Journal of Philosophy, Inc. True to the Facts Author(s): Donald Davidson Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 21, Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Nov. 6, 1969), pp. 748-764 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2023778 Accessed: 26/03/2009 13:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jphil. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org 748 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY TRUE TO THE FACTS * A TRUE statement is a statement that is true to the facts. This remark seems to embody the same sort of obvious and essential wisdom about truth as the following about moth- erhood: a mother is a person who is the mother of someone. The property of being a mother is explained by the relation between a woman and her child; similarly, the suggestion runs, the property of being true is to be explained by a relation between a statement and something else. Without prejudice to the question what the something else might be, or what word or phrase best expresses the relation (of being true to, corresponding to, picturing), I shall take the license of calling any view of this kind a correspondence theory of truth. Correspondence theories rest on what appears to be an inelucta- ble if simple idea, but they have not done well under examination. The chief difficulty is in finding a notion of fact that explains any- thing, that does not lapse, when spelled out, into the trivial or the empty. Recent discussion is thus mainly concerned with deciding whether some form of correspondence is true and trivial (". the theory of truth is a series of truisms" 1) or, in so far as it is not con- fused, simply empty ("The correspondence theory requires, not purification, but elimination" 2). Those who have discussed the semantic concept of truth in connection with correspondence the- ories have typically ruled the semantic concept either irrelevant or trivial. In this paper I defend a version of the correspondence theory. I think truth can be explained by appeal to a relation between lan- guage and the world, and that analysis of that relation yields in- sight into how, by uttering sentences, we sometimes manage to say what is true. The semantic concept of truth, as first systematically expounded by Tarski,3 will play a crucial role in the defense. * To be presented in an APA symposium on Truth, December 28, 1969; see James F. Thomson, "Truth-bearers and the Trouble about Propositions," this JOURNAL, LXVI, 21 (Nov. 6, 1969): 737-747. I have benefited greatly from discussions with John Wallace and from reading an unpublished paper in which he argues that the concept of satisfaction (which may be viewed as a form of correspondence) emerges in any theory of truth that meets certain desirable demands. My research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Cen- ter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. 1, 2 J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson, symposium on "Truth," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XXIV (1950), reprinted in George Pitcher, ed., Truth (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964). The quoted remarks are from Austin and Strawson respectively, and appear on pages 21 and 32 of Pitcher. 3 Alfred Tarski, "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages," in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (New York: Oxford, 1956). TRUE TO THE FACTS 749 It might be possible to prove that any theory or definition of truth meeting plausible standards necessarily contained conceptual resources adequate to define a sense of correspondence. My project is less ambitious: I shall be satisfied if I can find a natural inter- pretation of the relation of correspondence that helps explain truth. Clearly it is consistent with the success of this attempt that there be a formula for eliminating phrases like 'it is true that' and 'is true' from many or all contexts: correspondence and redundancy theories do not necessarily conflict. Nevertheless, we may find in- struction concerning the role of correspondence by asking how well we can do in systematically replacing sentences with truth-words or phrases by sentences without. The sentence (1) The statement that French is the officiallanguage of Mauritiusis true. is materially equivalent to 'French is the official language of Mau- ritius'; and the same might be said for any two sentences similarly related. This encourages the thought that the words that bed the embedded sentence in (1) represent an identity truth function, the same in power as double negation, but lacking significant articula- tion. On this suggestion, it would be no more than a freak of gram- mar that (1) consists of a complex singular term and a predicate. The trouble with the double-negation theory of truth is that it applies only to sentences, like (1) and 'It is true that 2 + 2 = 5', that have embedded sentences. The theory cannot cope directly with (2) The Pythagoreantheorem is true. (3) Nothing Aristotle said is true. We might retain the double-negation theory as applied to (1) while reserving (2) and (3) for separate treatment. But it is hardly plausi- ble that the words 'is true' have different meanings in these different cases, especially since there seem to be simple inferences connecting sentences of the two sorts. Thus from (2) and 'The Pythagorean theorem is the statement that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides' we can infer 'The statement that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides is true'. It is tempting to think that the double-negation theory can some- how be extended to cover the likes of (2) and (3). The reasoning might go this way: the double-negation theory tells us there is a sentence that expresses every statement. But then (2) holds just in 750 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY case there is a true sentence that expresses the Pythagorean theorem, and (3) holds in case no true sentence expresses something Aristotle said. The seeming need, in this explanation, to use the word 'true' will be shown harmless by rendering (2) and (3) thus: (2') (p)(the statement that p = the Pythagoreantheorem-* p) (3') -(3 p)(Aristotlesaid that p-p) We are now pursuing a line that diverges from the simple double- negation theory by accepting an ontology of statements, and by in- troducing quantification into positions that can be occupied by sentences. Not that the variables in (2') and (3') range over state- ments; it is rather expressions of the sort flanking the identity sign in (2') that refer to statements. In the double-negation theory, puta- tive reference to statements and putative predication of truth were absorbed into a grammatically complex, but logically simple, ex- pression, a truth-functional sentential connective. By contrast, the present theory allows us to view 'is true' as a genuine predicate. It provides a principle, namely (4) (p)(the statement that p is true -> P) that leads to sentences free of the predicate 'is true' and logically equivalent to sentences containing it. Here, truth is not explained away as something that can be predicated of statements, but ex- plained. Explained, that is, if we understand (2'), (3'), and (4). But do we? The trouble is in the variables. Since the variables replace sentences both as they feature after words like 'Aristotle said that' and in truth-functional contexts, the range of the variables must be entities that sentences may be construed as naming in both such uses. But there are very strong reasons, as Frege pointed out, for supposing that if sentences, when standing alone or in truth-functional con- texts, name anything, then all true sentences name the same thing.' This would force us to conclude that the statement that p is identical with the statement that q whenever p and q are both true; presum- ably an unacceptable result. In a brief, and often mentioned, passage F. P. Ramsey puts for- ward a theory similar to, or identical with, the one just discussed. He observes that sentences like (2'), (3'), and (4) cannot be convinc- ingly read in English without introducing the words 'is true' at the end, but seems to see this as a quirk, or even defect, of the language 4 Gottlob Frege, "On Sense and Reference," reprinted in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited and translated by Peter Geach and Max Black (New York: Oxford, 1952), pp.