Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Truth and Assertibility Author(s): Robert Brandom Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 6 (Mar. 25, 1976), pp. 137-149 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2025885 Accessed: 19-11-2016 14:30 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms - -__ _ 4- i I - 4 _ _ ITHE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXIII, NO. 6, MARCH 25, 1976 TRUTH AND ASSERTIBILITY * T HE question I will try to answer in this paper is: What role should the study of the truth conditions of sentences play in our attempt to understand the phenomenon of language? In contemporary philosophy of language there are two major opposing schools of thought on this issue. On the one hand, a tradition influenced by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein of the Tracta- tus, Tarski, and Carnap takes truth to be the basic concept in terms of which a theory of meaning, and hence a theory of lan- guage, is to be developed. According to this view, the essential feature of language is its capacity to represent the way things are. Understanding this function in detail is thus a matter of describing the conditions under which particular sentences truly represent the way things are. Formal semantics, the study of the truth conditions of sentences of various sorts of discourse, is the natural expression of this point of view. On the other hand, there is an approach to language, shared by Dewey and the later Wittgenstein, which attributes little or no importance to the notion of truth. According to this view, language is best thought of as a set of social practices. In order to understand how language works, we must attend to the uses to which its sentences are put and the circumstances in which they are used. Dewey claimed that everything useful that could be said about language with the notion of truth could also be said with a more general and methodologically unproblematic notion of justified utterance or "warranted assertibility." He argued further that the notion of truth should be discarded, since, insofar as it cannot be so reconstructed, its use in a theory of language leads to confusions and pointless unanswerable questions., One of the * I would like to thank Richard Rorty, David Lewis, and Bruce Kuklick for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. X John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, 1938); see especially chs. 1, 6, and 25. See also Dewey's response to Russell in P. A. Schilpp, ed., Philosophy of John Dewey (New York: Tudor, 1951). I37 This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms I38 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY striking features of Wittgenstein's mature thought is the replace- ment of his earlier question "What are the facts?" by the question "What are we entitled to say?" The notion of truth plays no role whatsoever in his comments on language-use (it is mentioned only in passing in the Investigations, by way of criticizing his earlier views).2 I It is not immediately obvious why stressing the kinship of language- use to other social practices should lead to the de-emphasis of the notion of truth; so let us look a little more closely at the sort of picture with which this approach presents us. The use of a par- ticular language by a population consists in the conformity of that population to a great many regularities. There are regularities involving pronunciation, the form of utterances, the physical and social circumstances of utterance, responses to utterances, and so on. The object of a theory of that language is the characteriza- tion and explanation of those regularities conformity to which is a criterion of membership in the linguistic community. We want, among other things, to associate with each sentence of the language a set-the assertibility conditions of that sentence-which deter- mines the regularities of usage a speaker must conform to for a given sentence. (The elements of the sets associated with sentences might be patterns of retinal irradiations, possible worlds, or sets of beliefs of the speaker; for my present purposes we can abstract from the question of what sorts of elements to choose.) Now it is clear that no regularity of appropriate utterance which a speaker learns to conform to and which is reconstructed by a hypothetical theory of assertibility conditions for a language can amount to requiring that all utterances be true, for that would make infallibil- ity a prerequisite for learning the language. It is thus clear that many of the utterances of any population will be, as we should say, assertible but not true, or true but not assertible. But-to return to the question raised above in connection with Dewey and Wittgenstein-what is the significance of this observa- tion for understanding the language studied? Presumably some of the utterances are guttural or nine-worded or spoken in the sun and not assertible, or are assertible and not guttural, nine-worded, 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1958), pp. 67-68; Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), part I, secs. 22, 23; see also secs. 136, 137 for the only use of truth. This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms TRUTH AND ASSERTIBILITY I39 or spoken in the sun. Why should the notion of truth be more important to the theory of this language than these other notions? Of course we can describe the linguistic behavior in terms of truth if we like, but the redundancy characteristics of our truth predicate assure us that we can involve that notion in any description we like, even where nothing like language is being discussed. We want to know what work is to be done by that notion. Notice that it is of no particular use to point out that in some language being studied not all warranted assertions of the presence of a deer result in veni- son dinners (even when nothing concrete goes wrong with the hunt, such as a badly thrown spear). For this is just to say that even if all members of the group are on their best behavior, each intending to conform to all the traditional regularities of linguistic conduct, asserting things only when appropriate and always responding ap- propriately, and even if everyone succeeds in these intentions, some- times things go well and sometimes not so well. And this is surely true of their other social practices of child-rearing, planting, and propitiating the gods as well. If no notion of truth is required to explain the occasional and otherwise random failures of a certain generally successful child-rearing practice, what is it about the lin- guistic practices which does enforce this notion? Approaching language primarily as a social practice or "form of life" thus presents a challenge to anyone who thinks that truth and the truth conditions studied by semantics ought to play a central role in our account of language. In the rest of this paper I will de- velop a precise sense in which the representationalist's concern with truth conditions can be generated within the project of the asserti- bility theorists. II Two recent authors who have recognized the challenge presented by the two points of view we have outlined, and have made explicit attempts to reconcile them are Wilfrid Sellars 8 and David Lewis.4 I will not draw upon their efforts here, though the resolution I will propose is similar in some respects to each of their proposals. The suggestion I will develop as to the proper role of truth in explain- ing language-use is that of Michael Dummett 5: a Science and Metaphysics (New York: Humanities, 1968), chs. 4 and 5. 4 "Languages and Language," forthcoming in the Minnesota Studies; also his Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1969), ch. 5, sec. 4. I believe that the view Lewis puts forward is, with minor changes, compatible with the more detailed position developed in this essay. 5 Frege: Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 451. This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms I40 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY ... the notion of truth is born in the first place out of less specific modes of commendation of an assertoric utterance, from the necessity to distinguish between it and the epistemic notion of justifiability; and this necessity is in turn imposed by the requirements for under- standing certain kinds of compound sentence (451). "Epistemic justifiability" is a part of what we have called the "as- sertibility conditions" of an utterance. Dummett offers an example: If future-tense sentences could not come within the scope of sentential operators, there would be no place for such a distinction between justification and truth.