Truth and Ontology

Kant-Studien

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Although it is unclear how these different approaches relate to each other, all of them have the potential for allowing for that our ordinary description of the world in terms of mid-size objects, mathematics, morality, and so on, is literally true, while at the same time these truths leave it open what the world, so to speak, deep down, really, and ultimately is like. To use one way of articulating this, even though there are tables, numbers, and values, reality in itself might contain none of them. Reality in itself might contain no objects at all, and nothing normative.

Or it might. The ordinary description of the world, on this conception, leaves it largely open what reality in itself is like. To find that out is the job of metaphysics, in particular ontology. We might, given our cognitive setup, be forced to think of the world as one of objects, say. But that might merely reflect how reality is for us.

How it is in itself is left open. Whether the distinction between reality as it is for us and as it is in itself can be made sense of is an open question, in particular if it is not simply the distinction between reality as it appears to us, and as it really is. This distinction would not allow for the option that our ordinary description of reality is true, while the question how reality is in itself is left open by this.

If our ordinary description were true then this would mean that how reality appears to us is how it in fact is. But if this distinction can be made sense of as intended then it gives rise to a problem about how to characterize reality as it is in itself, and this gives rise to a role for logic in the sense of L1. If we are forced to think of the world in terms of objects because of our cognitive makeup then it would be no surprise that our natural language forces us to describe the world in terms of objects.

And arguably some of the central features of natural languages do exactly that.

It represents information in terms of subject and predicate, where the subject paradigmatically picks out an object and the predicate paradigmatically attributes a property to it. If this is correct about natural language then it seems that natural language is utterly unsuitable to describe reality as it is in itself if the latter does not contain any objects at all.

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But then, how are we to describe reality as it is in itself? Some philosophers have proposed that natural language might be unsuitable for the purposes of ontology. It might be unsuitable since it carries with it too much baggage from our particular conceptual scheme. See Burgess for a discussion. Or it might be unsuitable since various expressions in it are not precise enough, too context sensitive, or in other ways not ideally suited for the philosophical project. These philosophers propose instead to find a new, better suited language.

Such a language likely will be a major departure from natural language and instead will be a formal, artificial language.

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The task thus is to find the fundamental language, a language in the sense of L1 , to properly carry out ontology, in the new and revised sense of O2 : the project of finding out what reality fundamentally, or in itself, etc. For a critical discussion of the proposal that we should be asking the questions of ontology in ontologese, see chapter 10 of Thomasson But this idea of a connection between L1 and O2 is not unproblematic.

First there is a problem about making this approach to O2 more precise. On this understanding it would simply be the world as it is except with no humans in it, which would in many of its grander features be just as it in fact is. But then what does it mean? Second, there is a serious worry about how the formal language which is supposed to be the fundamental language is to be understood.

In particular, is it supposed to be merely an auxiliary tool, or an essential one?

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This question is tied to the motivation for a formal fundamental language in the first place. If it is merely to overcome ambiguities, imperfections, and context sensitivities, then it most likely will merely be an auxiliary, but not essential tool. After all, within natural language we have many means available to get rid of ambiguities, imperfections and context sensitivities.

Scope ambiguities can be often quite easily be overcome with scope markers. Other imprecisions can often, and maybe always, be overcome in some form or other. On other hand, the formal fundamental language might be taken to be essential for overcoming shortcomings or inherent features of our natural language as the one alluded to above.

If the subject-predicate structure of our natural languages brings with it a object-property way of representing the world, and if that way of representing the world is unsuitable for representing how reality is in itself, then a completely different language might be required, and not simply be useful, to describe fundamental reality. But then what do sentences in the fundamental language mean?

Can we even make sense of the project of finding out which sentences in such a language are correct? A sample debate related to the issues discussed in this section is the debate about whether it might be that reality in itself does not contain any objects. See, for example, Hawthorne and Cortens , Burgess , and Turner Here the use of a variable and quantifier free language like predicate functor logic as the fundamental language is a recurring theme.

One way to understand logic is as the study of the most general forms of thought or judgment, what we called L4. One way to understand ontology is as the study of the most general features of what there is, our O3.

Now, there is a striking similarity between the most general forms of thought and the most general features of what there is. Take one example. Many thoughts have a subject of which they predicate something. What there is contains individuals that have properties. It seems that there is a kind of a correspondence between thought and reality: the form of the thought corresponds to the structure of a fact in the world. And similarly for other forms and structures.

A pragmatic theory of truth and ontology - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal

Does this matching between thought and the world ask for a substantial philosophical explanation? Is it a deep philosophical puzzle? To take the simplest example, the form of our subject-predicate thoughts corresponds perfectly to the structure of object-property facts. If there is an explanation of this correspondence to be given it seems it could go in one of three ways: either the form of thought explains the structure of reality a form of idealism , or the other way round a form of realism , or maybe there is a common explanation of why there is a correspondence between them, for example on a form of theism where God guarantees a match.

At first it might seem clear that we should try to give an explanation of the second kind: the structure of the facts explains the forms of our thoughts that represent these facts. And an idea for such an explanation suggests itself. Our minds developed in a world full of objects having properties. If we had a separate simple representation for these different facts then this would be highly inefficient.

After all, it is often the same object that has different properties and figures in different facts, and it is often the same property that is had by different objects. So, it makes sense to split up our representations of the objects and of the properties into different parts, and to put them back together in different combinations in the representation of a fact. And thus it makes sense that our minds developed to represent object-property facts with subject-predicate representations.

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Therefore we have a mind whose thoughts have a form which mirrors the structure of the facts that make up the world. This kind of an explanation is a nice try, and plausible, but it is rather speculative. That our minds really developed this way in light of those pressures is a question that is not easy to answer from the armchair. Maybe the facts do have a different structure, but our forms are close enough for practical purposes, i. And maybe the correspondence does obtain, but not for this largely evolutionary reason, but for a different, more direct and more philosophical or metaphysical reason.

To explain the connection differently one could endorse the opposite order of explanatory priority, and argue that the form of thought explains the structure of the world. This would most likely lead to an idealist position of sorts.

It would hold that the general features of our minds explain some of the most general features of reality. This strategy for explaining the similarity has the problem of explaining how there can be a world that exists independently of us, and will continue to exist after we have died, but nonetheless the structure of this world is explained by the forms of our thoughts. Maybe this route could only be taken if one denies that the world exists independently of us, or maybe one could make this tension go away. In addition one would have to say how the form of thought explains the structure of reality.

For one attempt to do this, see Hofweber But maybe there is not much to explain here. Maybe reality does not have anything like a structure that mirrors the form of our thoughts, at least not understood a certain way. And all that is required for that is a world that contains John, but not also another thing, the property of smoking. Thus a structural match would be less demanding, only requiring a match between objects and object directed thought, but no further match.

Such a view would be broadly nominalistic about properties, and it is rather controversial. Another way in which there might be nothing to explain is connected to philosophical debates about truth. If a correspondence theory of truth is correct, and if thus for a sentence to be true it has to correspond to the world in a way that mirrors the structure and matches parts of the sentence properly with parts of the world, then the form of a true sentence would have to be mirrored in the world.

But if, on the other extreme, a coherence theory of truth is correct then the truth of a sentence does not require a structural correspondence to the world, but merely a coherence with other sentences. Whether or not there is a substantial metaphysical puzzle about the correspondence of the form of thoughts and the structure of reality will itself depend on certain controversial philosophical topics. And if there is a puzzle here, it might be a trivial one, or it might be quite deep.

And as usual in these parts of philosophy, how substantial a question is is itself a hard question.

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