An Observation about Truth (with Implications for Meaning and Language) Thesis submitted for the degree of “Doctor of Philosophy” By David Kashtan Submitted to the Senate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem November 2017 i This work was carried out under the supervision of: Prof. Carl Posy ii Racheli Kasztan-Czerwonogórze i Avigail Kasztan-Czerwonogórze i ich matce iii Acknowledgements I am the proximal cause of this dissertation. It has many distal causes, of which I will give only a partial list. During the several years in which this work was in preparation I was lucky to be supported by several sources. For almost the whole duration of my doctoral studies I was a funded doctoral fellow at the Language, Logic and Cognition Center. The membership in the LLCC has been of tremendous significance to my scientific education and to the final shape and content of this dissertation. I thank especially Danny Fox, from whom I learnt how linguistics is done (though, due to my stubbornness, not how to do it) and all the other members of this important place, past and present, and in particular Lital Myers who makes it all come together. In the years 2011-2013 I was a funded participant in an inter-university research and study program about Kantian philosophy. The program was organized by Ido Geiger and Yakir Levin from Ben-Gurion University, and by Eli Friedlander, Ofra Rechter and Yaron Senderowicz from Tel-Aviv University. The atmosphere in the program was one of intimacy and devotion to philosophy; I predict we will soon witness blossoms, the seeds of which were planted there. In the winter of 2012 I visited the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy for a one-month funded doctoral fellowship. I thank Hannes Leitgeb and the fellows present there for a warm and enlightening stay. The spring semester of 2016 I spent in Germany again, this time around Berlin, and was hosted as a visiting fellow at the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS). An important part of the dissertation was written in that time. I thank Uli Sauerland for having me, Marie-Christine Meyer for making the connection, and the other fellows in ZAS for an interesting and enjoyable visit. The Hebrew University has a reputation for being a cold and impersonal place, whatever its academic merits. But it is not cold, just misunderstood. Apart from having been taught, I have been helped, encouraged, inspired and, most importantly, educated, by many different people in the philosophy department (and outside of it). I thank David Enoch, Michael Roubach, Oron Shagrir, Nali Thaler, and all the other members of the department, and especially Limor Eilon, without whom the department would not be the unified organism that it is. I had the privilege to be awarded the departmental prize in memory of Yael Cohen. I thank the family for keeping up this institution throughout all these years. It is an important event in the yearly cycle of the department. This dissertation developed out of my MA thesis, entitled Kant, Tarski and Quine: The Logical Form of Transcendental Philosophy, written (in Hebrew) under the supervision of Yemima Ben-Menahem. I thank Yemima for her guidance, tolerance and support in the face of my stubbornness. The dissertation also owes a lot to its two committee members, Gila Sher of the University of San Diego, and Eli Dresner of Tel-Aviv University. It was in listening to a mini-course Gila gave for the LLCC that many of my iv ideas about Tarskian truth started to crystallize. Eli’s presence on the committee had an important anti- stress effect, and his philosophical modesty and tolerance are virtues that I hope in the future to succeed better in adopting. I will only be able to give a partial account of my debt to Carl Posy, the advisor of the present thesis. Carl has not been a particularly easy supervisor, which is the first thing I am grateful for. Philosophy is (or should be conceived) first and foremost (as) a profession. This does not, as some people might worry, diminish its loftiness. It just implies that there is a certain standard to which a piece of philosophical argumentation or exposition must adhere. Learning to do philosophy is learning to identify, in particular in one’s own work, when philosophical content is present and when, on the contrary, philosophical ideas are at most grazed, maybe caressed, but not really handled. Prior to education, one may possess philosophical vision, sensitivity, even genius; but the professional standard is acquired knowledge. This dissertation, I hope, is the fruit of the first step in my acquisition of this standard, and I thank Carl for his central role in this step. The growth of philosophers depends on the soil in which they are planted, and the peers of a graduate student are the constituents of that soil. Since I have spent so many years on this project, the list of peers who own a piece of it is long. A special thanks goes to Gil Sagi, now of Haifa University. Gil’s energy and initiative in organizing reading groups, conferences, workshops and invited talks, during the years of her doctoral studies as well as after they were over, have both been a benefit and an inspiration. Other friends and colleagues from whom I’ve learnt and with whom time passed quicker than it would have otherwise are Ron Aboodi, Roy Amir, Dustin Atlas, Dan Baras, Moysh Bar-Lev, Itai Bassi, Henry Brice, Nora and Will Danielson-Lanier, Eran Fish, Moran Godess-Riccitelli, Rea Golan, Aviv Keren, Nati Kupfer, Ran Lanzet, Daniel Margulis, Danny November, Etye Steinberg, Shlomit Wygoda, and Ynon Wygoda. I apologize to the people I’ve forgotten; writing a philosophy dissertation decreases your cognitive competence considerably. This dissertation took a long time to write. During this time, I got married three times (to the same woman, it’s a long story) and had two daughters (two different ones). A PhD dissertation, especially one that seems never to end, puts a great strain on the writer’s surroundings. My surroundings have been supporting beyond any reasonable expectation, a fact it has been easy to take for granted. I thank my parents for incredible amounts of patience and tolerance, and for similar amounts of technical, financial and especially moral support, and apologize for having taken them so often for granted. At some age it is no longer excusable to take your parents for granted, and I am well past that age. Undoubtedly the star, as far as this dissertation and the life of its composer are concerned, is my wife Katarzyna Czerwonogóra. The final phase of writing coincided with the birth of our second daughter, and the strain on our household was heavy. Kasia was patient and accommodating to the point of heroism, and we are both very glad that this period is behind us. The biggest thanks goes to her. I v couldn’t have wished myself a better partner and teacher in the spiritual, intellectual, ethical and emotional journeys that make up an adult life. Lastly, I would like to thank the first cause of this essay. vi Abstract This dissertation is a philosophical analysis of the concept of truth. It is a development and defense of the “stratified” or “language-level” conception of truth, first advanced in Alfred Tarski’s 1933 monograph The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Although Tarski’s paper had seminal influence both in philosophy and in more technical disciplines, its central philosophical claim has not been generally accepted. This work has two central goals: (a) to give a detailed and analytic presentation of Tarski’s theory and the problems it faces; (b) to offer a solution to these problems and assess the philosophical significance of this solution. The essay is divided in two parts. Part One contains a detailed and analytic presentation and interpretation of the stratified conception of truth. The analysis contains several steps: (a) Crucial basic assumptions, such as the limitation to formalized languages and the requirement of explicit definitions, are stated explicitly, motivated, and their philosophical significance discussed. (b) The main negative result of the stratified conception, the impossibility of semantic closure and of a universal language, is given in detail and interpreted. (c) Tarski’s criterion for adequate truth definitions, known as Convention T, is stated and motivated. (d) The deep structure of Tarski-style truth definitions and the necessary conditions for their availability are analyzed. In particular, the philosophical significance of Tarski’s notion of “essential richness” is discussed. (e) Finally, several problems are raised for the stratified conception, chief among them the unity objection, according to which the stratified conception is not a viable analysis of the concept of truth, since (by (a) above) an analysis should take the form of a definition, and on the stratified conception different languages have different definitions. There is therefore no one analysis of the concept. Part Two is a development of answers to the problems raised at the end of Part One. The crux of the answer to the unity objection is that Convention T, the adequacy criterion, connects the many definitions of truth into a single concept. However, in order to fulfill that role Convention T must apply universally, and a universal language was shown to be impossible ((c) above). The task of Part Two is therefore to develop a mode of expression that allows the universal applicability of Convention T without commitment to a universal metalanguage. The procedure is as follows. (a) Convention T is formalized in order to isolate the place in which universal applicability is required.