Event Detail

Why do we have, or would we want, the predicate ‘is true’ or the noun ‘truth’ in our language? Traditional descriptivists have long assumed that the predicate serves to describe a particularly desirable property, which propositions possess if they correspond to the right sort of facts in the world. Pragmatists and deflationists have suggested instead that the truth predicate plays useful roles in our lives, such as encouraging debate and friction, or enabling us to form generalizations—and that these roles can be fulfilled without thinking the term tracks some property of being true. I argue that we can get a better approach to questions about the function of the truth predicate (and the noun ‘truth’) by appealing to work in empirical linguistics. Systemic functional linguistics provides the basis for a step-by-step multilayered account of the functions served by having practices of acceptance and rejection of propositions, by introducing a truth predicate, and finally by introducing a noun for ‘truth’. The resulting picture gives us a way of showing that prior pragmatic and deflationary suggestions about the function of truth talk are compatible, and may form different parts of a more complete, step-by-step approach. It also gives us reason to think that we can fully account for the presence of truth-talk in our lives and theories, without the need to ‘posit’ some property we are tracking, which requires a kind of worldly ‘explanation’.