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).