In Our Time - Truth

Episode Date: December 18, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of truth. Pontius Pilate famously asked: what is truth? In the twentieth century, the nature of truth became a subject of particular interest to philosophers, but they preferred to ask a slightly different question: what does it mean to say of any particular statement that it is true? What is the difference between these two questions, and how useful is the second of them?With:Simon Blackburn Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the HumanitiesJennifer Hornsby Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of LondonCrispin Wright Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, and Professor of Philosophy at New York UniversityProducer: Victoria Brignell and Luke Mulhall.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, what is truth? asked Pontius Pilate, but then he famously didn't stay for an answer. Philosophers have been more patient and questions about the nature of truth have been part of the Western philosophical tradition since its origins in ancient Greece. They've troubled some of the greatest things. thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel.

The 20th century saw a big change in the way some philosophers approached their subject. Developments in logic offered a powerful new tool for philosophical analysis. Thinkers began to see language and understanding the way we use words as the key to gaining philosophical insights. This so-called linguistic turn had a big effect on the way philosophers thought about truth. Instead of asking what truth is, they began to look at how the word truth operated, with startling results. In fact, it's led some philosophers to say that we could do away with the word truth altogether.

With me to discuss truth in 20th century philosophy, a Simon Blackburn, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities. Jennifer Hornsby, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and Crispin Wright, Regis Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen and Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

Simon Blackburn, A lot of people interested in truth from scientists, a policeman, a priest, some are philosophers. But what sets the philosopher's interest apart from the man over the rest of us? Right. Well, I think for most people, they're interested in truth because they're interested in the truth of a particular saying or remark or proposition. So the policeman might be interested in the truth of who pinched the jewels or who did the crime. The philosopher tends to look not at a particular proposition about which we're bothered. but at the notion itself. So ours is a kind of reflective or second order interest,

we're interested in the notion of truth, as opposed to particular truths, which is usually what takes up people's interest in the topic. Is there any sense in which the notion of truth is independent? Independent of, for example. I mean, that it's always the same, the truth you're looking for is always the same truth. Right. Well, of course, we use truth in many contexts,

There's truth in mathematics, truth in empirical science, truth in ethics, perhaps, aesthetics, perhaps. So there is a question about whether it's the same notion throughout, and philosophers differ about that. But there's a good reason for trying to keep it as single sense, as univocal as possible, because you can mingle those things together. So you could have, it's true that I came here after breakfast this morning, and that I'm rather like Rembrandt and that he's a great artist and so on and so on. So you can mingle together propositions from different areas

and still say the whole thing is true. And you couldn't do that if the notion of truth was differed from topic to topic. So there is a reason for trying to keep it single. I use the word independent. It obviously isn't the right word. But can you just develop what you've said again because it's such a crucial notion for the rest of the programme? Right, sure. Well, suppose I say it's true that Rembrandt is a great artist

and that I had a boiled egg for breakfast. Is the notion of truth going to be appropriate for aesthetics because the first part of that remark was about aesthetics, about Rembrandt's greatness, or is it going to be empirical because it's an empirical truth, truth of experience that I had an egg for breakfast? Now, if I mingle those two remarks together, what notion of truth is appropriate for the conjunction of them. We're going to be talking about truth in the 20th century,

but let's start a little bit before then. One traditional theory of truth is the correspondence theory. What's that? Well, famously it starts with Aristotle, who's said to say of what is that it is and of what is not, that it is not is true. And the idea is that truth is correspondence to the facts. And that's probably the first idea anybody has about truth.

Then it's true if facts prove it, as it were. Yes, that's right, exactly. So there's nice facts out there in the world. Our job is to delineate them with our beliefs or sentences. And when we do a good job, our sentences or beliefs are true. And that's, as I say, probably the primitive thought most people have about truth. Now, the two ways of worrying about it. One is that it puts a lot of burden on the notion of a fact.

So we start asking things like, are they naked? Are there general facts? What's a negative fact? Well, like I didn't have bacon for breakfast. I had a boiled egg. So I've already told you. My not having bacon is, as it were not, it's not obviously a chunky sort of structure in the world. It's not out there.

But it is a true, it's a true remark. I didn't have bacon. So that's a negative fact. There are also counterfactual facts, if you like. So if you had stuck your hand in the electrical outlet, you would have got a shock. That could be a fact, a very important fact. But it's, as it were, it doesn't have any being in the world. At least it's not obvious how it has any being in the world.

Why doesn't it have any being in the world if you get a shock? It would if you did. But if you had, I see. You haven't yet got a shock. And let's hope you never do. But if you had stuck your hand in the outlet, you'd have got a shock. So that's a counterfactual. And they're very problematic.

Historians find them very problematic, for example. But it's an attractive theory for people, including philosophers, isn't it? Yes. If it's good enough for Aristotle, it's good enough for... Well, of course, Aristotle didn't actually mention facts. So although he's usually got... This is godfathered onto him. It's not clear that Aristotle had a correspondence theory of that form.

But it held that idea held with many philosophers over a long period of time? I would say so, yes. And then one problem was the one I mentioned about things like negative and counterfactual facts. Another one was that, you know, facts are not quite as robust as you might think. Wittgenstein makes a nice remark somewhere that you could move the Eiffel Tower from Paris to Berlin if you felt like it. You can't move the fact that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris anywhere. The fact is not, as it were, a structure of. in the world, which is movable or even visible.

Facts seem to be more reconstruction of our minds than, as it was, presented to us from outside. Chris Minre right, that's the... Simon has kindly to an ignoramus outline the beginnings of the correspondence theory of truth. What do you see is the problems with it? I think it's important to distinguish between what you might call the correspondence platitude,

which is what Aristotle articulated, to say of what is so, that it is so, is to speak truly, to think what, and so on. And the proposal is a serious piece of analytical metaphysics when you're trying to, as we're plumb the depths of the notion of truth to articulate what being true really consists in. And a assignment I think is brought out. It's when it's taken in the latter spirit that we find problems.

So the platitude should survive. We're not proposing that we drop that. But those philosophies who worried about correspondence have worried about the notion of fact, whether we could articulate that without presupposing the notion of truth. And so there are, alasus goes in a circle. They've worried about the relation of correspondence. What is that?

What is it for a thought to correspond to the fact? Is that a kind of picturing or mirroring relation? Or what is it, how has it to be articulated? And it's fair to say that attempts to articulate it less metaphorically of tended to founder in difficulty. And there's also, I think, something that we haven't mentioned, which is the idea of the facts being out there to make everything true that we want to regard as true,

seems to impose a kind of unwelcome sweep of objectivity. You know, one doesn't think intuitively that our thought bears the same relation to aesthetic matters, ethical matters, matters of taste, as it does to matters of science, perhaps, certainly matters of the disposition of the objects on this table. These seem to be in a certain sense more robust

and to making our thoughts true. In the other case is there's a sense that our thumb is in the scales in some way, The fact, if there are facts about ethics, reflect in some way facts about us, and that's not being articulated. The correspondence theory is swamping that. It's obliterating the scope for a distinction along those lines.

Is there an area in which the correspondence theory works and an area in which it doesn't work, or is it suspect all the time? I think it works beautifully for the proposition that there is a glass of water here on this table. There's the proposition, and there's the fact. The fact is independently ostensible. You can take it in, recognise that it's conferring truth in that proposition.

But as soon as that simple model of the presentation of a circumstance, say to perception, and the thought or the belief lapses, as in the case of counterfact or facts or negative facts, then it starts to limp. Well, can we just talk a bit more about how it limps, some examples? So it works with a glass of a time. We may talk more about this later, but think of the mathematical case. Yeah. Okay, so quite theoretically sophisticated but simple parts of mathematics like number theory.

What are the facts in that case? What are numbers to begin with? What sort of realm do they occupy? And what constitutes the facts about them? And do we really want to think that to know, say, that there is an infinity of primes, or as we now do, that Fermat's last theorem is, after all, true, that this is to know a fact, in some sense,

that the fact is out there, and all we do is track it or pick it up in some way. That doesn't seem to be faithful to the actual conduct of mathematical inquiry. we use proofs in mathematics. We don't take in facts. So how do you distinguish between a proof and a fact then? Well, proof is something we construct. It's in a certain sense, an artifact.

Whereas the notion of fact here is something that's given to us, also intuitively it seems. But you could also say that the fact there's an infinite number of primes is the truth about primes. You could say that, and that's quite right. But then I think you've descended to the level of platitude again. That's all the time I think there is this platitude about correspondence. Of course, if what you say is true, and that's how things are.

So in that sense, you're corresponding to the facts. That shouldn't be rejected. That's going to be very counter-commonensical to let that go. The question really is what substance does that have? It's a relational play. The world is doing the work. The world is confirming the truth of our thoughts. It's an implicit idea.

And one doesn't want to commit oneself to so robust a world, I think. Another theory of truth is coherence, which for many people seems to be an improvement on correspondence. Could you tell us why that's thought? to be so? Well, it's an old theory, and initially it's paired with a kind of idealism, which crudely is exactly the view that we shouldn't think of the world as independent and conferring truth on our thoughts.

Rather, all truth is coherence of our ideas. We can't somewhere penetrate beyond the arena of our beliefs, our ideas, our concepts. That's an ancient motivation for it, but then it's not so much a theory of truth as a repudiation of the realism that informs the correspondence theory of truth. It's a reaction. But why was it attractive to philosophers this idea of coherence?

Why is it attractive in the first place, or second or whatever place? There's a long-running tendency in philosophy to be anti-realist, to play down the road of the world and to play out the role of our constructions, our theories, our thoughts. And if you do that,

you need to domesticate the notion of truth in tandem in a way that... Essentially, you're switching. the terms of the truth relation. So whereas for the correspondence theory, truth is a relation between thought and something that isn't a thought that's external. On the coherence view,

it is systems in the first instance that are true. Coherence systems, and one needs to say what coherence is. And individual thoughts are true only in so far as they participate in such systems. Jennifer, Jennifer Hornsby, what are the problems with the coherent, I mean, they've been indicated by Chris Wynn, but what problems do you find

with the coherence? theory? Well, there's a famous objection to the coherence theory which Bertrand Russell made, and he was thinking of it in the version which Crispin's just indicated by which we think of truth as consisting in membership of a coherent system of beliefs. Anyway, Russell's objection is known as the Bishop Stubbs objection, and it may not be a good objection to Russell as it stands, but I think it points to why we can't define truth as coherence. So Russell's point was that any self-consistent proposition belongs in some coherent set of propositions. And he illustrated the point using the proposition that Bishop Stubbs was hanged for murder,

something known widely at that time to be false. So it's an obviously false proposition. But there are plenty of collections of propositions which are themselves coherent and which contain it. so coherence in a system of propositions really can't be enough for truth. That's the objection as... Can you explain that a bit more detail? Why is Bishop Stubbs was hanged for murder?

Yeah, I assume the example amused Russell, as it were. No, I think it's a very good example. I don't know what Bishop's subs thought about it, but still there you go. He, of course, had died. Yes. And it's bad, yeah. So can you just develop that? then I haven't got a clear view of it yet.

So we've got this idea that if something's true, it belongs to a coherent system of beliefs, and that's all it takes for it to be true. So Russell comes along and says, but I can think of a coherent system of beliefs, I can name one for you, and in this system, and there are plenty like it, is this proposition to the effect that Bishop Stubbs

was hanged for murder. So you can't be right, coherence theorist. because that's coherent in his theories. Yeah, there's this coherent theory and it contains a falsehood to put it. Does that falsehood destroy the theory entirely or just test it? The coherence theorist will want to respond to the objection, as it were, so I take it that you'll say that we need to say

actually a bit more about these coherent systems of beliefs in order that we should be able to see that Russell's proposition wouldn't belong to one of them. But of course we can't say because it's false, because then we're helping ourselves as a notion of truth. A third theory of truth, before we move on to the 20th century,

so the last of these, is the theory of pragmatism. What does that have to say? So this is a theory held by the philosophers known as pragmatist, American pragmatists, so end of the 19th century.

And the first of these was purse, and he gave a sort of definition of truth, which in due course Dewey, who I guess is taken as the last pragmatist in Dawes said, you know, Perth came up with the best definition of truth. And what Perth said was that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

So his idea was that we should think of truth as the end of inquiry, that upon which our beliefs converge through the process of inquiry. And he once put it by saying that, truth is concordance with an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief. Is there any way you can give us an example of that? Well, since it's defined by reference to an ideal, as it were, it's hard to, as it were, spell out.

So how do they know what they're working towards, the pragmatists? They have views according to which truth must be it, as it were. But what is the it that they're looking for? I mean, I take it that they think that we seek truth in our inquiries and that as believers we're disposed to believe the truth and insofar as we're successful, that's going to depend upon our believing the truth. So they're pragmatically putting aside notions which stand in the way of them getting at what they think is the real truth.

I can't use real, I suppose, the truth. Yeah, I mean, that might be a way to put it. I mean, I think there actually might be seen to be avoiding correspondence and coherence. Simon and then, Chris. Yes, I think one helpful way of thinking about pragmatism might be this, that as scientific inquiry proceeds, it seems to be targeted upon light at the end of the tunnel when we finally have the theory of everything, as people say.

But we never seem to be quite there. There always seem to be more questions. So I think Perce had a sort of ideal limit. There was this sort of striving for a finish. But you never get there. Purs himself thought you never get there. And you would not know you were there if you were there because there's always the possibility of further investigation,

further questions, further explanations. So in a way Purs was producing a kind of focus imaginari, a imaginary focus for inquiry. And I think the virtue of what he does is he says, you know, that the fundamental given is assertibility. It's, you know, you do your experiment, you're allowed to put down the result. And then if your assertions are never going to get overturned, if they sort of stay solid, that's good enough. That's truth. They're part then of the system which in the long run we try to get to, although we're never quite there.

It's just to add exactly that. I think this idea of the limit of inquiry and the stuff that we believe when we get there is what's true, you can dispense with that and still keep the spirit of what's being proposed, which is, I think, quite simple. It's that we think of ourselves as improving our opinions over time, as learning more. The true propositions are the unimprovable opinions.

The unimprovable opinions, the ones such that when you get there, you'll never need to change your mind again. No matter what more evidence you get, that's going to stand fast. The picture of truth involves essentially that. Simon Blackburn, can we talk now about the change, these linguistic turn in philosophy,

and how it came about and what it did? Right. Well, so far we've been talking about truth, as it were, some kind of relationship, either between words in the world or words and theories or between theories and processes of inquiry in purse. and the linguistic turn is you start to look at the word itself. It's true. Now, one of the first things that,

one of the founders of linguistic philosophy, the great German mathematician Gottlob Frege noticed about truth, is what we might call it's transparency property. And this is, suppose we take a simple proposition, like there's a glass of water here, it makes very little difference whether I say there's a glass of water here or it's true that there's a glass of water here. or it's true that it's true that there's a glass of water here

or it's really true that it's a fact that there's a glass of water here and so on. So I can climb up this ladder, as it were, but I'm really just running on the spot because the only content to my remark is, all my remarks, is that there's a glass of water here, which is where we started. Now if truth was a sort of nice, chunky predicate, it should add some content, but it seems not to. So you've got, as I say, you can say there's a glass of water here, it's true,

that there's a glass of water here, it's true, that it's true, it doesn't add anything. And the linguistic turn, partly, tried to understand that, said, well, in that case, what's the meaning of the word true? How are we to conceive of it if it's got this queer transparency about it, that you don't, as it, add content? Of course, that makes it sound odd that we've got a word at all. It sounds as though it's just running on the spot. Why can't we just junk it?

And the linguistic turn, I think, started looking at language and looking at things we say using the notion of truth, rather than going straight at truth itself, as it were. So you start looking at what it is to ascribe truth to sentences, what it is to ascribe truth to truth claims. And that led to people basically doing the subject known as semantics, That is you start looking at the way sentences actually work rather than sort of thinking that you've got the abstract notion.

Now let's look at that. Chris Perman Wright, do you want to develop that, to stay around that area, how the list linguistic turn affects the way that philosophers approach this problem? I think a couple of things happen. Pre the linguistic turn, I think, there's never perhaps a stated assumption, but I think philosophers felt they could, as it were,

read the character of the reference of a word or a sentence off the grammatical form. So an adjective, well, that describes a property or a characteristic of some kind. A sentence, indicative sentence, that's some are used to state that something's the case. And with a linguistic turn, that assumption gets discarded and people start looking of what we're actually using words and sentences to do. So the then scope for the idea that although is true as a predicate and looks like it's as as as a property to thoughts or sentence, perhaps we're doing something different with it.

That's misleading. Perhaps we are merely endorsing, commending a certain view, claiming that someone's an authority on us. Imagine a similar thought about knowledge. A very similar set of issues arise. What is knowledge, what's its nature? Way back to the Aetetus, that's a puzzle.

It's still a puzzle. We've done no better, saying what knowledge consists in. The linguistic turn might say, well, forget that question, what knowledge is, and ask instead, what do we use, knows the word to do. And an answer might be well, we use it to, if I say

that X knows at P, and then I'm saying X is authoritative as far as P is concerned. You can trust his testimony. So one's liberated in a way. You know, we now have a conception of, as a way, the social function of the use and expression that may let you say things quite different to the kind of things you're saying

when you're doing traditional analytical metaphysics, trying to say what things are. Jennifer Hornsby, to turn to you again. First of all, could you just emphasise for our listeners the importance of this linguistic term at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century. But also, one of the first people to come up with the developed theory of truth after that was Frank Ramsey. And what did he say? Well, the view that's always attributed to Ramsey is known as the redundancy's theory of truth.

And I actually not at all clear that he ever held it. He certainly didn't hold it at the end of his short life. So he gave a paper to the Aristotelian Society in 1927 called Facts and Propositions, and it's in that paper that people find the redundancy theory rightly or wrongly. I mean, what leads people to say that Ramsey was the first redundancy theorist, if that's what they say, is that Ramsey said it's evidence that it's true that Caesar was murdered means no more than that Caesar was murdered. So he drew attention to what Simon spoke of,

of the transparency of truth noticed, of course, by Frager. But that makes it look as though the words it's true don't do any work. They don't add anything. I've said no more when I've said it's true that Caesar was murdered than when I said that Caesar was murdered.

And that would, if he believed all those things, that would make him a redundancy theorist. So as redundancy theories ordinarily understood, I think, it's meant to suggest that truth, so far from being a hard, philosophical concept is actually a rather trivial one. It's readily explained. It doesn't have important connections even with other concepts such as meaning and reality. So there's no substantial notion for the word true to express. Why does the redundancy theory take us? We shouldn't be

problematizing truth, shouldn't have a radio program about truth. I mean, you might have a radio program which said that you shouldn't have a radio program, but that would be all. We're I mean, I do think that's the attitude of someone who really endorses the redundancy theory. Simon Blackburn. Yes, well, you started off by mentioning Pilate's question. You know, what is truth? And she wouldn't stay for an answer. The redundancy theory or redundancy theorist would probably say,

you tell me, you tell me what you're interested in. So suppose Pilots' problem is this chap in front of me guilty of something? Okay, well, it's true that he's guilty if and only if he's guilty. It's your job to find out whether he's guilty. The philosopher can now go off the set. We've just told you what you need to find out. You need to find out. Do you want to know whether it's true that he's guilty?

Go and find out whether he's guilty. I can't help you with that, but I can tell you you don't have two problems. Is he guilty, A, and is it true that he's guilty? B, you've only got the one problem. Is he guilty? Do you go along with that, Christopher? Do I go along with the few?

No. No, well, we'll get to talk about deflationism. Well, let's talk about this first. It's difficult enough to do one at the time. It's perfectly possible that we can eliminate the use of the word in that kind of context. So there isn't a second question. So we don't need the word truth. That's not to say you've eliminated the notion.

You may as well put the question, is he guilty? Is the question, is it true that he's guilty? But it simply doesn't follow that there's no issue, no philosophical issue, about what is being true that he's guilty amounts to. It may very well be an issue that one can reformulate us, is he guilty. But that's not to say the notion of truth is idle, only that for certain purposes we don't need to use the word true, and that's a different point.

How long is the reach of this word redundancy then? This will wipe out a lot, or in certain cases, or how much of what does it wipe out? Well, Ramsey himself realized that there are contexts which aren't wiped out. So if somebody says at the end of this program everything Melvin said was true, it's not possible to wipe out the word true from that context because you can't just say everything Melvin said and then stop. You've got to add something and what you have to add is that it's true.

Now, modern descendants of redundancy theory, often called deflationary theories as Chris Bain mentioned, and they give or try to give an account. to those contexts. And I think they can do a reasonable job. The rather surprising linguistic turn here is that truth, it turns out to be a kind of device of generalisation. So instead of saying everything Melvin said was true,

suppose I had a list of possible things for you to say. Right. And I could say that Melvin said that it was 10.30 and it was 1030. Melvin said that he came by train. and he came by train. And that would be equivalent if I got all your sayings to saying that everything you said was true. And I wouldn't have used the word true. I'd have got rid of the semantic notion. So deflationary theories try to give sophisticated accounts of difficult contexts for the redundancy theory, difficult contexts like that. Yes. I like to think of deflationism as a particularly rigorous

version of an idea we already talked about. You focus on the uses of the word rather than take head on the question, what is truth? It's a metaphysical issue. What the deflationists try to do is to give a systematic characterization using very few, perhaps only one axiom, the famous convention T, in terms of which they claim all aspects of the use of the word

can be accounted. And having done that, as they think, they then hold up the hands and say, so there, see, there's no need to think of truth as a thing, as a property, we can fully characterise the use of expression in these very austere terms. That's all you need to know about truth,

that the proper use of the word is whatever is sanctioned by this particular theory. He was Tarski, it wasn't it, Jennifer, who came up with Convention T? He did indeed come on. Convention. And can you develop that as to why... Gosh, well, Tarski was a mathematical logician in the first instance, and his

principal interest in truth was giving a definition of it for a form. language, the kind of language in which mathematical logicians prove things. And in the first instance, Tarski needed to say what it would be for such a definition to be, as he put it, materially adequate, to be roughly accurate. And his convention T is that which the definition has to conform to in order to be materially adequate.

And how did that play when it came from mathematics into philosophy side? into much meaning. It's tricky here, Melvin. I mean, let me give an analogy, which may sound a bit off the point, but I hope it'll help. Suppose I was to define reference to numbers, and I'm tasky.

So I'm looking at a numeral system. What can I say about reference to numbers, if I got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, the ordinary digits. I could say that the digit one refers to the number one. The digit two refers to the number two. I could go on forever, which would be very boring,

so I get eventually to the combination of digits 219 refers to 219 and so on. But it's very interesting if I can give a structure, and of course there is a structure to the Arabic numeral system. It's to base 10, and so we can give an account of what numerals beyond 10 refer to, just in terms of the number of base clauses about what individual numbers refer, individual digits refer to. I'm not going to do it, but it can easily be done. And he might then say to Sileo Plato, well, look, you bothered about reference to numbers,

but now I've given you a theory of how it works for the Arabic numeral system. And you scratch your head and say, well, you've done something. But what you haven't done is, as it were, remove all the metaphysical worries you might have about what numbers are. And you haven't given us an insight to what it is to use. numbers to count or to use numbers to measure. In other words, you've just taken reference to a number for granted and told me a structure for the language. And a lot of philosophers think Tarski did something parallel for truth for languages. That is, he took a certain number of notions, very close to the notion of truth for granted, and then told you how you build sentences with that. In a very nice

phrase of the legician, great American logician quine, Tarski shows you how to chase truth up the tree of grammar. But that's all. Jennifer Hornsby, is there a meaningful, helpful relationship between the views of philosopher,

your view philosophers hold on truth with the views that you hold on other topics in philosophy, realism, for instance? Yes, I mean, one naturally thinks of the correspondence there is that we were talking about as the realists and the coherence. theorists as the anti-realists or idealists.

And as it well, that's not surprising because at least someone who holds a full-blooded correspondence theory more than just the platitude is, we'll say that if I make a statement and it's true, then there's something independent of me and it's a fact and there's a relation of the right sort correspondence between my statement and the fact. So we get the idea of that which is in the world and which we talk. about as quite independent of us. The facts are out there as it were. Whereas when we come to coherence theories who want to define truth in terms of systems of beliefs, we need make no allusion to anything independent of us and our minds in order to say what

truth consists in. So there's a basic distinction between those two philosophical opinions about our situation in the world and how our minds relate to it and those those two theories of truth. Can I come back to the word that's been mentioned, Simon Blackburn, deflationary approaches to truth. Now, Crispin, I think, mentioned it earlier in the programme. So let's try to talk about that. Well, I think we will talk about it.

I'll try to understand that. Well, I think we were getting to the point where there was a worry being aired about deflationism. Deflationism, remember, tries to get rid of the notion. It says there's no interesting notion there. It said, as it were, that pilots shouldn't do. have asked his question, he should have just concentrated on his job as a judge to find out whether this guy was guilty. But then people come back, there's a pushback against this simple view. And the pushback, I think, is that really the very notion of assertion or inquiry

presupposes the notion of truth. If we're engaged on an inquiry, we're trying to find out something. And what we're trying to do can always. be described as we're trying to find out what's true. Now, it's very unclear to people that a deflationary theory really does justice to the intricate connections between notions like truth, on the one hand, and then belief, inquiry, assertion, doubt, because after all, take, for example,

the view of ethics that Crispin mentioned, is sometimes called expressivism. I suppose I'm just in the business of voicing my attitudes when I do ethics. Still, I can wonder whether there's a stringent duty to give to charity and it might bother me

because I need to balance the needs of my family against the needs of the third world or something. And then I'm scratching my head and I'm wondering about what's true whether it's true that I've got this duty to charity and it's not clear that the expressivist, I mean I actually think expressivists can solve this problem, but it's certainly a problem and they've got to rub their noses in the whole, as it were,

cognitive structure that we erect around propositions and that we often describe by saying we need to know what's true, we need to discuss what's true and so on. And the argument against deflationism is that it doesn't quite do. justice to that, doesn't capture all that. Isn't there, Chris, has been right, is there a notion that's been developed recently, is pluralism

about truth? Is that, does that Yes. I think we want to make a distinction between the traditional project of analysing the concept, saying what truth is at some level, and the attempt to characterize what is the case when, as it seems to ask,

a particular proposition is true. So this is an attempt to nod to the deflationists, to say, yes, there isn't a great deal interesting to say about the concept of truth, but to reserve space for a more interesting set of questions about what's going on when, for example,

a particular ethical proposition is regarded as true or a physical theory is regarded as true. And the thought is that actually what's going on may vary. It may vary with the topic from subject matter. Questions like, what is truth, what is justice, what is the good? These seem profound. If I say

what is it to win a game, That doesn't seem like a profound question. Winning a game is achieving the position that's designated as the winning position in the game, and it's supposed to be fun to try to do that, roughly. There's not much to it. But if you ask the question, what does winning in rugby consist in, and how does it compare with winning in chess or a polo? Then it's clear the scope for a variety of answers.

So one concept, winning, not a very interesting concept, quite thin, but quite substantially different things in which winning consists in different areas. and the pluralist thought about truth is analogous that truth in ethics may be substantially and interestingly are different from truth in physics and truth in mathematics, although the concept is quite austere

and perhaps even correctly characterised by the reflectionist. Do you go along with that time? Well, I think it's certainly a very big player. Crispin's been very modest because it's his own baby rather. And I think it's very admirable. The pushback again,

there's always dissent in philosophy, would be to say that there's certainly very different judgments. Ethics is not mathematics. That's a different kind of gain. But you don't need different notions of truth. You just look at the content of the proposition. It's good or 2 plus 2 equals 4. Very different propositions.

All the difference can be taken care of there without transporting the differences back onto the notion of truth. Can I end with an even more obvious question than those I've been asking so far, which is, do you think that three of you and those like you who are talking about truth in this way are in very different truths,

deflation of truth, pluralism, do you think the language and the approach is, well, we hope it's accessible on this programme, that's what you've tried to make it, and thank you very much trying to do that. But do you think it's something that we'll enter into a fairly common notion about the way we look at truth,

or do you think it's an almost esoteric, marginalised activity? Well, I think there's, I mean, postmodernism is a kind of celebration of the disappearance of truth, or if you prefer it, the relativisation of truth into your truth, my truth, his truth, you know, who's to argue about it, who's to say. If I believe that, that's what I believe, I'm not taking any other things. I'm not taking anything. So I think that kind of skepticism or relativism, they may be different, but let's not bother too much.

I think that's been very much part of the contemporary culture for a long time. In that sense, philosophy has gone into contemporary culture quite neatly. Well, I think we want to fight against that, most of us, because it's just not true that anything goes. I love the remark. I think it's attributed to Clemonsso, after the end of the First World War, somebody said,

I wonder what historians are going to make of this. And the reply was, well, one thing they won't say is that Belgium invaded Germany. In other words, it's not true that anything goes. There are, for example, historical facts, not only interpretations. But the Nietzschean idea that there's nothing,

there's no fact, there's only interpretation. I think that's been very big lately, and it may be on the wane, but people are more serious. Crispin, and then I'll come to you for a final word, General. Just to say there's a dimension to the notion of truth that we haven't really touched on, which I think is important to ordinary thought,

and that is that truth is a value, and it's embedded in other values, like integrity, honesty, curiosity, discovery is a good thing. It may have no practical consequences how the universe started, but we're deeply interested to know. And the thought, the notion of truth is insubstantial,

there's nothing to it, it kind of pulls the rug away from under that kind of question. General, a final word from you? Yes, I agree. I mean, I take it that people understand truth perfectly well without giving the kind of theory about it or theorising about it in a manner of philosophers. And the notion they understand is roughly one so that they actually aim at thinking the truth and know that honesty is a virtue and you say what's true if you're honest. So I think there's a perfectly ordinary notion which we say all this. more fancy stuff about, but which is certainly grasped by everyone. And we don't need to convert them, as it were.

We're not suggesting that the notion be changed when we say the various things we do about it. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Simon Blackburn, Jennifer Hornsbyn, and Crispin Wright. And that's all from In Our Time for this year. I'll be back on January the 5th to present a week-long series examining the legacy of Magna Carta in the year of its 800th anniversary.

And in our time returns on January the 15th when we'll be talking about Broigel's painting the fight between Carnival and Lent. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash radio 4.