Truth, the a priori and
synonymy
1.
The a priori and the analytic
If we are asked what makes sentences like “most dogs have
four legs” or “napoleon lost in Waterloo” true, it is not too hard to provide a
rough answer. They are true in virtue on certain observable features of the
universe. Asked how we know such sentences to be true, the reply would be,
roughly : through observation by the senses. Of course we did not observe
napoleon lose at Waterloo, but someone did, and that is, ultimately, how we
know the sentence to be true. Or, at any rate, someone must have observed
something from which is reasonable to infer that Napoleon lost. Such truths as
these are usually called “empirical” or “a posteriori”.
There are many sentences whose truth cannot be explained
in the above way. Take the sentences “all bachelors are unmarried” and “two
plus two equal four”. Here are other examples of similar sorts of truths :
“whatever is, is”, “all triangles are three-sided”, “whatever is red is
coloured”, “if ‘S’ IS true, then ‘S’ is not false”, and “all bodies are
extended”. They are called a priori
truths.
Any explanation of
a priori truth must take a further consideration into account. These truths
seem to be necessary truths. Not only is it true a priori that two plus two equal four, it is necessarily true; it
could not be otherwise in the way that it could have been otherwise that I have
fair hair. Again, while it is possible for any man to get married, it is not
possible that a bachelor should be married and also remain a bachelor. In the
everyday sense of “necessary” there are plenty of necessary truths which are
not a priori. Thus we might of it
being necessary that an unsuspended apple should fall; or of its being
impossible for a man to grow to fifty feet. In philosophical jargon, though, it
is customary to restrict the term “necessary” to a priori truths. Either this, or to apply some longer term like
“natural necessity” to truths which are true in virtue scientific laws like
those above. For, since David Hume’s time, it has generally accepted that the
laws of science are empirical and contingent, and that we could at least
imagine them breaking down, and so imagine lot of what is in fact true being
false.
Whether or not there are other necessary truths, it is
fairly plain why a priori ones should
be necessary. For it makes no difference to an a priori truth what happen in the world; so if whatever could
change in the universe would make no difference, it is difficult to see how our
a priori truths could have been
false. I can describe no occurrences such that, if they were to take place,
they would falsify all bachelors are unmarried. So any account of a priori truth must take into
consideration the peculiarly necessary status of such truth.
What, then, is an a
priori or necessary truth? Many definitions have been provided, but it is
doubtful, if any has been fully satisfactory. Mainly they have failed through
being circular, or through failing to explain its necessity. Consider, for
example, Leibniz’s definition of an a
priori truth as one whose denial would be self-contradictory. This will
account for the a priori nature of
sentence like “John is John”. But what about the sentence “all bachelors are
unmarried?”. The denial of this does not have the explicit form of a self-contradiction;
ie, it is not of the form “it is the
case that X, and it is not the case that X”. So Leibniz must be using “self
contradictory” in a wider sense. But what sense? Can we say more than that a
sentence is self contradictory in this sense if it is the denial of an a priori
truth? If not we have explained nothing. Or consider Hume’s view that a
necessary truth is one whose falsity is unimaginable?
Apart from the problem that people’s powers of imagination very widely, and are
anyway largely untapped, there is a further difficulty. Let us admit that an a
priori truth cannot be imagined to be false. Surely, though, we have not been
given the reason why it is necessary. The cart has been put before the horse.
The reason why we cannot imagine certain sentence to be false is because they are necessarily true. So
Hume’s account would fail to explain the necessity of a priori truths are those
whose falsity we cannot imagine, and vise versa.
Given the difficulties in finding an adequate account of
necessary truth, it is similar wonder that some philosophers have given up the
chase, and denied that there is such a thing. J. S. Mill in his system of logic, for instance, regards
it as an illusion to suppose that mathematical and other supposedly a priori
truths are necessary? For him, they are no more than especially well-confirmed
empirical generalizations. And a more recent philosopher, Quine, says “In
principle… I see no higher or more austere necessity than natural necessity”.
They may be right. Perhaps the a priori is a white elephant. But it is
too early for us to admit this. Let us search for more adequate definitions
of the a priori.
Since the eighteenth century, discussion of a priori
truth has usually been conducted within the framework set up by Kant. Indeed,
the division into a priori and a posteriori, in those terms, is Kant’s. in
addition to this division, Kant made another. All truths, he says, are analytic
or synthetic.
In all judgment in which the
relation of a subject to predicate is thought… this relation is possible in two
different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, a something
which is (covertly) contained in this concept A; or B lies outside the concept
A, although it does indeed stand in connection with it. In the one case I
entitle the judgment analytic, in the other synthetic.
As an example of
analytic truth he gives “all bodies are extended”. He seems to mean that the
idea of extension is included in the very concept of body; that in thinking of a
body one is already thinking of
extension. This is to be distinguished from a synthetic truth such as “all
bodies have weight”; for the idea of heaviness is not actually contained in the
concept of body.
While Kant is getting at something important here, his
description of the analytic/synthetic distinction is unsatisfactory. For, it is
not at all clear what is the psychological talks of ideas containing one
another, or of our thinking the predicate in subject, means. Recent
philosophers, consequently, have given different accounts of the distinction,
though they have remained, supposedly, true to the spirit of Kant’s. According
to these philosophers, saying that one idea is contained in another is a
misleading way of saying that one term is part of the meaning of another. On
this account, “All bodies are extended” is analytic because of word “body” means, inter alia, something that has
extension. A synthetic truth, on the other hand, is one that is not similarly
true in virtue of the meanings of the component expressions.
We can now see the relevance of linguistic considerations
to the a priori. For all analytic
truths are a priori truths; and analytic truths, we have just seen, are those
which supposedly are true in virtue of meanings alone. So far, though, what we
are saying is very vague, because of the extreme vagueness of “meaning”. Nor
would it help matters to employ A. J. Ayer’s account, that “a proposition is
analytic when its validity depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it
contains”. For the notion of definition is scarcely clearer than the notion of
meaning. It has been said that there are at least fourteen distinct kinds of definitions;
and not all of these ostensive definition, for example – could be involved in
analytic truth.Nor is it much use to say with Carnap that analytic truths are
those which are true in virtue of the “semantical rules” of language. Unlike an
artificial logician’s language, which contains explicit instructions for the
use of symbols, a natural language despite the attempts of the French Academic
and Fowler to impose them – does not contain explicit rules of form “Always
use ‘body’ so that it means something
extended. The semantics rules, If there be any are implicit. But then how do we
know what they are? Not by looking at the dictionary, for the lexicographer is
only describing how we use words; he is not a legislator. It seems we say
little about such rule except they are the rule which, if we infringe them,
result in the denial analytic truths. If so, we must first recognize a priori truths before we can extract
the semantic rules and so we cannot explain the a priori in the terms of this rules.
The definition of analytic is one terms of synonymy. It has been suggested that an
analytic truth is one which can be transformed into a logical truth once
synonyms are replaced by synonyms. For example, since “bachelor” is synonymous
with “unmarried man” then we can transform the sentence “All bachelors are
unmarried men” into “All bachelors are bachelors” when we replace one
expression by its synonym. Now the latter sentence is a truth of logic; that
is, it has the form ”All A’s are A’s”. This view of analytic truth depends upon
our being able to give an adequate
account of synonymy. This is something we should want to do anyway, since it
constitutes one of the two major problems about but the role that synonymy
plays in answering the question “what is a
priori truth?” provides an added spur to studying it.
We have already noted that analytic truths are a priori,
and we are assuming that analytic truths depend upon synonymy relations. If it
could be shown, further, that all a priori truths are analytic it would then
follow that all a priori are true in virtue of synonymy relations. So what the
linguistic theory asserts is:
1. All a priori truths are analytic
2. All analytic truths are true in
virtue of purely linguistic data (eg synonymy relations)
Contemporary empiricists, like Ayer and Carnap said there
are just two kinds of truths namely empirical ones, which area tested by
observation and analytic ones, which are tested by seeing how words are
employed.
2. Synonymy
There
are some analisys of synonymy used in this explanation which is stated by some
of the philosopis.
·
According to Fowler’s Modern English Usage “Synonyms, in the
narrowest sense, are separate words whose meaning, both detonation and
conotation, is identical, so that one can always be subtituted for the other
without change in the effect of the sentence in which it is done.”
·
The extreme version of the
theory is well stated by Benson Mates as follows:
Two expressions are
synonymous in a language L if and only if they may be interchanged in each
sentence of L without altering the truth value of that sentence.
·
Goodman stresses that two expressions are not synonymous just
because they apply to all and only the same things. ‘Centaur’and ‘unicorn’ are
not even alike in meaning, yet they apply to all and only the same-namely
nothing at all.
The
theory of synonymy that E. Cooper wants to consider is concerned with the
subtitution of one word for another only insofar as this might change the truth-valve sentences-not with how it
might alter the psychological or emotive force of the sentences. The theory of
synonymy that E.Cooper wants to discuss and amend is often called the
‘interchangeability theory’. Put loosely, the claim is that synonymy is a
function of words being interchageable in sentences without altering the
truth-values of those sentences. The extreme version of theory is well stated
by Benson Mates.
For
example, ‘bachelor’ and ‘unmarried man’ are synonyms if any true sentence
containing ‘bachelor’ remains true when ‘unmarried man’ replaces ‘bachelor’-
and similarly for false sentences. But, there are the extreem theories that
mentioned as the recalcitrant sentences:
1. ‘“Bachelor”
has eight letters.’ Obviously this becomes false if we replace ‘bachelor’ by
‘unmarried man’. So these
two putative synonyms fail to interchange here-and, of course, no two words
that are not orthograpically identical will be interchangeable in all sentences
of this sort.
2. “[di’said]
(ie decide) has less phonemes than [di’laitid’ (ie delighted).’ This would
become false if we replaced ‘decide’ by the putative synonym ‘make a
decision’-and again we could not expect any two words which are phonetically
distinct to be interchageable in all such sentences.
3. ‘He’ll
get over her;it’s only puppy-love’, or ‘John,Mary, and Susan from passionate
love-triangle’. The first become absurd if we try to replace ‘puppy’ by ‘young
dog’. The second becomes absurd if we replace ‘triangle’ by ‘plane, triangle
figure’. When a word forms part of some longer compound expression, it will, in
general, be hopeless to expect any other word to be interchangeable with it Salva veritate.
4. ‘Too many cooks spoil the
broth’, or ‘Life is just a cherry-cream pie’. Try
replacing ‘cooks’ by some putative synonym like ‘culinary workers’ in the
first. And try replacing ‘cherry’ by ‘pulpy drupe from a species of prunus’ in
the second. Both the proverb and the metaphor become absurd as a result, To the
extent to which, qua proverb and metaphor, they are true, they cease to be true
once ‘cooks’ and ‘cherry’ are replaced by their putative synonyms.
5. ‘Whoever
believes all the men inthe men in the room are bachelors, believes all the men
in the room are bachelors.’ This is certainly true. But suppose we replace the
second occurance of ‘bachelors’ by ‘unmarried men’, and derive ‘whoever
believes all the men in the room are bachelors, believes all the men in the
room are unmerried men’. This is almost certainly false- for there is almost
certainly someone who does not believe that all bachelors are unmarried. And in
general one should not begin to expect any two words to be universally
interchangeable in all so-called ‘intensinal’ sentences-ones of such forms as
‘he believes that X is Y’, or ‘She hopes that X will be Y’, or ‘ They want X to
be Y’, or ‘He wondered if X was Y’, etc.
So
now it could be suggested the following criterion of synonymy: two expressions
are synonymous if and only if they are interchangeable salva veritate in all those sentences attempted confirmation of which presupposes giving a semantic
interpretation of the expressions. There are two terms that is stated by
E.Cooper; ‘Attempted Confirmation’ and ‘semantic interpretation’. By an attempt
confirmation of a sentence, I mean anything that would count as an attempt to
find out if the sentence was true or false. This might range from a
full-blooded laboratory test to establish the truth of a sentence, to grouping,
uncertain, indirect ways of finding out if it was true or false. The
confirmation might be empirical-as when one looks and listens-or of a quite
different type, as when one tries to find out if a statement in mathematics is
true by employing the deductive techniques of that discipline.
By
a semantic interprentation of an expression, I mean just about anything would
count as an attempt to explain what an expression means, what is to be
understood by it, or what is implied by it. Thus a man’s saying ‘”bachelor”
means unmarried man’, or a person’s pointing to Russian flags and pools of
blood in answer to the question ‘What does “red” mean?’ could both be counted
as semantic interpretations. Again the point is that we need not always be able
to provide such a semantic interpretation of each word in a sentence in order
to set about confirming it. But now we
have a problem. For how do we know that the sentence ‘All bachelors are
necessarily unmarried men’ is true unless we already know that ‘bachelor’ and
‘unmarried man’ are synonymous.
So
E. Cooper restate the definition of synonymy: two expressions are synonymous if
and only if they, and various compound expressions derived from them, are
interchageable Salva veritate in all
sentences attempted confirmation of which presupposes giving a semantic
interpretation of the expressions.
3. Sentences and proposition
The
alleged confusion is between sentences, which are linguitic entities, and
certain non-linguistic entities which sentences are used to express. The claim
is that truth and falsity belong not to sentences, it is difficult to see how a
necessary truth can depend upon linguitics data, since what is necessarily
true, a proposition, is not something linguistics at all. To suppose that
sentences are true or false is like supposing that it is written score of a
symphony that is beautiful rather than the symphony itself. Just as the beauty
of the symphony does not depend upon the nature of the symbols used in writing
the score, so the truth of a proposition does not depend upon the nature of the
symbols used in a sentences whish expresses it.
Because
words have the meaning they do, sentences containing the will express the
proposition they do. But the truth or falsity of the propositions so expressed
in no way depends upon the meanings of the words.
Can sentences be true or false? If we
consider sentences as grammatical entities, we may think that they can be true
or false. Can a sentence be grammatical or not? If we consider the different
meanings of the word grammatical, we will have different answers to this
question.
To
talk about the truth or falsity of sentences, as long as they are distinct from
propositions and from, well, people. One can only evaluate something as true or
false if it expresses an idea, and further if there is some model of the world
that can be compared to the expressed idea. Particular sentences, if you look
only at the formal aspects, are not specified for models of worlds, and so
cannot per se have true/false values. Of course, it is rare in the course of
life to experience a sentence that does not (or never did) express anything
true or false.
A
sentence can be evaluated as grammatical or not, at least in my conception of
the terms “sentence” and “grammatical”. Especially in the
non-core areas of the grammar, and also in the murky waters of null anaphora
and ellipsis, and in very contextually or semantically-constrained
constructions, it is difficult to distinguish between “pure” grammaticality and what some call “acceptability”.
2. The
pattern of symbols,
marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence.
The
meaning of a proposition includes having the quality or
property of being either true or false,
and as such propositions are claimed to be truth
be arers.The existence of propositions in sense (a) above,
as well as the existence of "meanings," is disputed by some
philosophers. Where the concept of a "meaning" is admitted, its
nature is controversial. In earlier texts writers have not always made it
sufficiently clear whether they are using the term proposition in sense of the words or the
"meaning" expressed by the words. To
avoid the controversies and ontological implications,
the term sentence is often now used instead of proposition to refer to just those strings of
symbols that are truthbearers, being either true or false under an
interpretation. Strawson advocated the use of the term "statement," and
some mathematicians have adopted this usage.
One
of the fundamental concerns in philosophy is that with truth. But what kind of
things are true?—what is truth a property of? The traditional answer is that it
is propositions which are true or false, where propositions are to be
distinguished from sentences. There are four main arguments for denying that it
is sentences which are true or false and for introducing the apparatus of
propositions to stand as the bearers of truth.
Firstly,
"sentence" is a grammatical concept and not all grammatically
well-formed sentences appear to express anything which is capable of being true
or false: for example, "All green ideas sleep furiously". This
sentence is grammatically well-formed, but clearly meaningless. Some sentences,
we shall say, do not express any proposition at all.
Secondly,
some sentences are ambiguous. We normally explain this by saying that one
sentence (string of words) is capable of expressing more than one proposition:
for example, "Flying aeroplanes can be dangerous", which can mean
either that being a pilot can be a dangerous activity, or that aeroplanes can
be dangerous when they are flying about in the sky.
Thirdly,
different sentences can have the same meaning. We would normally think of
translation from one language to another to be possible because sentences from
different languages can express the same proposition: for example, "It is
raining", "Il pleut" and "Esregnet".
Fourthly,
we tend to think that there is some meaning in common between the indicative,
interrogative and imperative sentences in the table below, and this is normally
explained by differentiating their assertoric force from their propositional
content.
|
The
sentences below are synonymous with the sentences to the left
|
|
Indicative
|
The cat is
on the mat.
|
It is the
case that
|
the cat is
on the mat
|
|
Interrogative
|
Is the cat
on the mat?
|
Is it the
case that
|
the cat is
on the mat
|
|
Imperative
|
Put the
cat on the mat!
|
Make it
the case that
|
the cat is
on the mat
|
|
Assertoric
force
|
Propositional
content
|
1It is only because we normally
concentrate on indicative sentences that we often fail to recognize that there
is a difference between sentences and propositions. But clearly interrogative
and imperative sentences are in some way also about things in the world, about
cats and mats in this case, just as much as indicative sentences are.
Propositions are invoked in an attempt to explain this.
4. ……is true
Based on the book ‘philosophy and
the nature of language’, david e. cooper have been using the terms of true and
false without explaining the terms. This procedure is justifiable enough, for
even if the normal person would be hard pressed to give definitions of them
david e. cooper certainly has a working grasp of them and to that extend knows
what they mean. In this section, though, I do want to give some account of
these crucial little words.
There are many questions that can be
asked about truth, which would all fall under the question, what is truth? The
question could mean what things are true?. Traditionally there have been two
favorite theories which have tried to provide the answer: coherence theory and
correspondence theory. For the first we will see:
1) Coherence
theory
Some philosopher like:
plato and irsathotholees or aristoteles, both of them had developed coherence
theory based on thinking pattern.
For a coherence
theorist a sentence is true if and only if it is related in a special way to
other sentences: if it coheres with these in some manner. The coherence theory
is best regarded not as an explanation of what “true” means, but of why it is
that we accept sentences as true in many instances.
For example: all people
will die, is right sentence, and
Fulan
will die,
It means second
statement is right too because the second sentence relevant with first
sentence. And another example for this theory we can find it in mathematics.
2) Correspondence
theory
The philosopher namely
Bertrand russel had defined this theory.
For a correspondence
theorist a sentence is true if and only if it is related in a special way to
the world: if it corresponds to something in the world.
For example: Jakarta is
the capital of Indonesia
Surabaya
is the capital of east java.
Turning to the
correspondence theory, david E.cooper shall distinguish between an old-style,
and a new-style version. The former is much plausible, but its mistakes will be
instructive.
a) The
old-style theory
We can think of this
theory as claiming that the relation between a true sentence and some aspect of
the world is analogous. Analogously, it has been suggested that:
·
There corresponds to
each part of the sentence something in the world.
·
The components of the
sentences be ordered or structured in a way corresponding to the order or
structure of the features in the world.
For
the theory to be acceptable, it is essential that we can separately identify
the component in a sentence from the component in the world. For only then
could it make sense to speak of comparing the sentence fits or matches?
For
example:
·
Relation between a
photograph of a face and face
·
The cat on the mat
For
the photo to be accurate it is necessary that, corresponding to each area on
the cellulose, there is an area on the surface of the face. In addition, the
areas on the cellulose must be ordered of the areas on the face. This second
condition required; it is not enough that bits of the photo should corresponds
to b its of face, since photo might be cut up into little pieces and stuck back
together again so that it does not resemble the subject. By analogy, we could
only say that a photo is accurate if we can identify the photo, identify the
subject and see whether they are similar in look. Now it can be shown that is
not possible separately to identify the components in a sentence from the
components in the world. What about if there is a language which one-word
sentence.”Catamat“ is used when and only when we would use the sentence ‘ the
cat is on the mat’ and that speaker if this language hold catamat to be true
when and only when we hold our sentence; they describe the same situation in
the world. For here we have two sentences differing in their components, but
describing same situation on the world. If the cat is on the mat were true in
virtue of special relation holding between each of its components and
components in the world, then catamat could not be true, since it does not have
that relation. It is tempting to reply; but catamat must really have several
components and is simply an abbreviated way of saying what we say. This reply
is based on linguistics ethnocentrism.
What both of the above arguments
show is that the relation between a sentence and something in the world is a
conventional relationship. It is a matter of convention which sentences we
employ to describe the world; and it is, in a sense, a matter of convention
what we count the situations in the world as comprising and being like.
b) The
new-style theory.
This
amended version of the correspondence theory admits all that david e cooper has
said so far. Indeed proponents of it stress that the relation between sentence
and the world is conventional and not natural like that between a photo and a
face. What is suggested is this: when a person utters a true sentence we must
be obeying certain convention which relates his words to the world. These
conventions will include at least the following;
a. Convention
whereby referring expressions are used to refer to things to the world.
b. Convention
whereby predicates can be used to express characteristic of things
Let us admit that when a person utters a
sentence ‘s’ truly, the person obeying the relevant conventions, it does not
follow, however, that “s “ is true means the same as ‘s ‘ was uttered in
accordance with the relevant conventions. It does not follow that calling a
sentence true is the same thing as asserting that the sentence obeyed the
conventions. It may be that the theory under discussion informs us of the
necessary and sufficient conditions for a sentence’s being true. But does not
inform us what “true ‘ means.
For example, it has been argued that if
theory were correct then, whenever we call a sentence true we should be talking
simply about the meaning of words and rules of using words. And this, it is
alleged, is an unacceptable consequence since, surely, we are at least partly
talking about the world when we say a sentence is true. It seems to david e
cooper, though that on the new-style theory we would be talking about the world
in calling a person’s sentence true. The reason is this; a true sentence only
obeys the relevant conventions if something in the world is the case. There
does seem to be a more effective reason for denying that the new-style theory
gives us the meaning of is true. There is a good sense in which necessary
truths, as discussed earlier in this chapter, are not about the world at all.
Certainly they do not need to be established via observation of what is
happening in the world. So let us try again. It is important to note that in a
good sense the expressions is true and is false are superfluous. For, whenever
one says a sentence is true, one could instead simply reassert that sentence.
It would be natural to conclude that when a person says p is true. It means no
more than when he simply. But this would be too hasty. True is not completely
superfluous. This can be seen in the following way. So this is a further ,
albeit minor, objection to the new-style correspondence theory. If asked what
true means is then, we must first point out that the information-content of
calling a sentence true is precisely the same as that of simply asserting the
sentence in question. In addition we must point out that calling true differs
from merely asserting the sentence, in that the former plays an endorsing role
not formally played by the assertion itself.
Source: Cooper,
David E. 1973. Philosophy and the Nature
of Language.London : Longman.
