Truth and Other Enigmas

by Michael Dummett

This collection of Michael Dummett’s philosophical essays, spanning more than twenty years, ranges in topic from time to the philosophy of mathematics, but is unified by a steady philosophical outlook. The essays are, in one way or another, informed by Dummett’s concern with metaphysical questions and his belief that the correct approach to them is via the theory of meaning. Reflected here is Dummett’s conviction that the concept of truth is of central importance both for the theory of meaning and for metaphysics. As he sees it, an adequate elucidation of the concept of truth requires nothing less than the construction of a satisfactory theory of meaning. At the same time, resolution of the traditional problems of metaphysics turns critically upon the way in which the concept of truth applies to each of various large ranges of statements, and especially upon whether the statements in each such range satisfy the principle that every statement must be true or false.

The book includes all Dummett’s philosophical essays that were published or given as public lectures before August 1976, with the exception of a few he did not think it worthwhile to reprint and of the two entitled “What Is a Theory of Meaning?” One essay appears here for the first time in English and two have not been previously published. In an extensive preface, Dummett comments on the essays and seeks to relate them to the philosophical background against which they were written.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, Logic, Mathematics

470 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

A skilled analytic mind and an ardent voice against racism, Sir Michael A. E. Dummett is considered by many to be one of twentieth-century Britain’s most influential philosophers of language. Dummett is best known for his work in the history of analytic philosophy and in his contributions to the philosophy of language and mathematics. Much of his work has taken the form of commentary on the likes of Frege, Wittgenstein, and Quine. Dummett, who considered himself a Wittgensteinian, is widely held as the English authority on the work of German logician Gottlob Frege. Though Dummett diverges from Frege, who is a realist, most of Dummett’s achievements have been pursued in connection with his enthusiasm for Frege’s thought.

Dummett was born in London in 1925 and attended prestigious boys’ schools in Wiltshire and Hampshire. Though he rejected religious belief in his youth, Dummett converted to Catholicism while serving in the armed forces during the Second World War. After his military service he went to Oxford University where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Christ Church College. He graduated in 1950 with first class honors and was awarded a fellowship at All Souls College. Throughout his acclaimed career Dummett remained associated with Oxford, though he has held visiting posts at several universities around the world. In 1962 he was appointed reader in the philosophy of mathematics at Oxford; in 1979 he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic, where he served as chair until his retirement in 1992. Dummett, along with his wife, has remained active in antiracist campaigns and political reforms, even placing his philosophical career on hold for several years during the sixties to pursue these causes. He received a knighthood in 1999.

Many of Britain’s leading analytic philosophers have been significantly influenced by Dummett, including Crispin Wright, Simon Blackburn, John McDowell, and Timothy Williamson — though none would be properly classed a disciple. Dummett’s most notable contributions have come in his analysis of theories of meaning accounting for communication, reason, and representation in language. His commitment to a kind of anti-realism in debates about reference and language, though often overstated, has been a point of particular interest for his admirers and detractors alike. Dummett was not satisfied with the pessimism of Wittgenstein and the holists who denied the possibility of finally understanding a language from within language. Dummett argues that an alternative can be found if one denies the principle of bivalence. Bivalence is the notion that every meaningful proposition is either true or false; and in Dummett’s view the denial of bivalence entails anti-realism about the reference of language.

Dummett’s most influential writings are the first and second editions of Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973–1981), The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy (1981), and the 'William James Lectures' that he delivered at Harvard in 1976 published in 1991 as The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. He also delivered a series of lectures at Bologna in 1987, published in 1988 as Origins of Analytical Philosophy. In 1991 he published a collections of papers on Frege; and in 1993 a collection entitled The Seas of Language.

Reviews

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could There Be Unicorns?

It’s the provocative title of the article that initially drew my attention to Michael Dummett (1925-2011) who was the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. His work was highly influenced by Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein (early and late) and was frequently in conversation with empiricists like Hume as well as the logical positivists. If you are at all interested in the philosophy of language and how we use language to know the world and communicate about it meaningfully with others, you should definitely look into Dummett’s work.

The answer to the question about unicorns? Yes. There could be unicorns. The reason is really that we lack the ability to say that there are no such things as unicorns because doing so relies on establishing the truth of such a claim (i.e., that there are no unicorns) by reference to a reality that is outside of our ability to verify. And it relies on asserting a meaning for the term “unicorn.” At best, the claim that there are such things as unicorns is both truth and false. This “anti-realist” positions is one of Dummett’s best known contributions to logic and the philosophy of language.

This book is a collection of his essays published between 1952 and 1977 and they cover some of his main ideas and contributions. Some essays are more accessible than others and this probably reflects that some essays were republished lectures and others came into this world as crunchy, philosophical contributions that take readers deep into the weeds of analytic philosophy. I thought I might touch on a few of Dummett’s main ideas at a fairly high level and then mention of few of the essays that I found particularly compelling.

Truth Derives from Meaning that is Situated by Use

What makes a sentence true is not solely determined by what the words reference in the world or what the words stand for as a code referencing the thoughts of the person speaking or writing those words (88). Rather the truth is in the way that the sentence works with other sentences to create truth-value chains and to facilitate participation on the language game where those sentences constitute “a move.” An implication of this observation is that sentences are not true or false in one way — it will vary by meaning, which varies by use, which varies by time. Consequently it is possible for a sentence to be true and false (23) when analyzed in the abstract.

This idea hinges on a distinction that Frege made between a sentence’s “reference” (i.e., thing in in the world that a sentence points to) and its “sense” (i.e., how we, as users of language, grasp its meaning). Sense very much depends on the context of use and the context of the language games in which we use those words (this is Wittgenstein’s influence). “[O]nly in the context of a sentence does a name stand for anything” (38). Truth cannot solely be carried by the reference if the sense is how we understand it (76) as a “concept” (75). The sense is an essential “ingredient” of meaning (122). I saw this notion explained once using the following example: “Lois Lane met Superman” and “Lois Lane met Clark Kent” have the same truth value by reference between Clark Kent is Superman, but in terms of the sense in which “Clark Kent” and “Superman” are used, they have different truth value.

Maybe not everyone knows who Superman is, but I like this version over Frege’s original, which used “the morning star” and “the evening star” (both are Venus) to make the same point.

Warranted Assertibility

The reference of a sentence does still matter, however, because it is the thing that the sentence is true “in virtue of” (14) it supplies the condition of truth (121) or what John Searle later takes up as a “condition of satisfaction” which is the relation between a thought or intention or word and the world that it is directed at. Some sentences will have firmer or more restricted conditions of satisfaction. They will be “decidable” (40) in ways that some other assertions are not. The sense + reference + context of use supply the grounds for determining the truth of a sentence on the basis of its “warranted assertibility” or the conditions under which an assertion can be understood to be meaningful and true. A strict interpretation of this stance will cause problems for establishing the truth of things that happened in the past, but the statements that make up our history may also contribute to the warranted assertibility of a claim (368).

The warrant for a word’s assertion comes from the sentence (117) and for a sentence from other sentences that make up the language game it is part of (77). In an essay on “Nominalism” Dummett gets at this idea by contrasting it with a phenomenalist approach that might try to reduce meaning to its most primitive building blocks in the way that an experience might be portrayed as an accumulation of discrete sensory input data points. I’m not sure that experience actually works that way and Dummett doesn’t think meaning works that way either — the meaning of a sentence is not found in each of the words in isolation the way that pixels of red make up a red object. It is more like the meaning of “square,” which would be disrupted if one looked at smaller and smaller line segments making up a square — go small enough and they do not resemble squares at all — only in their totality do they mean “square” (45)

Anti-Realism

“The fundamental difference between the anti-realist and the realist lies in this: […] the anti-realist interprets ‘capable of being known’ to mean ‘capable of being known by us’, whereas the realist interprets it to mean ‘capable of being known by some hypothetical being whoever intellectual capacities and power of observation may exceed our own’” (24).

Dummett’s anti-realist position derives from this position about verifiability as a condition of truth. If the only thing that we were concerned about in establishing the truth of statements was that sentence’s reference or the reference of the words comprising the sentence then we would find that they are referencing a world that we do not always have verifiable access to.

Realism I characterize as the belief that statements of the disputed class [i.e., those asserting truth] possess an objective truth-value, independently of our means of knowing it: they are true or false in virtue of a reality existing independently of us. The anti-realist opposes to this view that statements of the disputed class are to be understood only by reference to the sort of thing which we count as evidence for a statement of that class (146)

True is what is verifiable either in actual practice or that we are capable of verifying (361). The evidence and the means of verifying whether a statement warrants assertibility is found in its use, which helps establish its sense + the way the world is as a condition of satisfaction (147). Because we cannot be aware of all the circumstances of sense in which a statement might be uttered, we cannot account for all the conditions under which it might be true or false (302). Only in the conduct of logical analysis, following the law of the excluded middle must we decide that a statement (in the abstract) is either true or false. The anti-realist position insists that we must hold statements in the abstract as both true and false until truth or falsity is determined by the verifiable context of use (155, 163). This position causes all kinds of problems for ways that we attempt to understand what is true about the world, especially when we attempt to do so outside of actual verification (as in through logical deduction [298]).

A lot of this work seems counter to common sense. Obviously there is a world out there that is independent of our minds. Obviously we can’t say that effects can precede their causes. And I’m willing to bet the unicorns don’t exist either. Dummett’s point isn’t really to argue against reality. He is arguing that these positions are necessary as a counter to the work of logic that operates on the basis that statements are true or false by reference to a world and a stable state of affairs that we don’t have to verify. The world that we operate in is vague (260) and a hard logical analysis of it doesn’t always hold up over time or circumstance. In fact, adherence to the dictates of logic can force us into strange situations such as one where the logic of truth can be noted to work the same forward in time and backward in time, allowing effects to precede their causes (335). It’s only when we acknowledge that the sense of language, in a context of use, is a significant contributor to meaning and truth that we can escape the weird consequences that a rigorous application of logic would require (333).

Some of the essays that I found particularly compelling are: “Truth” (1959), “Nominalism” (1956), “Frege’s Distinction between Sense and Reference” (1975), “Realism” (1963), “Wang’s Paradox” (1970), “Can An Effect Precede Its Cause” (1954), “The Reality of the Past” (1969).

[Ege]

Contents

1. Truth
2. Presupposition
3. The Structure of Appearance
4. Nominalism
5. Constructionalism
6. George Boole
7. Frege on Functions
8. Frege’s Philosophy
9. Frege’s Distinction between Sense and Reference
10. Realism
11. Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics
12. The Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s Theorem
13. Platonism
14. The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic
15. Wang’s Paradox
16. Is Logic Empirical?
17. The Justification of Deduction
18. Can an Effect Precede its Cause?
19. Bringing About the Past
20. A Defence of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time
21. The Reality of the Past
22. The Significance of Quine’s Indeterminacy Thesis
23. The Social Character of Meaning
24. Oxford Philosophy
25. Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be?

In these article, It's argued that Dummet interprets Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics incorrectly:
1. Dummett's Radical Conventionalist Reading of Wittgenstein (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43046976)
2. Dummett and Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10....)
3. Philosophical Theorizing and Particularism: Michael Dummett on Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy of Language
(https://link.springer.com/chapter/10....)