge, as getting closer to the truth.
▶︎ 10:14 We might want to distinguish discourses that do and do not aim at the truth. So, expressions of taste and preference, chocolate ice cream is great. In a way, that doesn't really aim at the truth. That's just expressing my preferences. But other forms of discourse talk about, say, the shape of the Earth or the location of Cairo, do aim at the truth.
▶︎ 10:37 We also, she says, we want to be able to use the notion of truth in logic, for example, to be able to say which forms of inference preserve truth or which kinds of statement are always true just given the logical form of the statement. For example, saying P or not P for any P, it's snowing or it's not snowing, is always true according to most logical systems.
▶︎ 11:00 Now, Huw Price introduces a different analysis of the functions of truth, what he calls an expressivist analysis. He's also a neopragmatist philosopher. And he takes himself to disagree with Horwich about the essential functions of the term true, because he says Horwich's view that true serves as a device of generalization, that's all fine, but it can't account for what Price calls the normativity of truth. The idea that the truth is something we should believe and should aim to assert, should aim to get to in our inquiries.
▶︎ 11:34 On Price's view, truth serves as what he calls a third norm of assertion. That is, what standard should you try to follow when you say something in an assertive way or tone? Well, first, you should be sincere. That's familiar. Second, you should have warrant for it. You should have grounds for asserting what you assert. But Price says we need more than that. We need to also follow a norm of truth. You ought to say what's true, where that outstrips just what you're sincere about and what you have some evidence for. You can have evidence, and it'll still turn out to be wrong. So truth on Price's analysis, this is a quote, "Gives disagreement its immediate normative character, a character on which dialogue depends, and which no lesser norm provides."
▶︎ 12:22 I'll come back to Price's view in a minute, but one of the first goals I have here is to look at these three different views about the functions of truth talk and see if we can find a way to bring them together to a more total assessment of the different functions of truth talk. And the way I'll do this is parallel to what I did with moral discourse in the prior lecture. Try to give us a step-by-step analysis of simpler, more basic forms of discourse, and how from there we could evolve to talking of what is true or to talk of truth now using the noun, and just try to uncover what functions are added at each stage of development.
▶︎ 13:07 Let's do that now. What are the functions of truth talk? A first caution here, as I've suggested elsewhere, is don't assume there's just one, that there's just a single function. Functions often get layered up as we add on these more sophisticated grammatical developments in language. I think we can begin from an original function of talk in that vicinity. What do we need? We are social creatures, and we're creatures that have to interact in our environment, hopefully in ways that will be successful, that will aid our survival and thriving and meeting our needs and desires.
▶︎ 13:53 We all have different points of view. We have needs to exchange information and to screen that information, what we can rely on and what we can't. We have needs to listen to what others say, but also to accept some of what they say and reject some of what they say, and to figure out what we can and cannot rely on. Let's start there.
▶︎ 14:22 Going back to Price's view. As I mentioned a minute ago, Price says Horwich can't account for the normative role of truth, why we should accept some statements and reject others. Price thinks of this as really essential to enabling us to impose a kind of pressure for reconciling our views with those of others. When we have a disagreement, when someone says something that doesn't match what I said or would say or what I previously believed, then we get a kind of disagreement that, if this is truth-oriented talk rather than just expressing preferences about ice cream flavors or something like that, that needs reconciliation.
▶︎ 15:07 Price says, this is a quote, "Assertoric speech acts," when you make an assertion, say something in an assertive tone, "are taken to be subject to a distinctive norm of correctness, whose primary use rule is that disagreement is to be interpreted by default as a sign of fault." So that if I assert something, you assert something that contradicts it, we've got to assume that at least one of us is wrong. And it's this that, as Price says, puts the cogs in cognition. That is, it gives the kind of friction needed to encourage us to pursue inquiry and figure out what's right and what's wrong. Creates a space for further improvement.
▶︎ 15:53 Now, I think all that is right and really cool, but what else I think is that we don't really need the word true or truth to do that. All we really need is some kind of basic practices of accepting and rejecting what others say, say assertively. Saying yes or no, or more commonly in contemporary English, yeah or nah to what other people say. And Price even notices this at one stage. He says, "The notions of truth and falsity give voice to more primitive implicit norms. If we start with a predicate 'is true,' then we have started too late." So I think the basic form of language to start with here isn't saying something is true or talk of truth, but just saying yes or no, yeah and nah, to what other people say.
▶︎ 16:42 We can say it to our own assertions too, but we don't tend to do that very often. So how do terms like yeah and nah function in our regular discourse? Well, the linguists identify these uses of yes and no or yeah and nah as polarity adjuncts, as part of the mood system. And the mood system, as I discussed in a prior lecture, fulfills primarily interpersonal functions. So if you say something like, "It's going to snow tomorrow," and I disagree and say, "Nah," then what I'm doing is putting myself in the social position of rejecter of your assertions. If I agree, I'm in a different position. So yeah and nah form these kinds of functions of expressing agreement or disagreement, putting myself in position of acceptor or rejecter of what you say and vice versa.
▶︎ 17:38 Now, this idea has come up in philosophy before. So A.J. Ayer, early in the 20th century, 1934, argued that true and false don't stand for anything. That they don't try to represent properties in the world, like Horwich said much later. But instead function as assertion and negation signs. Peter Strawson in 1949 compared the role of true to the role of yes in endorsing an utterance of someone else. So if I say that's true to what you said, it's like saying yes to it. He said, it's the same as saying ditto. It's a little old-fashioned now, but now we might say, "I know, right?" That's got a similar function to the yes or the true that expresses agreement. That's what yes and no in these uses seem to do. But I think it's a mistake to, as Strawson and Ayer were tempted to do, think that that exhausts the function of a term like true or truth.
▶︎ 18:39 Strawson says, quote, "We could, with no very great violence to our language, perform these relevant functions without the need for any expression which seems as true seems to make a statement." We could just say, "Yeah," "Nah," or "Ditto." But there's actually additional functions served by having a predicate like true in our vocabulary. It's not just redundant. It's not just a stylistic variant of saying yeah or nah to somebody else's assertions.
▶︎ 19:09 So what else does it do? What do we gain by moving from just being able to yes or no someone's assertions to being able to say they are true? Well, again, with the linguistics in hand, we can say this. True then gets introduced on the back of practices of saying yeah to assertions as a kind of grammatical metaphor. We get a sort of cross-grammatical category now by introducing this predicate rather than the interjection or adverbial use of yes. And this brings in some new functions.
▶︎ 19:41 One is this. It kind of makes explicit what you're doing, that you take yourself at least to be accepting someone else's assertion. Yeah can be used in many more ways than that. We can use yeah or yes to accept an assertion like, "Today is Wednesday," or to acquiesce to a proposal like, "Let's go for sushi." "Yes." But by marking it as true, you can't say, "Let's go for sushi." True. You mark it as what you're doing is accepting someone else's assertion, or at least what you take to be an assertion.
▶︎ 20:16 So that's good. I can also use true less awkwardly in English than yes to sort of reinforce my own assertions. I can say, "It is true that Kant was a great philosopher." But I can't say, like, "Yes, Kant was a great philosopher," if I'm just alone and not responding to something you said.
▶︎ 20:33 Another kind of neat feature of true is that we can use it to mark what parts of an assertion we're accepting and what we're rejecting. So, for example, you can say, if you overhear a child discussing penguins, you can say, "It is true that the penguin is a bird, but it's false that they can fly," for example. You can mark off what you're accepting and rejecting. So it has that kind of fine-grainedness.
▶︎ 20:59 It also, as we've already seen from Horwich, now we can wheel him in, bringing in true instead of yeah and nah serves as a device of generalization, so that we can now say things like, "Everything Sally said is true" without having to just repeat all of her assertions and say yeah to all of them, including blind generalizations when we don't even know or remember exactly what she said. So that's really helpful.
▶︎ 21:25 The term is true also has use, like all grammatical metaphors, as we saw in a prior lecture, in forming generalizations useful for theories and bureaucracies. So in logic, for example, we need to find a way to say that these forms of inference ensure that the conclusion is true if the premises are true. So we need that and not just yes or no, yeah or nah, to be able to say something general about forms of inference and forms of sentence like that. That's why logicians are so interested in the idea of truth.
▶︎ 22:01 In epistemology, the theory of knowledge, we might want to talk about what forms of inquiry are most likely to lead us to say something true in science, for example. But we also need it not just in our scientific theories, but in our bureaucracies. So we might need general principles that people who say something that's not true, especially in a court of law, shall be punished in the following way.
▶︎ 22:28 So being able to talk about what's true or false brings in several new functions of precision in what you're doing, of generalization, useful in theory and bureaucracy, that you can't just get with the simple yes or no to what someone else said. That's what people like Ayer and Strawson were missing. Okay, that takes up is true. What about the noun form, truth now?
▶︎ 22:51 Well, look at that. With the prior understanding of linguistics in hand, we can see that truth, the noun, is another grammatical metaphor, a nominalization derived out of the predicate is true. What new functions does that add for us? Again, it shouldn't be any surprise that this extra layer of nominalization enables us to make new forms of generalization for theory and for bureaucracy.
▶︎ 23:18 So now in things like epistemology and logic, you can say things like that Misak wanted us to be able to say. That truth is a norm of belief. That is, our belief should aim at the truth. That truth is the goal of inquiry. We could ask which forms of inference preserve truth, or which procedures of inquiry are truth conducive in different disciplines. In bureaucracy, you can then say things like, courts must always seek the truth, or newspapers must only report the truth, and so on.
▶︎ 23:55 So once again, by bringing in this linguistic work and going step by step through the different layers of linguistic development, from the very basic simple yes or no to somebody else's assertion, through to saying it's true, to saying truth, now we can capture actually all three of the prior views about the function of truth talk, the prior non-descriptivist views. That is, we can capture both the role of this, putting a norm for assertion and encouraging us to resolve disagreements with others, and the role in generalizations and the role in theorizing that were noted by Horwich, Price, and Misak. So that's pretty cool.
▶︎ 24:39 But now you might ask, okay, but what does that tell us about metaphysics? Interesting stuff about the functions of truth talk.
▶︎ 24:47 Let me talk next about the ways in which this can shed new light on old metaphysical problems about truth. As I mentioned at the outset, the classic metaphysical problems about truth involve asking questions like what is truth? What kind of property is it? How is it grounded in features of the world? And questions about what the truth makers are for moral statements, for statements about possibilities, et cetera.
▶︎ 25:13 Now the pragmatic analysis I've just given us, that goes step by step through these added functions, gives us a way to account for why we would introduce this kind of talk and speak of statements as being true or false without having to think that what we're doing is reporting on some special glowy feature that some statements have and others don't. Where we could then demand an explanation of how this special glowy feature is grounded in more basic features of the world. Now, that doesn't mean that we should deny that there is a property of truth. Again, I think property talk, as I discussed in a prior lecture, can be understood as being introduced by rules that just take you from something like, "The barn is red," to, "The barn has the property of redness." Or in pretty much any case, barring paradox, I'll leave that to the side for now, from X is Q to X has the property of being Q, for any Q.
▶︎ 26:12 So we can move from this sentence is true to this sentence has the property of truth, for example, and that's fine. In that way, we can come to talk about the property of truth, but this talk is derived from simpler forms of speech by introducing these nominalizations, it's not reporting on some observed feature of the world. Moreover, we can see that talk of properties can be introduced from different bases. So in the talk of the redness of the barn, we start from an observational term. The barn is red. From there, we can say the barn has the property of redness.
▶︎ 26:56 But truth talk starts from a kind of interpersonal discourse. We begin by just yesing or no-ing other people's assertions, then we come to say it is true or it is false, and from there, from saying that the statement is true, we can say it has the property of truth and come to speak of the property of truth. And we aren't even starting from observational discourse here. So the idea that we should find some worldly feature that can ground the property of truth is just really obviously misguided in this case.
▶︎ 27:31 So in this way, we can totally accept and say with a straight face there is a property of being true, there is such a thing as truth. But what we're not doing is reporting on some sort of feature we've observed or discovered in the world. Instead, it's this kind of introduced term nominalization by the time we get to truth itself, that serves all sorts of useful functions for us.
▶︎ 27:57 You might be listening to this and say, that was an interesting story about how talk of truth comes from talk of what is true, and that comes from saying yes or no to what other people say. That's all cool, but look, why do we or should we say yes to some assertions and no to others? Why do we yeah sometimes and nah others? Don't we just yeah those assertions that are true? Isn't that the standard for saying yes to someone's assertion? But if that's the way it goes, then you've gotten us precisely nowhere because we had to presuppose a notion of truth in order to understand what's going on in those really primitive practices of saying yes to some assertions and no to others.
▶︎ 28:42 Let me talk about how to respond to that now. The people who want to say that want to say, look, we need a generalized standard for accepting and rejecting assertions, and that just is accept them if they're true. Or if you want to put it in other terms, let's go back to the correspondence theory. Accept them if they correspond to the facts in the world. And the correspondence theorist will say, I can do that, what have you got?
▶︎ 29:12 So let me just say why I think that reply actually won't do. It's true that truth and correspondence with the facts go together, but it won't do as a generalized explanation. So let's talk for a minute about fact talk. How does fact talk get introduced? What are its functions? Well, look, fact talk also isn't basic. It's introduced as a grammatical metaphor out of sentences that we accept.
▶︎ 29:41 So we can move from any statement P, like it's hot today, to say it's a fact that P, it's a fact that it is hot today. That's absolutely fine, but what we're doing now is introducing a new nominalization that will enable us to make certain kinds of generalizations, like scientific papers must correctly report the facts, or facts are more useful for guiding our action than fiction. Or the courts must find the facts before they reach a decision. Facts talk is really useful for all these generalizing forms. But it's a nominalization out of those sentences we accept, and it can't explain them.
▶︎ 30:20 Or this would again just be like a dormitive virtue explanation. Why is it true that it's hot today? Because it's a fact that it's hot today. That's just a more nominalized way of saying the same thing while adding new functions to your vocabulary. So facts and truth do go together. That's why people end up taking this view. But appeal to the facts can't tell us why we should accept the original assertion. Instead, you get talk of the facts emerging out of the original assertion. And any appeal to it that's supposed to explain stuff would just be a dormitive virtue explanation.
▶︎ 30:59 If you can't do it by appealing to the facts, what are the standards for when we should accept or reject an assertion? And I don't want to do it by saying when it's true. We also don't want to say accept it if you agree with it, or if it serves your own interests, or if your community agrees with it, because we know all of those can go wrong. And the appeal to truth is in some ways an appeal to neutral standards outside of my desires or beliefs or those of my community.
▶︎ 31:32 Well, we can get a clue here from the pragmatist work of Cheryl Misak again. Misak, who is working from Peirce's view of truth, the American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, says the pragmatist will say that truth is proper assertion, but different discourses have different standards for proper assertion. So let's work with that idea. I think one of the problems behind the original correspondence view of truth, truth maker theories, is a faulty and artificial overgeneralization, not entirely unlike the overgeneralization about the functions of discourse that I criticized in the first lecture and saw as leading metaphysics astray.
▶︎ 32:19 I think what we need to do here is to reject the demand for a very generalized way of saying what the norm is for accepting any assertion whatsoever, whether it's a legal assertion, an assertion in chemistry, in art criticism, in physics, in history, whatever. Instead, different forms of discourse serve different functions, as I've been emphasizing. And these different forms of discourse may then have different appropriate standards, standards that, if all goes well, are in place because they help to serve the functions of that form of discourse. Then we can see the term true as marking what has met whatever the relevant local standards are for that form of discourse and enabling us then to have that kind of security to move forward with using that assertion in further reasoning, whether it's legal reasoning, reasoning in chemistry, psychiatry, whatever the case may be.
▶︎ 33:19 So what are these different standards? Well, that's a life's work, and I certainly can't cover all of that in one lecture, and I don't know how to do it all now. I'm not an expert in every field. We could say some things to at least give you the idea of how this might go.
▶︎ 33:35 So come back to observational discourse, the sort of language that we learned first, along with a few social terms like greetings and things like that. We learn to say things like, the cat is on the mat, the dog is under the tree, snow is white, whatever. We learn these by observing. What are the standards there? If I say it's snowing and you don't believe me, go look out the window and see for yourself. Or better still, step into the snow and feel it and so on. Go make further observations. If I tell you that the deer went behind the tree, go out and try to see it.
▶︎ 34:11 So observational discourse has certain standards of confirmation or disconfirmation through further observations. And depending on what kind of observation this is, we also have built-in standards for how to correct for possible illusions or errors. We know how to correct for the typical observational error that comes with seeing a straw as bent in water. You pull it out, and you can see really that it's straight, and you can see it from many angles. So observational discourse has observational standards, and you can try to articulate those more formally, but we all know roughly how it goes. But that's not how it goes for every form of discourse, and it's not likely to go through for other forms of discourse like discourse about what's possible or necessary, mathematical discourse, you can't just go look to find the square root of two, moral discourse, and many others.
▶︎ 35:07 I'll do one more example for you so you see how the standards can vary. This is something I've developed elsewhere. What about the standards for accepting claims about what's possible or necessary? Now, these claims are made in different ways. I'm going to talk about those claims about what's metaphysically possible or necessary. For example, it's necessary that a square have four sides, let's say as an example, or it's necessary that a bachelor be unmarried, and so on.
▶︎ 35:34 What's the function of these claims of necessity and possibility? Again, you can't just see it. You can't go out and observe it, that the necessary features of something don't glow. What I argue in my 2020 book, Norms of Necessity, is that these claims about what's possible and necessary that get used in metaphysics serve a function of giving a kind of object language, and it's not a kind of metalanguage, way of expressing what the rules are for using these terms.
▶︎ 36:03 So suppose you're a child and you're given a math quiz to identify the rectangles. And you leave one, you don't mark off the one that to you looks like a square because you're like, oh, that's a square, that's not a rectangle. And then your teacher may communicate your error to you by saying, no, no, actually, rectangles may have, it's possible that a rectangle have four sides of equal length. And in that way, your teacher communicates to you the standards for using the term rectangle, that it doesn't exclude being square, that the sides can be of the same length or of different lengths. And if I say a square, however, must have, it's necessary that a square have four sides of equal length, then I communicate to you the rules of use for the term square, that it requires four sides of equal length in a way that rectangle doesn't.
▶︎ 36:57 So those are the standards for using a claim of metaphysical necessity, that it reflects a kind of rule for using this form of language, or sometimes what follows from these rules, either through logical inferences or by also adding in empirical worldly facts. Not trying to get into all those details here, but that gives you a glimpse of how there can be different standards. Not here a kind of correspondence to some underlying metaphysical reality or to what possible worlds they are, but to reflecting properly the relevant linguistic standards. And we can see why we have those standards for good reason and why we would want this talk, because the function of this kind of talk of what's possible and what's necessary is helping us to maintain a kind of well-functioning, communicative community where we use terms in the same way, so we can talk with each other clearly about what is and isn't square or rectangular or many other things.
▶︎ 37:54 So in each case, the functions of the discourse, of observational discourse, to enable us to interact in the world in successful ways, or of modal discourse to enable us to maintain a kind of communicative community where we understand each other. The standards reflect the functions of the discourse, and the statement is true if it conforms to the relevant standards.
▶︎ 38:19 All right, so I don't have time to go into standards for other forms of discourse here, but this will give you the idea, at least. Obviously, in mathematics, it's something more like do the relevant calculation, and you learn how to do the calculations to find square roots as you learn to do math. The point is, for here, that we should give up the demand and the search for some discoverable worldly property that all true statements have, and we should give up the search for some generalized criterion for truth that applies across all forms of discourse. But there are standards for what assertions to accept and what to reject. And from accepting a statement P, we can then move on to say it's true that P, and that enables us to do new things, and it marks it as usable for further reasoning.
▶︎ 39:08 The standards themselves at use in any of these forms of discourse aren't arbitrary. The appropriate standards will vary for different forms of discourse that serve different kinds of functions, and they're always open to criticism to say why these standards aren't quite serving the functions the way we want, and we should revise them. In any case, the standards are pragmatically justified by what we need this discourse to do for us.
▶︎ 39:33 There's an old line about pragmatist theories of truth. People think of them as if they're saying what's true is just what's useful. Or worse still, what's true is what's useful to me. But hopefully, you can see why on this pragmatist understanding of truth, that's not at all the case. The standards are what's useful for serving the functions of the area of discourse.
▶︎ 39:56 So what the standards are, aren't up to us. It's what's actually useful for fulfilling the function of the discourse. And whether a particular statement, empirical statement, statement about necessity, mathematical statement, actually succeeds at those standards and meets those standards or not, is also totally not up to us and is open for discovery via different methods. So we have a pragmatist understanding of truth that is very much standards-governed, very much not anything goes. But once again, by taking this pragmatic approach that involves understanding the functions of the discourse, we can avoid or rethink a lot of the old metaphysical problems about truth.
▶︎ 40:41 The payoff here isn't just negative in telling us that we can get rid of some of the old metaphysical problems about truth. It's also positive because as I suggested at the beginning, it can tell us something about the importance and the value of truth and why we should value truth. I think this is actually hard to get on the old-fashioned metaphysicalized views of truth. Just invoking claims that we ought to care about truth, that truth is highly valuable, can really just sound like empty words, or as if it's some worldly discoverable property, but we have no idea how to discover it. It sounds just like we're trying to track some golden idol that's not there.
▶︎ 41:24 It's also hard to see on the metaphysicalized view why we should care about truth. If truth's just some worldly thing, why is it something that should govern our belief, our investigations, and so on? Where does this should come from? There we encounter what Shamik Dasgupta has called the problem of missing value. How could some mere metaphysical thingy in the world engage what we ought to do, what we ought to think, how we ought to reason or believe?
▶︎ 41:53 Huw Price puts it this way, quote, "Imagine for a moment that there were a substantial property of truth," like the metaphysicians were looking for. "Why should we aim for beliefs that possess this property? Not for their own sake, presumably, but because such beliefs are valuable in some other sense. Because they dispose to behavioral success, for example."
▶︎ 42:18 If we take instead the kind of pragmatic approach to truth that I've been defending, we can see why we should care about truth and what it is to care about truth. On this view, caring about truth is caring about standards, where the standard isn't just will it serve my interests or the interests of my rich and powerful friends. The standards are neutral. They don't care about my personal interests. They often serve interests that we all share, like being able to communicate or being able to act successfully in the world, or being able to preserve public health. And we care about these standards because we care about the functions that they serve.
▶︎ 43:03 So if people reject well-verified scientific claims, say, about vaccine effectiveness or about climate change, or if people reject carefully done findings of the courts, what's concerning really is that they ignore the standards for accepting assertions in all of these areas and just replace them with whatever I want to say or whatever's in my interests, or whatever I wish was true, or I wish to believe. But the standards that govern accepting assertions of any of these kinds are outside of my personal interests and anyone's personal interests. And they're there for good reasons, reasons to do with serving the functions of the discourse, whether in enabling successful medical treatments, enabling explanation, prediction, and intervention in meteorological events, preserving public confidence in the procedural justice of the courts, and so on. To ignore these standards is to ignore what we want and what we all need these forms of discourse for in the first place, which concern issues of public interest of various kinds, whether health, communication, successful action.
▶︎ 44:19 So to speak of the value of truth is to speak of the value of standards and adhering to them because they're there for good reasons. On this view then, the value of truth is not some mystical golden idol or some undetectable property that we expect to glow forth from some assertions. The value of truth is the value of standards, and the value of standards lies in what they can do for all of us. So in this way, this kind of reverse engineering approach to understanding truth, I think, can not only demystify some of the old metaphysical problems of truth, but also clarify and reinforce the importance of truth in our lives.