Lesson 7: An argument for epistemically constrained truth

The first task at hand is to create a firm distinction between truth and matters of fact. Without this distinction the argument will fail.

Let us take truth to be the status that a sentence, or more specifically an assertion, has when it has accurately denoted a certain, and intended, state of affairs in the world. So an assertion is, by virtue of either achieving or not in a certain way, either true or false. This makes the the metaphysics of truth or falsity similar to that of a measurement, maybe. A meter does not exist as an object in its own right. It can only be understood as the property of an object, e.g. a piece of string being a meter long. Meter lengths presuppose something which can be that length. In the same way truth presupposes something which can be true (or false). Truth and falsity cannot exist as objects on their own. And the correct objects for having the property of being either true or false are assertions.

Matters of fact are states of affairs in the world. Matters of fact are the objects and the properties of such objects which make up reality as it is, whether we are realist or contructivists about this reality. Matters of fact are the chairs, tables, planets and Platonic Forms which make up reality. Matters of fact are also the the way these things are, such as tables and chairs being made of wood or plastic and belonging to the class of things called 'furniture'. It is a matter of fact that planets are round and have orbits and moons of their own. Matters of fact form the content (referents) of our assertions, whether true or not. I think most will agree that it is fully posible that there exist matter of fact of which we have no knowledge at any given moment in time. There must be planets we do not know about. Maybe Plato was right about Forms.

Now, dear reader, how do 'truth' and 'matters of fact' relate to each other. Remember 'truth' is the status that an assertion can have it meets certain criteria, and 'matters of fact' is the content of an assertion- what it is making reference to. The relationhip is that an assertion is 'true' if it has correctly denoted the intended 'matters of fact'. We have agreed that the existence of matter of fact are not contrained by our knowledge thereof. Things do exist without us knowing of such things. However, can the same be said about 'truth'? Can truth trancend knowledge?

If there were to be a piece of string floating about in the ether. But this piece of string was not visible to the ordinary senses of man. Let us imagine that a claim is being made that that piece of string is a meter long. It has the property of being a meter long. But that it cannot, due to its extraordinary extra-sensory nature, be tracked nor measured. How would you regard claims that this piece of string is a meter long? You might, like me, dear reader, think that 'meter', being an artificial construct entirely dependent on human endeavours and concepts, is better utilised as a practical, determinable property of objects, rather than understood as an hypothetical property which a piece of string may or may not have. You may think, why even bother to state that something is a meter long when it is immeasurable? There is nothing a priori wrong with doing this, of course, because it is possible that, completely by chance, the state of affairs which need to exist in the world which would render the claim true does exists. But making claims that something is meter long knowing full well that it cannot be meaured does seem, at least, a little platitudinous and, at most, an entirely meaningless way of looking at the concept of 'meter'.

My suggestion is that 'truth' should be treated, as with the concept of 'meter', as a practical and workable, and therefore knowable, property of assertions as 'meter' is a measurable property of pieces of string. It is commonly accepted by most philosophers that to assert is to state as true. But if this is done with the full knowledge that the truth status of an assertion can never be determined (known), this must make asserting, in cases which are not constrained by knowledge, a vacuous activity.

So, above is my reason for why 'truth' is better understood as constrained by knowledge. Do you agree? Next time we look at what the realists and anti-realists say about this.

Lesson 6: The beginnings of an argument for why truth should be evidentially constrained.

Now, it is true, and anyone would be a fool for not conceding, that there must be things out there that are not known to the human mind. For one, time and the history of human enquiry, both formal and informal, have proven this to be so. If one were to be reasonable it would seem quite feasible to assume that there must be more such facts that will be discovered in the furture, and that when these are to be discovered they are found to have existed long before the event of their discovery. The Earth being flat we take to be such a discovery. And we assume that the Earth did not only become flat when it was found to be so (but, naturally, we cannot be completely sure about this either). The Earth was flat preceding the knowledge of this fact. In other words, the metaphysics preceded the epistemology of this state of affairs.

Taking the assertion, "The earth is flat", to have meaning according to the logical positivists based on the fact that it can be shown to be either contingently true or false.

Now, what would happen if someone quite brilliant suggested that they are willing to concede that certain statements have no meaning according the criteria for meaning forwarded by the positivists, but would like to maintian that truth can nevertheless be evidence transcendent. Their reason for this being that there simply are certain things which are, at any given moment in time, beyong human cognition and recognition. This entails that all assertions about the world, despite the truth conditions for these assertions being unavailable to human perception and comprehension, are either true or false. It is after all the state of affairs in the world which either make the assertions true or false and not our subjective opinions.

However, the proponents of evidence transcendent truth are forced to conclude, if truth conditions are what import meaning to assertions, and these conditions are unavailable to human cognition, that meaning is imported independently of speakers knowing what they are speaking of. In other words, if truth is sometimes evidence transcendent, and meaning presupposes truth conditions, then meaning is sometimes transcendent of human comprehension and understanding. So, meaning is not a human activity as it is not constrained by human knowledge but rather yielded by the world out there. In short, meaning, sometimes, comes from somewhere else. Presumably, from the same place as truth comes from.

I leave you here for now, but with this difficult question about meaning. Can the meaning which our assertions carry be imported by facts in the world which we have no access to? Because, if the answer to this question is affrimative, this would have to entail that the source of language (the human mind) is independent to the source of meaning (the world).