This post develops an ultimately unsatisfactory deflationary theory of truth. Feel free to skip.
A binary predicate needs two names, or two quantifiers, to make a sentence. A unary predicate needs one name, or one quantifier, to make a sentence. A nullary predicates needs no names—it by itself, with no arguments, makes a sentence. For instance, the English "It rains" is a nullary predicate. It pretends to be a subject-predicate sentence, with the subject "it", but the "it" has no reference.
English allows the stipulative introduction of new names and predicates. Thus, I can say things like:
- Let "Cloak" denote Socrates' nose. It is notorious that Cloak is snub.
- Let "tigging" denote that which is in fact Sam's favorite activity. There is then a possible world where Sam would rather eat spinach than tigg.
- Kathleen's theory about the origins of the universe is not true.
- Stipulate that "xyzz" is a nullary predicate expressing Kathleen's theory about the origins of the universe. It's not the case that xyzz.
So far this strategy will only handle some uses of "true", namely those where the predicate "is true" is joined to a name or definite description. What about a more complex case?
- At least one of Kathleen's astrophysical theories is true if string theory is true.
- Stipulate that "xyzz" is a nullary predicate expressing the disjunction of Kathleen's astrophysical theories. Stipulate that "strig" is a nullary predicate expressing string theory. Xyzz if strig.
But what I cannot handle using this method are uses of "is true" embedded in modal operators, such as:
- Kathleen could have come up with a true astrophysical theory.
- There is a world w and a proposition p such that Kathleen comes up with p in w, and p is an astrophysical theory in w, and p is true in w.
However, if that's how we understand worlds, then we need substitutional quantification to explain what it means to say that "s in w" (e.g., "Snow is white in w"), where "s" is a sentence. Our bet may be to say: for all s, s in w if and only if the proposition that s is a member of w. But the "for all" is substitutional quantification. But substitutional quantification and truth are probably interdefinable, so if we have to rely on substitutional quantification, the above account fails.
At this point my toy deflationary account of truth in terms of stipulation of nullary predicates comes to a halt. It is modal embedding that brings it to this halt.
It is interesting that modality does not seem to bring to a halt a similar view of A-predicates.
1 comment:
Isn't "It rains" equivalent to P(x) = "x rains", a unary predicate?
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