Wright on Deflationism

I’m reading Crispin Wright’s Truth and Objectivity for a reading group at the moment, where he sums up an argument against deflationism about truth in the following way (I quote at length):

The deflationist holds that “true”, although gramatically a predicate, denotes no substantial quality of statements, or thoughts, but is merely a device of assertoric endorsement, of use to us only because we sometimes wish so to endorse a single statement, referred to in a way which doesn’t specify it’s content, or batches of statements all at once. Apart from applications of those two kinds, it is, for the deflationist, a complete explanation of the truth predicate that it satisfies the Disquotational Schema. It is a consequence of this general conception of the role of the truth predicate that it can register no norm governing assertoric discourse distinct from warranted assertibility. Yet the central place assigned to the Disquotational Schema—and thereby to the Negation Equivalence—actually clashes with that consequence, for it follows that, while normative of assertoric discourse, and indeed coincident in (positive prescriptive) normative force with warranted assertibility, “true” is nevertheless potentially extensionally divergent from warranted assertibility—and hence has to be accounted as registering a distinct such norm. Since it’s compliance or non-compliance with a norm distinct from assertoric warrant can hardly be an “insubstantial”property of a statement, and since a uniform account is possible of what it is for any particular statement so to comply, deflationism collapses. (pp. 71–2)

For reference, the Disquotational Schema is:

(DS) “P” is T is and only if P

One can’t, without engaging in a kind of doublethink, say or believe things like ‘P and it is not warrantedly assertible that P’ for some proposition P, since you can rationally assert P if and only if it is warrantedly assertible (for you) that P. But truth can be used to contrast with warranted assertibility. Take (DS) and substitute ‘It is not the case that P’ for P:

(i) ‘It is not the case that P’ is T is and only if it is not the case that P.

From (i) and (DS) one can infer:

(ii) It is not the case that P if and only if it is not the case that ‘P’ is T.

And from (i) and (ii) you get:

(iii) ‘It is not the case that P’ is T if and only if it is not the case that ‘P’ is T.

But (iii) cannot be right if T means warrantedly assertible, so ‘true’ registers a norm distinct from warranted assertibility. Deflationism is the view that ‘true’ just is a devise of assertoric endorsement, and Wright thinks that a mere devise of assertoric endorsement couldn’t register a norm distinct from warranted assertibility, so deflationism must be false.

But there is a way to register the truth norm without using the truth predicate. One can say ‘P and it is not warrantedly assertible for S that P’ or ‘¬P and it is warrantedly assertible for S that P’ where S is some person other than yourself, and in doing so can register the truth norm without using the truth predicate. What is required is that one contrasts one’s own perspective with that of another. Registering the truth norm requires some kind of I-Thou contrast. If that’s the case then ‘true’ is not what, fundamentally, allows one to register the truth norm contrasting with the norm of warranted assertibility, and deflationism is off the hook.

I think this might tap into something deep about objectivity—more specifically, our ability to see the world as being objective or to conceptualise there being objective facts that outstrip our ability to know them—as it coheres with something Robert Brandom says about objectivity. Brandom (I won’t spell out the details here) also argues that conceptualising objectivity requires I-Thou relationships. This is made explicit in paradigmatically referential of-statements like ‘He believes of this criminal that he is an innocent man.’ Understanding “of” requires navigating between one’s own perspective and that of another. Since “of” is how we refer objectively to the world, talking (and hence thinking) about the world objectively requires navigating between one’s own perspective and that of another.

Semantic Inferentialism and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

My Philosophy Compass article ‘Semantic Inferentialism and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’ now looks like it’s been published online.  Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism has provoked a huge literature since it first began being discussed, but none of the prominent responses to it have, to my mind, been convincing.  In this paper however, I argue that semantic inferentialists, of the Brandomian sort, aren’t subject to the kind of considerations that motivate the argument.  Enjoy!

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phc3.12062/abstract

Nazi Philosophers

This article appeared in the Telegraph a few days ago chronicling the rise of Nazi philosophers in Hitler's Germany:

‘[Most academics in Germany] did not merely reconcile themselves to Hitler. They enthusiastically espoused Nazi ideology, and came up with all sorts of elaborate reasons to justify the purging of Jews, the persecution of dissidents, and the conquest and oppression of other nations. They went out of their way to flaunt their loyalty to the Nazi cause.’

The diagnosis of why this happened that caught my eye:

‘Their deluded enthusiasm for the debased ideology of the Nazis is an instance of the fact that people who spend their lives debating abstract issues can become so distanced from the quotidian world that they can no longer see the obvious.’

This is a thought that I’m not wholly hostile to (although it's not clear it explains the uptake of Nazism amongst academics: plenty of people who occupied the "quotidian world" were Nazis too), but Palmer continues:

‘Philosophers are particularly vulnerable to this form of idiocy, because there is so little content to their subject.  It does not consist in the discovery of new facts, and philosophical theories are only seldom decisively refuted by anything.  Fashion is often the most important factor in explaining which doctrines come to be accepted by any group of academic philosophers.’

I think there is a more charitable explanation to be had.  Philosophy involves teasing out the consequences of various commitments.  This involves three responsibilities, one critical, one ampliative and one justificatory. [I'm drawing on Brandom's Reason in Philosophy here.]  The critical responsibility is to rectify mutually incompatible commitments, it is to ensure that one's system of beliefs is consistent.  If one maintains P, $\neg$Q and P $\rightarrow$ Q, then at least one of these commitments must be jettisoned.  The ampliative responsibility is to become aware of the material consequences of one's current commitments.  Acknowledged commitments give rise to further commitments that one may not yet be aware of.  The responsibility to make oneself aware of these further commitments and to integrate them appropriately into the whole is a responsibility that aims at completeness.  Whereas the ampliative responsibility looks inferentially downstream, the justificatory responsibility looks inferentially upstream.  Agents are responsible for offering reasons for their commitments, by claiming commitments that entitle them to their current commitments.  The justificatory responsibility is directed at ensuring that one's network of commitments is warranted.  Philosophy is aimed at acquiring a certain kind of understanding, an integration of our beliefs into a coherent whole.  Unearthing our inferential commitments however can only take us so far; it can tell us that P, $\neg$Q and P $\rightarrow$ Q are not compossible, but it does not tell us what thereby to so; whether to reject our belief P, our belief $\neg$Q, or whether to reconsider the conditional itself.  As the saying goes, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.

This goes some way to explaining why philosophers aren’t inoculated from evil political ideologies.  An ability to reason is not, by itself, sufficient to steer away from such things.  In fact, an ability to reason can aid dogmatism, as it makes it easier to defend a view, any view, from counterarguments.  The lesson I think ought to be drawn from the sad prevalence of Nazi philosophers isn’t that philosophy “lacks content” (however that view is parsed), but that rational nous alone isn’t enough to get at the truth; we also require the intellectual virtues of open-mindedness, independence of thought, intellectual honesty and humility, and self-awareness.  Reason, in this sense, is rather like courage: whether it is used for good or ill depends on the other character traits of those who employ it.

Solving Meno's Paradox the Semantic Inferentialist Way

Semantic inferentialists hold that understanding an expression amounts to having a practical mastery over the ‘material’ infererences it is involved in. (‘Material’ is intended to invoke the old Aristotelian distinction between form and matter: logically valid inferences are hold in virtue of their form, materially valid inferences hold in virtue of their content.)  Grasping ‘That’s red’, to use a well-trodden example, involves treating the commitment as incompatible with ‘That’s green’ and as entailing commitment to ‘That’s coloured’.  Logical locutions (paradigmatically negation and the conditional), are used to make explicit the inferential relations one endorses in practice.  The inference from ‘That’s red’ to ‘That’s coloured’, although materially valid, is logically invalid.  The enthymematic gap can be plugged with ‘For all x, if x is red then x is coloured’.

That’s a (very) brief synopsis of one central tenet of semantic inferentialism, but what bearing does this have on the Meno paradox?  Plato’s Socrates states the paradox this way:

Do you realize what a controversy you’re conjuring up? The claim is that it’s impossible for a man to search either for what he knows or for what he doesn’t know: he wouldn’t be searching for what he knows, since he knows it and that makes the search unnecessary, and he can’t search for what he doesn’t know either, since he doesn’t even know what it is he’s going to search for. [Meno, 80e]

Socrates was inquiring into the nature of virtue, but any project of analysis—the analysis of knowledge, for instance—is subject to the paradox. If we already understand what knowledge is, then the analysis of knowledge appears superfluous; but, if we do not understand what knowledge is then we will have no grip on what analysis is the correct one.  It looks like the semantic inferentialist can avoid this dilemma by appealing to the difference between practical mastery and making explicit.  We began with an implicit understanding of ‘knowledge’; a practical mastery of the inferences it licenses, its circumstances and consequences of application.  By making explicit the inferences that a concept licenses, what is gained from the project of analysis is an explicit understanding of the concept of knowledge; so on the one hand analysis is not superfluous. On the other hand, our implicit understanding of knowledge allows us to check it against various analyses: are there occasions where it is appropriate to ascribe knowledge but where it is not appropriate to ascribe the analysans, or vice versa? So, there is no puzzle surrounding how we can know which analysis is the correct one. Our implicit inferential mastery of concepts makes the project of analysis possible.