Fanciful Arguments for Realism.pdf

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Fanciful Arguments for RealismAuthor(s): Alan H. GoldmanSource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 93, No. 369 (Jan., 1984), pp. 19-38Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2254203 .Accessed: 13/09/2011 23:39

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Mind (i 984) Vol. XCIII, I9-38

Fanciful Arguments for Realism

ALAN H. GOLDMAN

i. Throughout the long history of the realism-idealism debate, the realist has encountered notorious difficulty in specifying clearly his notion of independence, when he claims that the world is independent of our perceptions and concepts. Michael Dummett has suggested a way that interprets realism as a- semantic and epi- stemological, as much as a metaphysical, thesis.1 For him the realist's claim is that meaning must be defined in terms of truth conditions, and that truth here must be contrasted with verification or warranted assertibility. The realist takes his assertions to state that their truth conditions are satisfied, whether or not we are in a position to tell that they are. The independence in question is the irreducibility of truth to warrant, coupled with the analysis of meaning in terms of truth.

Realism in this semantic sense must be thoroughgoing in order to have any plausibility. We cannot be realists about truth but not meaning. We cannot, as some contemporary philosophers seem to suggest,2 analyze meanings as given by justification conditions and then continue to contrast justification with truth. This leads to the absurd result that to assert that x is F is to assert that x is probably F but may not be. Since these assertions are not equivalent, if meaning is to be given by justification conditions, then truth must reduce to warranted assertibility as well. If we accept the antecedent but not the consequent, we must also renounce the equivalence in all but observational contexts between 'It is true that p' and 'p', since the latter would assert only justification conditions and the former truth. The semantic realist denies the antecedent as well as the consequent.

Dummett, of course, has challenged the ultimate viability of the more thorough semantic realism. The basic problem for him is to

I Michael Dummett, 'Realism', in Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I978); see in the same collection, Preface, 'The Reality of the Past,' and 'Truth'.

2 See, for example, John Pollock, Knowledge and Justification (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I974),

I9

20 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

connect the realist notion of truth to the practice of language users, to show how it helps to explain linguistic practice. This demand is legitimate given the supposed link between meaning and truth. To provide a theory of meaning is to show what a language user knows when he understands sentences in the language. If that knowledge is knowledge of the conditions under which the sentences are true, it must still be manifest in their use. For understanding must be taught, acquired and judged in the context of public communi- cation. Meaning, and truth as its explanans, cannot transcend all manifestation in practice, or we could never know whether others understand us (not even perhaps whether we understand our own statements).

Dummett's challenge addresses the intelligibility or possibility of realism, not the truth of the position traditionally construed. He has not really provided a translation of the metaphysical thesis, but at most clarified a necessary condition for its truth. That meaning is analyzed in terms of truth (as opposed to warranted assertibility) conditions entails that we intend our terms to refer to a determinately structured, independent reality, that we assert the existence of such states of affairs. It does not show that these states of affairs obtain or that our realist concepts are instantiated.

But while not sufficient for its truth, the truth conditions analysis of meaning and the contrast between truth and assertibility are necessary for the intelligibility of the realist's thesis. Dummett's challenge must therefore be met before the traditional issue can be reopened.

2. Several more preliminary remarks are in order regarding another formulation of the semantic realist's thesis by Dummett. For him the truth conditions analysis equates with belief in the principle of bivalence, the idea that each statement is determinately true or false. Several paths lead to this equation, the clearest through the conception of the realist theory of meaning along Tarskian or Davidsonian lines. A Tarskian theory of truth entails all sentences of the form 'S is true iff p', where S names the sentence that replaces p, or p translates the sentence named by S. If a theory of this form is to serve as the realist's theory of meaning, it is clear that he must accept the principle of bivalence. Otherwise, the designated sentence in the Tarskian schema might fail to be true when the sentence on the right is not false. The equivalence will then fail.

FANCIFUL ARGUMENTS FOR REALISM 2I

Bivalence might also seem on intuitive grounds to be a requirement for the realist. The crucial cases for his position appear to be those in which there is no overriding evidence for a statement or class of statements, or those in which statements are conceived as possibly false despite the balance of evidence as projected in- definitely into the future. Here he claims that such statements are true or false independently of the evidence. Lack of evidence does not imply lack of truth or falsity, and positive evidence does not rule out falsity. Concentration on such cases can easily lead to the generalization of the realist's claims in regard to them to the principle of bivalence, to the claim that all statements are determinately true or false (whatever the evidence fo^r them might be).

But despite such considerations, bivalence is neither necessary nor sufficient for realism, semantic or otherwise. First, regarding sufficiency, consider phenomenalism as a form of anti-realism regarding physical objects. The truth values of statements about objects are not logically independent of statements of their total evidence on this view, but the principle of bivalence may be satisfied. It will be satisfied if the subjunctive conditionals in the phenomenalist translations of physical object statements are allowed only when supported by evidence. The point here is more easily made, however, in relation to other domains of discourse. In the philosophy of law, for example, Ronald Dworkin has argued that every question of kIw has a determinate answer; every statement of the form 'It is the law that p' is determinately true or false.1 But truth here, of course, is of the coherence variety. A statement of law is true if it is more consistent with the body of established law than is its negation (not if it corresponds to some independent reality). One might well adopt a similar position with regard to moral judgments and the data base of settled moral convictions. In both cases bivalence can hold while the hallmarks of realism-the distinction between truth and warranted assertibility, the notion of correspondence, the conceivable falsity of a univers- ally endorsed, maximally consistent theory-are absent.2

Regarding the necessity of the principle for the realist, bivalence can fail for reasons relating to portions of our language, more deeply to our perceptual and conceptual abilities, rather than to any lack of

I Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I 977), chs. 2-4.

2 Compare Simon Blackburn, 'Truth, Realism, and the Regulation of Theory', Midwest Studies in Philosophy, V (I980), pp. 353-37I.

22 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

independence or determinateness in the world. The realist's position, as characterized by the criteria mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph, is not threatened by vagueness in our terms or concepts, although vagueness renders problematic the assignment of truth values to certain statements. Realism entails belief in a determinate reality, but not in a fully determinate language with no 'open concepts'. As others have pointed out, the vagueness of many predicates is no accident or oversight to be remedied by simple stipulative adjustment. It typically characterizes, for example, not only observational predicates like colour terms, but ordinary kind terms as well. To use Quine's latest version of the sorites paradox,' if we imagine subtracting one molecule at a time from the surfaces of a table, we will be unable to draw a precise line at which 'x is a table' is no longer true of the object. Thus bivalence is problematic for a range of cases. Here it is clear that the problem lies not in any lack of determinateness in the realist's world. The world may be completely determinate in every space-time region and yet fail to determine 'a is a table' as true or false, because the concept of a table cannot be sharpened to the same degree.

There are reasons irrelevant to our point here for doubting that a Tarskian truth theory can serve as a theory of meaning. The main one is that the equivalence relation in the test sentences seemingly needs to be stronger than material equivalence in order to guarantee that the sentences on the right side translate those named on the left.2 Davidson seeks to maintain extensionality via constraints on the generation of the theory, creating relations among the Tarskian sentences that achieve the required guarantee.3 What I have noted here is that such a theory, with its implied principle of bivalence, is not necessary for the semantic realist. But the analysis of meaning in terms of truth, and the contrast between truth and verification or warranted assertibility, remain necessary. We may now turn to Dummett's arguments against such notions of meaning and reference.

W. V. 0. Quine, 'What Price Bivalence ?', Journal of Philosophy, 78 (i98i), pp. 90-95.

2 Even entailment or equivalence in all possible worlds will not by themselves do the trick, since necessary truths can differ in meaning.

3 See, for example, Donald Davidson, 'Reality without Reference', in Mark Platts (ed.), Reference, Truth and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I980); see also Davidson, 'Truth and Meaning', Synthese, 17 (I967), pp. 304-323.

FANCIFUL ARGUMENTS FOR REALISM 23

3. Dummett suggests three related arguments against the realist's concepts of meaning and truth. All three derive from the following claims: (i) that meaning is what a language user knows when he understands a statement; (2) that a theory of meaning must provide a systematic account of such understanding; and (3) that linguistic understanding and the knowledge that underlies it must be manifest in practice or communicative use. Dummett questions the compatibility of the realist's analysis of understanding, i.e. knowledge of meaning, as knowledge of evidence-transcendent truth conditions with the thrust of these three claims.

His first argument derives more specifically from considerations regarding language acquisition. He points out that we learn to use sentences correctly by being taught to make assertions with them in conditions taken to establish the truth of those assertions.' If understanding is what is acquired through this training process, then it becomes problematic how we could understand what it is for an assertion to be true independently of knowing what evidential conditions count in its favour.

Dummett's second argument derives from his demand that the realist provide an account of the knowledge of truth conditions that is to constitute understanding of meaning. According to him, stating truth conditions in Tarskian form cannot give us a grasp of the designated sentence's meaning, since we must already understand the meaning of the latter sentence in order fully to grasp the sense of the Tarskian sentence that contains it.2 The same question might be raised regarding knowledge of assertibility conditions, since we might want to represent such knowledge by suitably transformed Tarski-type sentences. But there are several important differences here. First, non-trivial statements of assertibility conditions will be possible for a broader class of sentences than in the case of truth conditions, since evidence for assertions is more often statable in terms other than those of the assertions themselves. Second, and more important, assertibility conditions can be taught and expressed directly by assertions in those actual conditions. This will not be possible for truth conditions in the differentiating cases.

Dummett's third, closely related argument expresses the demand that understanding, knowledge of truth conditions according to the

I Compare Dummett, 'Truth', ibid., p. 362.

2 Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, I973), P. 458.

24 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

realist, be manifest in use.1 If the realist's notion of understanding as transcending knowledge of verification conditions is to be genuinely different from its verificationist counterpart, it must make a difference to the practice of language users. But if using sentences correctly is using them to make warranted assertions, it again becomes problematic how such use could justify ascription of understanding that transcends conditions of warrant.

Dummett himself suggests in several places that the notion of truth derives from a broader notion of linguistic correctness in certain contexts in which appeal to verification or warranted assertibility seems insufficient to determine correct use. In the formation of certain compounds, the assertibility of the components does not imply the assertibility of the whole sentences. These non-assertible-functional compounds require an auxiliary notion to account for assertibility conditions themselves. Dummett sometimes suggests that the notion of truth plays this role.2 Robert Brandom has systematized those examples that support this line of argument.3 In general, he points out, whenever one clause of a compound expresses a state of the speaker and the other ascribes that state to him, the compound may not preserve assertibility.4 As a simple case, consider 'I believe that p', 'p', and 'If I believe that p, then p'. Sentences formed from the first two schemas will have the same assertibility conditions (leave aside the complication that a person may know that he believes that p for stupid reasons), but assertibility does not transfer to the compound. Here we require a stronger criterion for the second clause, and the notion of truth suggests itself. If p is true, and not simply assertible by this speaker, then the compound will be true.

Unfortunately the realist's conception of truth is not required here-a notion of warranted assertibility broader than that of verifiability by particular speakers at particular times will do. That the former is not necessary becomes clear when we consider the same problem as it arises when p is a moral judgment. It does not follow from my believing that an action is right that it is right, although the assertibility for me of the components may be the same. This does not establish realism as a meta-ethical theory,

I Dummett states the argument, among other places, in 'What is a Theory of Meaning (II)', in Evans and McDowell, ibid., p. 70.

2 Dummett, Frege, pp. 420-42I, 449-450.

3 Robert Brandon, 'Truth and Assertibility', Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976), pp. I37-I49.

4 Ibid., p. I44.


however. We need only distinguish between the speaker's warrant at a given time and the convergent and maximally coherent judgment of the moral community at the limit of moral develop- ment. Verification is certainly distinct from warranted assertibility in the Peircean sense, since the latter may not be accessible to current speakers. But the realist's notion of truth also is distinct at the other end of the spectrum from Peircean assertibility. It transcends this broader nonrealist concept, since for the realist even convergent and maximally coherent theories can be false.

Thus, to account for the failure of assertibility perservation in compounds such as that mentioned above, we need only posit a linguistic division of labour in which first person warrants for self- ascribing certain states override, while some form of collective warrant or criterion of coherence overrides in expressions of the contents of those states. Certain other contexts in which we contrast truth with justification can be accommodated in the same way by the anti-realist, in terms of the contrast between narrower and broader conditions of warrant. Conceptual change often results from criticism of beliefs about warrant, as warrant is supposed to generate truth. In the clearest cases we discover that procedures of verification lead to conflicting judgments. The demand to abandon some of these procedures, or to order them so as to remove the inconsistency, appears to derive from the concept of a single transcendent truth at which we aim.' But once more it can derive instead from the goal of consistent and convergent theory itself. The distinction between narrower verification and ultimate collective warrant again allows us to avoid appeal to realist notions of truth and meaning. The challenge remains to show how these concepts are necessary to an account of linguistic practice, how they are manifest in use.

4. In fact two questions of Dummett remain to be answered: 'How is it possible to acquire understanding in the realist's sense?' and 'How is such understanding manifest in use?' We may begin with the former. Dummett himself suggests, only to dismiss, that we may acquire understanding beyond the ability to verify through imaginatively extending our grasp of verification procedures themselves by analogy. By imagining creatures in more advantageous

Compare David Papineau, Theory and Meaning (London: Oxford University Press, I979), p. 9I.

26 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

positions in space-time or with superior intellectual capacities for acquiring corroborating evidence, we come to understand what would make our unverifiable sentences true, hence in what their truth consists.' He dismisses this first fanciful response by the realist, however, on the ground that we could not manifest such imaginative grasp of meaning in use. Perhaps the point is that our use of sentences must continue to be governed by whatever actual justification procedures we have.

It does not appear to be necessary to continue the argument in this direction, since I do not believe that the realist needs to extend by analogy his grasp of verification for each unverifiable sentence he may claim to understand. The demand first of all oversimplifies the way that understanding of sentences is built up from understanding of terms. Terms can be learned originally from their contributions to verifiable assertions, or from their functions in explanatory models grasped partly by analogy, or from combinations of other terms learned in these ways. They can be recombined into sentences and theories that, in Quine's terms, face the tribunal of experience only holistically. Even the broader theories face this tribunal not alone, but in relation to competing alternatives. The latter point is important here, because a theory thought to be verified or justified by evidence at a given stage of inquiry can be replaced by a theory more explanatory of that evidence without the former's becoming thereby unintelligible. An outmoded theory may lack conceivable evidence or further justification, all conceivable evidence being reinterpreted in the terms of the new theoretical vocabulary. But we may nevertheless understand the old theory (e.g. that of phlogiston) as well as did our predecessors, for whom it was justified.

Examples abound within science and without, including those within our most extensive domain of fanciful discourse, religion and myth. Religious explanations of empirical phenomena once may have competed as serious scientific contenders; they may have been justified by the evidence in relation to available alternatives. At present, however, an atheist can refuse to accept any conceivable evidence as verifying the existence of a deity, while at the same time intelligibly denying that existence. He can also deny the possibility of conclusive falsification, while continuing to understand the

Dummett, 'What is a Theory of Meaning (II)', in Evans and McDowell, ibid., pp. 98-99; Frege, p. 465.


assertion of existence. Evidence here would consist in observations best explained as divine manifestation, but in this case some theory of hallucination might be preferable as a last resort alternative. Whether or not the latter would be explanatorily preferable, and whether or not the atheist is able to picture a creature better situated to gather verifying or falsifying evidence, his religious talk need not lack sense.

5. If it is not necessary to extend our notion of justification or evidence by fanciful analogy in order to derive realist concepts of understanding and truth, how are these concepts derived and distinguished from their nonrealist counterparts? It is through extending our primitive notion of error, not verification, that we arrive at the realist's conception of truth as independent of evidence. For the nonrealist error remains conceivable only in relation to experiences and beliefs taken to be veridical: fallibility entails corrigibility. For the realist the truth value of a mistaken but justified assertion does not change when it is shown to be false. It would have been false even had the counterevidence never materialized. The realist extends this concept by analogy first into one of possible error despite the weight of all conceivable evidence and then into that of possible global error, possible falsity of our ultimately corroborated theories. Thus he is committed to the intelligibility of global scepticism, while the nonrealist must deny not only the force, but the sense, or the sceptic's pervasive doubts. 1

Traditionally these doubts have been made seemingly intelligible to us with the aid of some fanciful creatures-evil demons and, more recently, brains in vats. The latter are to illustrate fully coherent belief systems that are uniformly false in ascribing properties to nonexistent objects, objects that exist only in the minds of the brains. The former are to make a similar point, that our own beliefs, even when maximally coherent or verified, may be themselves systematically false. But these prodigal offspring of prior epistemologists may be inadequate for their tasks, either sceptical or realist.

There are several possible replies to these modern philosophical

One might assume a realist position for certain propositions (by holding that their truth conditions transcend verification procedures) without countenanc- ing the possibility of global scepticism. But once truth as correspondence is distinguished from coherence, it certainly appears logically possible that most of our coherent beliefs might fail to correspond. See below pp. 33-34.

28 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

myths; all would argue that they fail to demonstrate the possibility of maximally coherent, false beliefs. To begin with the brains in vats, if these are programmed to have beliefs shared by the scientists who maintain them, their beliefs might be taken to refer to ordinary objects via deviant causal chains (interpreted nonrealistically) through the beliefs of the scientists. The former could then be deemed true or false of these objects by means of the usual coherence tests. If the scientists rather programme wildly false but internally coherent and verified beliefs into their brains, two further nonrealist responses might be offered. The beliefs of the brains might be deemed false in this situation by failing to cohere with those of the scientists and other inhabitants of their shared world. Or the nonrealist, if wary of this union of the world of the scientists and that of their brains, could hold that the brains occupy their own worlds, those defined by their sets of beliefs. Within those worlds their beliefs could be held true when coherent or verified, and true of the objects in those worlds as their beliefs define them.

If the point of the brains in the vats case is rather that we might be such and hence cannot trust our own coherence tests for truth, we assimilate this case to that of the evil demon. The initial reply to this spectre is that we have good reason to dismiss him, since the explanation for the nature of our beliefs that appeals to him as their cause is far less satisfactory on many counts than that which appeals to ordinary objects, whether or not realistically construed. The rejoinder of the realist here is that the mere possibility of the demon illustrates once more that coherence does not entail truth. A satisfactory reply to the sceptic need not bother the realist, given their different uses of the demon's services. But the final reply of the nonrealist here can echo that of the previous paragraph. For the nonrealist our willingness to countenance the demon need not shake our faith in the truth of our maximally coherent sets of beliefs. Within our world, the world defined for us by those sets, such beliefs remain true of the objects they specify. We can imagine them false only by introducing new beliefs with which they fail to cohere, by imagining them falsified. If we were to accept belief in the demon, we would have to alter other beliefs in the prior system. But the suggestion that the demon might exist although never to be countenanced by our beliefs or revealed in our experiences can be dismissed as incoherent by the staunch nonrealist.

A reply similar to this last offered to the evil demon and brains in vats is suggested by Putnam's recent anti-realist argument. Putnam


considers the global case of a complete theory or set of beliefs that meets all the operational and aesthetic, coherence and pragmatic constraints on theories judged true.1 According to him we can simply choose the referents of this theory so as to make it come out true of those referents under our ordinary (Tarskian) concept of truth. When we so map a model of the theory onto objects in our world so that all such criteria are satisfied, we cannot make sense of the claim that this theory might be false. This would amount to the claim that our mapping does not pick out the real intended objects as they are related according to the real meanings of our terms, that it is the wrong mapping. But why is not the interpretation that maps onto those objects (and properties) that make the theory come out true the correct one?

In the brains in vats and evil demon cases, Putnam's argument would imply the suggestion offered by the nonrealist above: the maximally coherent beliefs of the brains and demon-victims are true of the objects in the worlds accessible to them, what we from the outside would consider their phenomenal worlds.2 There may appear to be a problem here with certain of their coherent beliefs, for example the belief that objects continue to exist unperceived and unconceived; but possibly such apparently realist beliefs could be given some Millian interpretation that would make them true also (or they could be shown to be false in Dummett's fashion by being shown to be inconsistent with the brains' genuine understanding of object terms). There is yet a third option, that of maintaining that these propositional attitudes fail to refer and therefore lack truth value. Here the lack of entailment from coherence to truth lacks a realist ring, since it does not imply the independence of the world to which reference is made from evidence or theories. Then too, under this interpretation we might hesitate to call the attitudes in question beliefs at all. In any case, the freedom we have in assigning or refusing to assign referents means that the myth fails to force a realist interpretation upon us. It fails to drive the wedge between warranted assertibility and truth.

I Hilary Putnam, 'Realism and Reason', in Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I978).

2 In a more recent book Putnam has made this argument more explicit by holding that the brains could not refer to real objects because they do not causally interact with them. See Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I 98 I), chs. I-2.

30 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

6. Use of the notion of global error has not succeeded in demon- strating the requirement for a realist concept of truth, since the nonrealist appears free to deny the intelligibility of that notion. The intelligibility of evil demon and brain in vat stories does not affect that freedom, since the nonrealist can assign sense to certain interpretations of them. Perhaps our realist protagonist will do better to return to the more local level for the time being. To demonstrate a lack of entailment between verification or coherence and truth, we seek a belief that is conclusively verified, that remains forever consistent with others and immune from falsification, but that is false.

To illustrate the possibility, let us add a new creature to the metaphysical zoo, or rather borrow one from recent literature in the philosophy of mind. Imagine then a person S and his physical replica R, an atom for atom duplicate.' In this story shortly after R materializes, S dematefializes without a trace. R's seeming memories now match S's former genuine memories. Specifically, R remembers having had an unhappy childhood, which, of course, he never had. It appears, nevertheless, that his belief must meet all pragmatic and coherence tests of truth: it can be verified but not falsified. Complete evidence here will fail to entail truth; it appears to be the realist's notion of correspondence, or lack of it, that determines the falsity of R's belief.

An initial nonrealist response to this story might be to say that in it S simply becomes R, so that R's belief is true of his, i.e. S's, childhood. This move can be blocked, however. First, if we are allowed to use material criteria of personal identity, we can point out that there has been no physical process of division in this story. If such criteria are rejected, we can point out that there need not be even deviant causal chains between S's childhood and his replica's belief. We can imagine that the replica just happened to materialize as a physical duplicate. The causal criterion of memory cannot be rejected, although the non-realist will provide his own interpretation of cause to accommodate it. There clearly is a difference between a genuine memory and one which accidentally, though accurately, represents a past occurrence. The required connection

Replicas have recently made their way from the literature of science fiction to that of philosophy. See, for example, Stephen Stich, 'Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis', The Monist, 6i (1978), pp. 573-59I; Jaegwon Kim, 'Psychophysical Supervenience', Philosophical Studies, forthcoming. My replica serves a purpose different from those of his predecessors.

FANCIFUL ARGUMENTS FOR REALISM 3I

is not present in the story I am telling, making R's belief false although seemingly consistent with all evidence.

A second reply might accept the falsity of R's belief, but hold that it is its failure to cohere with our understanding of the situation that leads us to declare it false. This reply will not work either. Beliefs and the propositions they express are true or false within possible worlds. R's belief is false within his world and not simply in relation to ours. For the reply to be sound, his belief about his childhood would have to be true in his world although false in ours. But his belief is false in his world, although coherent with all other relevant beliefs in that world. Hence this reply is of no avail.

There is a point nevertheless to emphasizing the special point of view from which we are considering this highly artificial case. In defining the possible world as we choose, we have special access to the correspondence relations between beliefs and facts within it. In our world we rather share the fate of our science fiction counterparts in lacking such direct access. Correspondence to fact cannot be our criterion of truth, if by 'criterion' we understand a test that can be applied to determine the applicability of a term or concept. We are limited in our world, as opposed to those fanciful worlds of which we can acquire a transcendent view, to reliance upon coherentist criteria. The realist will then be obliged to link up the criterion of coherence with his correspondence notion of truth itself, if the latter is to be of use. I shall return to this difficulty briefly below.

A final nonrealist response here might be to imagine the possibility in the replica's world of future verificationist tests that might show his belief to be false. Many such conceivable tests, we have seen, can be ruled out in the definition of the fanciful case. But perhaps not all. Ultimately it seems that the nonrealist simply can take whatever criterion of difference we apply in saying that R is distinct from S and imagine a possible test for that difference.' Since this test will express our notion of identity and nonidentity, any attempt to rule it out will render unintelligible the claim that R replaces S and therefore has false beliefs about his past. If our criterion is physical identity, for example, then we can imagine a molecule tracer that will show R's physical makeup to be non- continuous with S's. The falsity of R's belief about his childhood will then be held to derive from its lack of coherence with the outcome of this conceivable verificationist test.

I This possibility was pointed out to me by Eddy Zemach.

32 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

Several final replies are in order. First, since the test in question is unavailable (in R's world), we can maintain that the notion of truth and falsity applicable to the case remains realist. Dummett permits the realist to imagine nonactual verifying tests while retaining his concept of truth. The second point, addressed to stronger definitions of semantic realism as well, is that we may question whether the conceived test in itself would demonstrate the falsity of R's belief. Imagining that such cases have never occurred pre- viously in the replica's world, that all other evidence continues to point to the truth of his belief, overall maximization of coherence would seem to call rather for dismissing the reliability of the test or, as a last resort, interpreting its results as illusory. Again it is only our appreciation of the lack of correspondence to (fanciful) fact that leads us to interpret the conceived test as veridical; the realist notion, here applicable from the transcendent viewpoint, does all the work. Coherence alone still calls for assignment of truth, despite the introduction of a single inconsistency that must and would be dismissed.

7. The point of introducing this more localized counterexample to the idea of verifiability or coherence as truth was to block the countermoves to the traditional holistic fanciful cases. First, unlike the brains in vats, there is no question of the replica's belief about his childhood being true via some deviant causal chain, since he had no childhood, and since S's childhood is causally unconnected. Second, there is no lack of coherence with beliefs of others in his society, as was the case with the brains. Finally, and most important, the nonrealist cannot take the replica's beliefs to define a world for him within which they are true. We cannot assign phenomenal referents here, since the reference of terms like 'childhood experience' will be fixed by uses of such terms to refer successfully by other members of R's linguistic community. His belief cannot be taken to refer to his imaginary experience, since there will be a distinction in his world, as in ours, between imaginary and genuine experiences and childhoods. We cannot then map the belief onto an object that would make it come out true, despite the belief's meeting all operational and verificationist tests.

The intelligibility of this new fanciful case reveals the fallacy in the antirealist argument of Putnam. In the global case, as Putnam argues, appeal to a causal theory of reference cannot help the realist,


since 'cause' can be given a globally nonrealist interpretation too.1 But in the local case causal relations exist in R's world between genuine experiences and later memories of them and references to them that do not obtain for him. This fact, together with the linguistic division of labour and the fact that he intends to use his terms as others use them, fixes the interpretation of his belief in a way that makes it come out false despite meeting all coherence tests. The moral for Putnam's argument is that our 'theories' (taken in the broadest sense in which a set of beliefs and linguistic practices together constitute a theory of the world) can build in structure beyond the ways in which they can be tested. There may be intentional structure in a theory (or between a particular theory and other facets of linguistic practice) that prevents the one-to-one mapping of its model onto the world from succeeding. This lack of congruence between relations among real objects and such internal relations among terms of the theory may not show up operationally.2 In the local case the mapping that makes the belief or set of beliefs true may not capture their intended referents. Here we can make sense of the latter notion, as Putnam argues we cannot in the global case, because reference is determined by practice outside the local belief or theory that borrows and assumes the fixation of referents for its terms. Putnam's linguistic division of labour allows for this possibility.3

Once we admit a requirement for the realist's notion of truth to account for the local case, we should not think that the nonrealist can maintain his ground on the global level. Once we admit that maximally coherent beliefs can be false for failing to correspond, once coherence fails to entail truth, the entailment cannot hold for global theories either. The realist can once more infer to the possibility of global error by generalizing the conceivable diver- gence of coherence from truth shown on the local level. If truth is verification-transcendent correspondence, then there appears to be no priori reason why our maximally coherent sets of beliefs cannot

I Putnam, 'Realism and Reason', pp. I26-I27; see also his 'Models and Reality', Journal of Symbolic Logic, 45 (I980), pp. 464-482.

2 G. H. Merill, 'The Model-Theoretic Argument Against Realism', Philosophy of Science, 47 (i98o), pp. 69-8I, argued the other side of this coin-that the world as a structured domain rather than a set of discrete objects may realize properties and relations that fail to be isomorphic to models of operationally ideal theories, despite the possibility of one-to-one mappings of objects in the models onto objects in the world.

3 Putnam, 'Language and Reality', in Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I 975), p. 274.

2

34 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

fail to be true. Putnam has argued more recently that any set of operationally acceptable beliefs can be assigned referents so as to come out true.' In fact any set of beliefs as a consistent formal structure has a model that can be mapped onto different sets of referents so as to make the beliefs come out true. All this shows, however, is that referents for (some) terms in natural languages must be fixed independently of the formal structures of the sentences into which they enter.2

The possibility of global falsity can lead us to reinterpret the global myths again. In the brains in vats case there appeared to be an option to translate their beliefs as true of phenomenal objects rather than as false of real objects. But their realist beliefs, regarding unperceived objects for example, remained problematic, the Millian interpretation being stretched and unintended. Maximal internal coherence of their beliefs, including these anti-phenomenalist beliefs, would seem to call for counting the majority of them as false (or as lacking truth value in lacking referents). We can recognize that maximal coherence calls for assignment of falsity rather than truth in this case once we are forced by the local case to distinguish truth from verification. Regarding Putnam's argument that the brains in vats could not refer to real objects (hence could not believe they were real brains in vats) because they do not causally interact with real objects, this rests upon a strongly causal theory of reference whose implausibility is evident from this very example. I have elsewhere suggested an alternative theory of reference according to which we collectively refer to those entities that satisfy core descriptions from which we would not retreat in different epistemic conditions.3 The implausibility of the strong causal requirement is evident here in the implication that language users collectively cannot refer to what they can describe in detail, even if they intend to refer to whatever satisfies some of those descriptions.

Once coherence is distinguished from truth, we need not seek to maximize ascription of true beliefs in ascribing propositional attitudes to others and referents to their terms. What we are really after in ascribing propositional attitudes when seeking to understand others is to render their lingauistic behaviour explicable. This

I See 'Models and Reality', ibid. 2 Compare Alvin Plantinga, 'How To Be an Anti-Realist', Proceedings of the

American Philosophical Association, 56 (i982), pp. 47-70.

3 Alan Goldman, 'Reference and Linguistic Authority', Southern 3ournal of Philosophy, 17 (0979), pp. 305-32I.


goal may lead to assignment of mostly true beliefs, and will do so when we detect nothing out of the ordinary in regard to the behaviour of the language users in the circumstances. When instead we have an explanation for their having been misled, we will ascribe false, but rational and coherent beliefs, as in the brains in vats case. At the extreme, when behaviour strikes us as incoherent, we will seek a more direct causal explanation that eschews appeal to rationality. We may occasionally seek to explain even linguistic behaviour in this way, when it appears bizarre. Thus, not only may we conceive of globally false conceptual schemes, we may also imagine circumstances in which we would ascribe them to other language users. Understanding others does not require even agreement with them, let alone truth in the stronger sense. And given the realist's notion of truth, we can picture as well distortion in the sources of our beliefs that would render them globally false. Thus the local case that forces this notion upon us, distinguishing truth from coherence, appears to defeat the global anti-realist arguments as well.

The realist's point could perhaps be made less fancifully in relation to ordinary false statements about the past for which there is present evidence and no counterevidence. Dummett himself discusses the counterintuitiveness of the nonrealist's seeming violation of the truth value link between present tense statements and corresponding past tense statements uttered at later times when the evidence has changed. If a present tense statement is false when uttered, it seems that the later past tense counterpart must be false, whatever the evidence for it at that time. This link holds not only for replicas' statements and beliefs, but for our own. Dummett considers the realist thrust of this point in 'The Reality of the Past'. The nonrealist, according to Dummett, can accept the truth value link for any present statement when he contemplates its future semantic status. At the same time he will maintain that the meaning of any statement when uttered (or, perhaps better stated, the assertion made by uttering any sentence) will be a function of the evidence for its truth at that time.' For the realist, but not for Dummett, the latter claim will nullify the force of the truth value connection over time. My motive in making the realist's point by use of the replica example was to illustrate vividly that the meaning and truth of a statement at a time is neither a function solely of the

Dummett, 'The Reality of the Past', in Truth and Other Enigmas, p. 373.

36 ALAN H. GOLDMAN:

evidence for it at that time, nor even of a diachronically broader notion of coherence. The virtue of the example in this respect is that it can rule out the possibility of defeating (or in this case saving) evidence in the past or future. The distinction between truth and coherence even over time is thereby forced upon us, then to be generalized.

8. It remains to indicate more specifically responses to Dummett's antirealist arguments outlined in section 3. One of his questions, how we can extend our notion of truth beyond that acquired in learning contexts in which language use and beliefs correct in relation to evidence, we have now answered. The task is ac- complished by extending our notion of error to that of locally coherent but false belief, and then to the conceivability of globally false belief. But if these realist notions of truth, meaning and understanding involve reference to verification transcendent states of affairs, Dummett's second question appears to become pressing, namely how we can succeed in making such reference. In Dummett's terms, what can constitute knowledge of such truth conditions, comprising our understanding of assertions for the realist? If we can conceive of states of affairs without conceiving of their verifying conditions, then we can also conceive how our terms can refer to such states of affairs. We have only then to think of reference as a relation of actual satisfaction. But if we- cannot so conceive of states of affairs, if we cannot know what particular truth conditions would be apart from knowing what would verify them, then the realist's notion of understanding collapses.

The answer to this problem is that, despite Dummett's arguments to the contrary, such knowledge can be expressed by the relevant Tarskian sentences (suitably strengthened to guarantee translation).1 Dummett points out that one must understand the designated sentence in a Tarskian sentence before one can understand the whole. We therefore cannot impart the meaning of the designated sentence by using this device. But this point appears relevant only if we fail to draw the distinction between use of

I As pointed out in section 2, even a suitably strengthened Tarskian truth theory can only approximate to a theory of meaning, since it ignores the vagueness that afflicts most predicates. But the ordinary person's understanding of most terms will not take account of this phenomenon, and so Tarskian sentences can capture his understanding of expressions using those terms. I ignore here complications aimed at capturing a philosophically more sophisticated understanding.


Tarskian sentences to express what a language user knows when he understands meanings, and use of them to teach meanings.' That they are unsuitable for the latter use does not imply that they cannot serve the former. Since the sentence inserted in the right side of the Tarskian schema is used rather then designated or mentioned, it does not matter whether it is formed by disquotation. The resulting Tarskian sentence can express what a language user knows when he understands the designated sentence, since the former does not simply state that he knows the sentence in question, but rather its truth condition. Meanings captured by the Tarskian schema can be taught originally in relation to verification conditions (or by using terms learned originally in that way) and then come to be understood in terms of verification transcendent truth conditions, as the concept of error becomes distinguished from that of lack of coherence, and then generalized.

Dummett argues further that we cannot use Tarskian sentences to explain both meaning and truth without circularity. If we explain truth by noting that ascribing truth to a statement is the same as asserting the statement, then we cannot explain meaning in terms of truth.2 Rather than stating the meaning of an assertion, such an explanation will accomplish no more than simply restating the assertion itself. This argument is more subtle and may appear more to the point; but all it shows, I believe, is that knowledge of truth conditions must sometimes be direct. It does not show that truth and meaning are not intimately connected, only that not all semantic notions can be taught purely linguistically without circularity. Any successful set of complete definitions can be challenged on the same ground, since all such sets will be circular (or incomplete in allowing primitives). This is obvious in regard to meaning apart from this argument about the explanation of truth. Some statements must be taken initially to be directly verifiable, although their truth too can be questioned later, once the distinction has been drawn between truth and coherence. Again the requirement relates to teaching and learning meanings, not to the knowledge that constitutes understanding them.

The only remaining question from Dummett is how the realist's notions are manifest in practice. Arguments evidencing a logic that presupposes the principle of bivalence do not provide the answer.

I Compare John McDowell, 'Truth Conditions, Bivalence, and Verifi- cationism,' in Evans and McDowell, ibid., pp. 55-56.

2 Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, p. 7.

38 ALAN H. GOLDMAN: ARGUMENTS FOR REALISM

We saw that the principle fails to hold for certain ranges of predicates (that rarely affect the validity of everyday arguments); also that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for semantic realism. The distinction between truth and warranted assertibility is itself implicit in certain linguistic practices, however. It shows up first in the way referents are assigned and understood. We may take ourselves to be speaking of the same unobservable objects, whether gods or quarks, even if we disagree about what would verify or falsify their existence or presence. Second, we can accept evidence, even complete evidence as in the replica case, without taking it to entail truth. Realism manifests itself in a willingness to acknowl- edge sceptical possibilities, in a healthy sense of our own fallibility and limited place and point of view in the world. Dummett might argue that such practices indicate our general intention to refer transcendently, but that they cannot specify particular transcendent objects or states of affairs which we can understand to be referents. This objection is overcome by construing reference as actual satisfaction (of certain privileged associated descriptions)' and construing understanding in the way indicated earlier in this section.

A more interesting question for the realist who admits that, from our ordinary nontranscendent point of view, coherence must remain our criterion of truth is how he can link the criterion to the concept itself. One way to make this connection is to take an evolutionary view of belief acquisition, according to which our beliefs become maximally coherent through a process of accom- modation to reality as encountered in experience. We cannot explore this possibility further here, since we shift at this point from the question of the intelligibility of realism to that of its truth. The issue here has been preliminary, concerned with the coherence of our linguistic intentions. Here the fanciful cases suffice to show that, even in flights of fancy, we are all at heart semantic realists.

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY,

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI,

CORAL GABLES,

FLORIDA 33124,

U.S.A.

See 'Reference and Linguistic Authority', ibid.

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Fanciful Arguments for Realism.pdf