The Dual Foundation of Qualitative Truth Approximation

The main formal notion involved in qualitative truth approximation by the HD-method, viz. ‘more truthlike’, is shown to not only have, by its definition, an intuitively appealing ‘model foundation’, but also, at least partially, a conceptually plausible ‘consequence foundation’. Moreover, combining the relevant parts of both leads to a very appealing ‘dual foundation’, the more so since the relevant methodological notions, viz. ‘more successful’ and its ingredients provided by the HD-method, can be given a similar dual foundation. According to the resulting dual foundation of ‘naive truth approximation’, the HD-method provides successes (established true consequences) and counterexamples (established wrongly missing models) of theories. Such HD-results may support the tentative conclusion that one theory seems to remain more successful than another in the naive sense of having more successes and fewer counterexamples. If so, this provides good reasons for believing that the more successful theory is also more truthlike in the naive sense of having more correct models and more true consequences. In the dual foundation of ‘refined truth approximation’, HD-results remain of the same two kinds, but ‘more successful’ is taken in the refined sense of accommodating counterexamples while saving relevant successes, in which case ‘more truthlike’ can be taken in the refined sense of improving relevant models while saving relevant consequences. In this way one gets a realistic dual account of qualitative truth approximation by the HD-method. The model foundation can also be extended to the methodological notions, but not in a very plausible way. The consequence foundation only seems specifiable for naive truth approximation, in which case it is plausible. In sum, the dual foundation is superior to both. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The scientific use of ‘representation’ and ‘function’: avoiding explanatory vacuity

Nearly all of the ways philosophers currently attempt to define the terms ‘representation’ and ‘function’ undermine the scientific application of those terms by rendering the scientific explanations in which they occur vacuous. Since this is unacceptable, we must develop analyses of these terms that avoid this vacuity. Robert Cummins argues in this fashion in Representations, Targets, and Attitudes. He accuses ‘use theories’ of representational content of generating vacuous explanations, claims that nearly all current theories of representational content are use theories, and offers a non-use theory of representational content which avoids explanatory vacuity. One task I undertake in this article is to develop an alternative non-use theory which avoids an objection fatal to that theory. My second task is to adapt Cummins’ argument to criticize most current analyses of ‘function,’ which undermine scientific explanation in an analogous way. Though Cummins does not explicitly argue in this manner, his own analysis of ‘function,’ by avoiding any appeal to use, avoids the explanatory vacuity to which they succumb. Consequently, I endorse Cummins’ notion of function. However, although use theories fail as analyses of the terms ‘representation’ and ‘function,’ they can still make significant contributions to the sciences employing these terms. For, while philosophers seeking to define ‘representation’ and ‘function’ must avoid incorporating representational and functional uses into their definitions, scientists must still find a way to determine which representations and functions are being used. Suitably re-construed use theories of representation and function may in many cases assist them in this task.     

Intensional Specifications of Truth-Conditions: ‘Because’, ‘In Virtue of’, and ‘Made True By…’

Although a number of truth theorists have claimed that a deflationary theory of ‘is true’ needs nothing more than the uniform implication of instances of the theorem ‘the proposition that p is true if and only if p’, reflection shows that this is inadequate. If deflationists can’t support the instances when replacing the biconditional with ‘because’, then their view is in peril. Deflationists sometimes acknowledge this by addressing, occasionally attempting to deflate, ‘because’ and ‘in virtue of’ formulas and their close relatives. I examine what I take to be the most promising deflationist moves in this direction and argue that they fail.     

Research traditions and evolutionary explanations in medicine

In this article, I argue that distinguishing ‘evolutionary’ from ‘Darwinian’ medicine will help us assess the variety of roles that evolutionary explanations can play in a number of medical contexts. Because the boundaries of evolutionary and Darwinian medicine overlap to some extent, however, they are best described as distinct ‘research traditions’ rather than as competing paradigms. But while evolutionary medicine does not stand out as a new scientific field of its own, Darwinian medicine is united by a number of distinctive theoretical and methodological claims. For example, evolutionary medicine and Darwinian medicine can be distinguished with respect to the styles of evolutionary explanations they employ. While the former primarily involves ‘forward looking’ explanations, the latter depends mostly on ‘backward looking’ explanations. A forward looking explanation tries to predict the effects of ongoing evolutionary processes on human health and disease in contemporary environments (e.g., hospitals). In contrast, a backward looking explanation typically applies evolutionary principles from the vantage point of humans’ distant biological past in order to assess present states of health and disease. Both approaches, however, are concerned with the prevention and control of human diseases. In conclusion, I raise some concerns about the claim that ‘nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution’.     

Truth and Assertability

Deflationists say that the equivalence between ‘p is true’ and p is all there is to the meaning of ‘true’. “Use” theories generally construe meaning as acceptance conditions. I argue: (i) there are certain obvious objections to a deflationary theory of truth so formulated; but (ii) they can be overcome if we employ a graded notion of use, i.e. a notion of assertability; but (iii) there appear to be certain further difficulties which cannot be overcome in this way.     

Heidegger’s Temple: How Truth Happens When Nothing is Portrayed

In his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger discusses three examples of artworks: a painting by Van Gogh of peasant shoes, a poem about a Roman fountain, and a Greek temple. The new entry on Heidegger’s aesthetics in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, written by Iain Thomson, focuses on this essay, and Van Gogh’s painting in particular. It argues that Heidegger uses Van Gogh’s painting to set art, as the happening of truth, in relation to ‘nothing’, which is a key term in Heidegger’s essays leading up to The Origin of the Work of Art. This paper extends a similar analysis to the Greek temple as a way of offering an exposition of Heidegger’s concerns in the essay. It begins by briefly outlining Thomson’s argument that Heidegger relates Van Gogh’s painting to ‘nothing’, and indicating the way this argument can be extended to the Greek temple. It then discusses three ways in which ‘nothing’ can open up the significance of the temple as a work of art in which truth happens: (1) it is not concerned with objective representation; (2) it depicts the primal strife of earth and world, concealing and unconcealing; (3) it is fundamentally historical.     

‘Diverse Epistemologies’, Truth and Archaeology: In Defence of Realism

In a recent journal article, as well as in a recent book chapter, in which she critiques my position on ‘indigenous knowledge’, Lesley Green of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town argues that ‘diverse epistemologies ought to be evaluated not on their capacity to express a strict realism but on their ability to advance understanding’. In order to examine the implications of Green’s arguments, and of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin’s work in this regard, I apply them to a well-known controversy between Native American (or First Nations) creationism and archaeology. I argue that issues in social justice should be distinguished from issues in epistemology. Moreover, in tightening in this paper the link between knowledge and truth, I attempt to defend science as a ‘privileged way of seeing the world’. The analysis of truth, and of related concepts like reality and ‘the way the world is’, will assume a central role here. I contend that, ultimately, the only coherent and consistent position is a realist view of the pertinent issues and ideas.     

Trustworthiness in explanation: The obligation to explain well

‘Scientific integrity’ certainly requires that data and references be beyond reproach. However, issues within the theory of scientific explanation suggest that there may be more to it than just this. While it is true that some contemporary, pragmatic analyses of explanation suffer from the ‘problem of relevance’ (an inability to ensure that explanations which are paradigmatic technically are relevant to the question being posed), it does not seem to be true that the addition of formal, metaphysical constraints is necessary to solve this problem. I argue that, when viewed as requests for help with an epistemic problem, explanation-seeking questions reveal the existence of a set of moral criteria centered in trust which, when satisfied, prevent trivial or irrelevant explanations from being offered, thereby broadening the concept of ‘scientific integrity’.     

Motive and Right Action

Some philosophers believe that a change in motive alone is sometimes sufficient to bring about a change in the deontic status (rightness or wrongness) of an action. I refer to this position as ‘weak motivism’, and distinguish it from ‘strong’ and ‘partial motivism’. I examine a number of cases where our intuitive judgements appear to support the weak motivist’s thesis, and argue that in each case an alternative explanation can be given for why a change in motive brings about (or, in some cases, appears to bring about) a change in deontic status.     

Truthmaking and Fundamentality

I apply the notion of truthmaking to the topic of fundamentality by articulating a truthmaker theory of fundamentality according to which some truths are truth‐grounded in certain entities while the ones that don't stand in a metaphysical‐semantic relation to the truths that do. I motivate this view by critically discussing two problems with Ross Cameron's truthmaker theory of fundamentality. I then defend this view against Theodore Sider's objection that the truthmaking approach to fundamentality violates the purity constraint. Truthmaker theorists can have a trouble‐free theory of fundamentality.     

Deflationism and the Dependence of Truth on Reality

A common objection against deflationism is that it cannot account for the fact that truth depends on reality. Consider the question ‘On what does the truth of the proposition that snow is white depend?’ An obvious answer is that it depends on whether snow is white. Now, consider what answer, if any, a deflationist can offer. The problem is as follows. A typical deflationary analysis of truth consists of biconditionals of the form ‘The proposition that p is true iff p’. Such biconditionals tell us nothing about what the truth of the proposition that p might depend on. Therefore, it seems that a typical deflationist cannot give an answer. Since we know that an answer is available, this throws doubt over the adequacy of deflationism as an account of truth. Articulated here is a defence of deflationism against this objection. It is argued that although biconditionals of the sort mentioned do not explicitly state a dependency between truth and reality, they nevertheless convey one. The reason is that, given the context in which a deflationist invokes the biconditionals, such a dependency is implicated. A potential problem with this defence is that it leaves the deflationist still unable to give an account of what it is for truth to depend on reality. One might think that a deflationist can offer such an account by appealing to truthmaker theory but, it is argued below, truthmaker theory is unavailable to a deflationist. Instead, the deflationist should question the assumption that an account is available.     

Teaching and Truthfulness

Some tendencies in modern education—the stress on ‘performativity’, for instance, and ‘celebration of difference’—threaten the value traditionally placed on truthful teaching. In this paper, truthfulness is mainly understood, following Bernard Williams, as a disposition to ‘Accuracy’ and ‘Sincerity’—hence as a virtue. It is to be distinguished from truth (a property of beliefs), and current debates about the nature of truth are not relevant to the issue of the value of truthfulness. This issue devolves into the question of whether truthfulness is a distinctive virtue of teachers, which they have a special obligation to exercise in the face of competing aims. This paper defends the idea of distinctive professional duties and considers two conceptions of teaching which ascribe a central place to truthfulness. The first conceives of teaching as a personal relationship within which trust, and hence, it is claimed, truthfulness, are paramount. This claim is challenged, and the paper concludes by sympathetically considering a second conception of teaching, articulated by Oakeshott and Heidegger. In this conception, teaching is a ‘releasement’ from ‘the daily flux’ of pupils’ lives through a truthful initiation into the alternatives to this ‘daily flux’ found within ‘the civilized inheritance of mankind’.     

Why Truthmaking Is Not a Case of Grounding

Truthmaker theorists often express their core commitment by saying that truth is grounded in being, and grounding theorists often take truthmaking to be a paradigm case of grounding. But I will argue that truthmaking is not a case of grounding. What is crucial for understanding truthmaking is not grounding but rather meaning (in a broad sense including reference). Truth is still constrained by how things are, so even if (so-called) truthmakers don't play a role in grounding truths, the methodological program of truthmaker theory survives. Here I lay out my understanding of truth and truthmaking, and distinguish two conceptions of grounding. I argue that truthmaking is not plausibly seen as a case of grounding on either conception. I argue further that treating truthmaking as grounding threatens to violate a plausible irreflexivity principle, and makes trouble for the view that grounding is transitive. I then suggest that there is no genuine relation of truthmaking (which there would have to be if it were a true case of grounding). Finally, I show how the core insights of truthmaker theory are preserved by the understanding of truthmaking that I favor.     

Metaphysics as interpretation of conscious life: some remarks on D. Henrich’s and D. Kolak’s thinking

In this article, I discuss the manner in which Dieter Henrich’s theory of subjectivity has emerged from the fundamental questions of German Idealism, and in what manner and to what extent this theory effects a reinstatement of metaphysics. In so doing, I shall argue that Henrich’s position represents a viable refutation of the attempt of the physicalist explanation of the world to prove the concept of the subject to be superfluous. Henrich’s metaphysics of subjectivity is primarily focused on the ‘ultimate questions’ which also compose “the deep levels of our subjectivity” and concern the factors that should promote stability in our emotional, moral and intellectual life. I argue with Henrich that the indisputable facticity of our conscious life is worthy of our special consideration and interpretation, explanation and clarification, just as the deeper meaning (the individual and collective subconscious structure) hidden beneath the layers of apparent comprehensibility calls for urgent investigation. Such interpretation and elucidation of life’s meaning has a tripartite character: first, it consists of clarification of the totality of human experience together with the realities playing a part in it; second, it builds on the process by which the contents of experience are cognized, and the knowledge thereof which results; thirdly, it embraces the transcendental precondition enabling each and every one of us to consciously lead our lives—for life, in a human sense, does not merely happen to one. Henrich’s metaphysical foundation of subjectivity is compared with Kolak‘s position, according to which individual consciousness is not insular, but integrated into the totality of overall unity that some have called “the Universal Self”, “the Noumenal Self”.     

Against Stepping Back: A Critique of Contextualist Approaches to the Semantic Paradoxes

A number of philosophers have argued that the key to understanding the semantic paradoxes is to recognize that truth is essentially relative to context. All of these philosophers have been motivated by the idea that once a liar sentence has been uttered we can ‘step back’ and, from the point of view of a different context, judge that the liar sentence is true. This paper argues that this ‘stepping back’ idea is a mistake that results from failing to relativize truth to context in the first place. Moreover, context-relative liar sentences, such as ‘This sentence is not true in any context’ present a paradox even after truth has been relativized to context. Nonetheless, the relativization of truth to context may offer us the means to avoid paradox, if we can justifiably deny that a sentence about a context can be true in the very context it is about.     

Negative truths and truthmaker principles

This paper argues that a consideration of the problem of providing truthmakers for negative truths undermines truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theorists are presented with an uncomfortable dilemma. Either they must take up the challenge of providing truthmakers for negative truths, or else they must explain why negative truths are exceptions to the principle that every truth must have a truthmaker. The first horn is unattractive since the prospects of providing truthmakers for negative truths do not look good neither absences, nor totality states of affairs, nor Graham Priest and J.C. Beall’s ‘polarities’ (Beall, 2000; Priest, 2000) are up to the job. The second horn, meanwhile, is problematic because restricting the truthmaker principle to atomic truths, or weakening it to the thesis that truth supervenes on being, undercuts truthmaker theory’s original motivation. The paper ends by arguing that truthmaker theory is, in any case, an under-motivated doctrine because the groundedness of truth can be explained without appeal to the truthmaker principle. This leaves us free to give the ommonsensical and deflationary explanation of negative truths that common-sense suggests.     

Forms of emergent interaction in General Process Theory

General Process Theory (GPT) is a new (non-Whiteheadian) process ontology. According to GPT the domains of scientific inquiry and everyday practice consist of configurations of ‘goings-on’ or ‘dynamics’ that can be technically defined as concrete, dynamic, non-particular individuals called general processes. The paper offers a brief introduction to GPT in order to provide ontological foundations for research programs such as interactivism that centrally rely on the notions of ‘process,’ ‘interaction,’ and ‘emergence.’ I begin with an analysis of our common sense concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a general process. General processes are not individuated in terms of their location but in terms of ‘what they do,’ i.e., in terms of their dynamic relationships in the basic sense of one process being part of another. The formal framework of GPT is thus an extensional mereology, albeit a non-classical theory with a non-transitive part-relation. After a brief sketch of basic notions and strategies of the GPT-framework I show how the latter may be applied to distinguish between causal, mechanistic, functional, self-maintaining, and recursively self-maintaining interactions, all of which involve ‘emergent phenomena’ in various senses of the term.     

Habermas on Understanding: Virtual Participation,Dialogue and the Universality of Truth

Although the success of Habermas’s theory of communicative action depends on his dialogical model of understanding in which a theorist is supposed to participate in the debate with the actors as a ‘virtual participant’ and seek context-transcendent truth through the exchange of speech acts, current literature on the theory of communicative action rarely touches on the difficulties it entails. In the first part of this paper, I will examine Habermas’s argument that understanding other cultural practices requires the interpreter to virtually participate in the “dialogue” with the actors as to the rationality of their cultural practice and discuss why, according to Habermas,such dialogue leads to the “context-transcendent truth”. In the second part, by using a concrete historical example, I will reconstruct a “virtual dialogue” between Habermas and Michael Polanyi as to the rationality of scientific practice and indicate why Habermas’s dialogical model of understanding based on the methodology of virtual participation cannot achieve what it professes to do.     

Propositional Names

I propose that an adequate name for a proposition will be (1) rigid, in Kripke’s sense of referring to the same thing in every world in which it exists, and (2) transparent, which means that it would be possible, if one knows the name, to know which object the name refers. I then argue that the Standard Way of naming propositions—prefixing the word ‘that’ to a declarative sentence—does not allow for transparent names of every proposition, and that no alternative naming convention does better. I explore the implications of this failure for deflationism about truth, arguing that any theory that requires the T biconditional to be a priori cannot succeed.