Following Michael Dummett's lead let us here call any view according to which some set of sentences S may be true even if there is no possible evidence for or against them realism with respect to S. Realism about the conscious states of others is a view according to which statements about, say, whether someone is in pain, can be true even when they elude all possible investigation into their truth.
Here is a line of argument that I want to test on you guys. I am not endorsing it, just spelling it out in here. It is presented in this from by Crispin Wright, though it derives essentially from some of Wittgenstein's remarks in Philosophical Investigations.
Meaning is normative. To know the meaning of an expression is to know, perhaps unreflectively, how to appraise uses of it, it is to know a set of constraints to which correct uses must conform. Accordingly, to give the meaning of a statement is to describe such constraints; nothing has a claim to be regarded as an account of a statement's meaning which does not succeed in doing so. The argument is now that the realist's truth-conditional conception of meaning has indeed no such claim.
Consider any statement, S, whose truth, the realist believes, may be but does not have to be associated with the availability of supporting evidence. According to the realist, the meaning of such a statement is determined by the conditions under which it is true. Anyone who understands the statement is thus thought to know these truth-condiitions. Such understanding must plainly involve a grasp of a constraint on S's correct use which is potentially distinct from that exerted by favorable evidence. For someone who is disposed to appraise such evidence in an acceptable manner, but has not grasped that the statement may be true when no such evidence can be obtained, must, on the realist view, have failed fully to grasp its content.
Consider now an analogy. Suppose I place before you two small, identical-seeming boxes. Each has been sealed and cannot be easily opened. I tell you that each contains a vacuum, and that enclosed in one of them, but not the other, is a beetle, fashioned of some highly volatile substance that will vaporize tracelessly if it comes into contact with air. There is no betraying rattle or other symptom - difference in weight e.g. - to suggest which box this might be. In such circumstances, there seems to be serious doubt whether you can so much as to try to pick the right box. If you think you can aim at the right box, ask yourself what this aiming would consist in. You might, for instance, reach out and tap one of the boxes with your finger, but that will not distinguish your intention from that of picking the wrong box, or just picking a box. You might accompany your gesture with the words, thought or spoken, "This is the box with the mysterious beetle." But your having that thought is no guarantee of the requisite intention, you might have had it while picking one of the boxes aimlessly.
To cut a long story short, intention is not a mental process through which a subject may pass - like a sensation or mood - independently of what else is true of him. Intentions are formed in the context of projects, determined by the details of and priorities among a subject's beliefs and desires. In order to have an intention - to aim - a subject must want the result of implementing it and this want must be intelligible in the context of the more generalized scheme of wants that partially determine his character. He must also have beliefs about how to aim at that particular result; leaving on the one side whether languageless creatures may have intentions, the subject who would be credited with action upon a certain intention must be ready to offer an account of why he did just what he did, why he conceived that course of action to be likely to promote its fulfilment. Finally, there are internal relations between the content of an intention ascribed to a subject and his responses, of satisfaction and frustration, as the sequence of events unfolds.
These, very sketchily, are three aspects of the background and surroundings of the significant ascriptions of intention. They are all absent in the analogy of the boxes. It is utterly unclear what motive you could have for wishing to pick the right box - (you might wish to go through the motions, of course, to humor me e.g., but that is not the same thing). Further you will, so long as you are rational, have absolutely no beliefs about how to go about it - and even if it is granted that you might somehow be irrationally smitten with some sort of idee fixe, it would be an odd strategy for the realist to try to make conceptual stock out of possibilities exlusively open to the irrational. Finally, there is no question of your responding with frustration or satisfaction at an outcome; there is not going to be, in that sense, any outcome.
It is just the same with verification-transcendent truth. Why should anyone value it? How can a subject have rational beliefs about how to secure it? How can the satisfactions and frustrations of the subject disclose that it was indeed his aim? We should conclude that truth, so conceived, cannot be aimed at: the surroundings necessary if the concept of intention is to grip, so to speak, are missing. There is thus a tension, when truth is realistically conceived, between the truth-conditional conception of meaning and the essential normativity of meaning. In effect, we should have given no meaning to an expression if the only 'constraint' on its correct use were such that, for the reasons just sketched, noone could aim compliance with them. The assignment, could it but be effected, of evidence-transcendent truth-conditions would impose just such 'constraints'. In so far as there are operational constraints on the correct use of statements whose meanings the realist views as determined by their association with evidence-transcendent truth-conditions, they are accordingly misrepresented by his view.
Here is a line of argument that I want to test on you guys. I am not endorsing it, just spelling it out in here. It is presented in this from by Crispin Wright, though it derives essentially from some of Wittgenstein's remarks in Philosophical Investigations.
Meaning is normative. To know the meaning of an expression is to know, perhaps unreflectively, how to appraise uses of it, it is to know a set of constraints to which correct uses must conform. Accordingly, to give the meaning of a statement is to describe such constraints; nothing has a claim to be regarded as an account of a statement's meaning which does not succeed in doing so. The argument is now that the realist's truth-conditional conception of meaning has indeed no such claim.
Consider any statement, S, whose truth, the realist believes, may be but does not have to be associated with the availability of supporting evidence. According to the realist, the meaning of such a statement is determined by the conditions under which it is true. Anyone who understands the statement is thus thought to know these truth-condiitions. Such understanding must plainly involve a grasp of a constraint on S's correct use which is potentially distinct from that exerted by favorable evidence. For someone who is disposed to appraise such evidence in an acceptable manner, but has not grasped that the statement may be true when no such evidence can be obtained, must, on the realist view, have failed fully to grasp its content.
Consider now an analogy. Suppose I place before you two small, identical-seeming boxes. Each has been sealed and cannot be easily opened. I tell you that each contains a vacuum, and that enclosed in one of them, but not the other, is a beetle, fashioned of some highly volatile substance that will vaporize tracelessly if it comes into contact with air. There is no betraying rattle or other symptom - difference in weight e.g. - to suggest which box this might be. In such circumstances, there seems to be serious doubt whether you can so much as to try to pick the right box. If you think you can aim at the right box, ask yourself what this aiming would consist in. You might, for instance, reach out and tap one of the boxes with your finger, but that will not distinguish your intention from that of picking the wrong box, or just picking a box. You might accompany your gesture with the words, thought or spoken, "This is the box with the mysterious beetle." But your having that thought is no guarantee of the requisite intention, you might have had it while picking one of the boxes aimlessly.
To cut a long story short, intention is not a mental process through which a subject may pass - like a sensation or mood - independently of what else is true of him. Intentions are formed in the context of projects, determined by the details of and priorities among a subject's beliefs and desires. In order to have an intention - to aim - a subject must want the result of implementing it and this want must be intelligible in the context of the more generalized scheme of wants that partially determine his character. He must also have beliefs about how to aim at that particular result; leaving on the one side whether languageless creatures may have intentions, the subject who would be credited with action upon a certain intention must be ready to offer an account of why he did just what he did, why he conceived that course of action to be likely to promote its fulfilment. Finally, there are internal relations between the content of an intention ascribed to a subject and his responses, of satisfaction and frustration, as the sequence of events unfolds.
These, very sketchily, are three aspects of the background and surroundings of the significant ascriptions of intention. They are all absent in the analogy of the boxes. It is utterly unclear what motive you could have for wishing to pick the right box - (you might wish to go through the motions, of course, to humor me e.g., but that is not the same thing). Further you will, so long as you are rational, have absolutely no beliefs about how to go about it - and even if it is granted that you might somehow be irrationally smitten with some sort of idee fixe, it would be an odd strategy for the realist to try to make conceptual stock out of possibilities exlusively open to the irrational. Finally, there is no question of your responding with frustration or satisfaction at an outcome; there is not going to be, in that sense, any outcome.
It is just the same with verification-transcendent truth. Why should anyone value it? How can a subject have rational beliefs about how to secure it? How can the satisfactions and frustrations of the subject disclose that it was indeed his aim? We should conclude that truth, so conceived, cannot be aimed at: the surroundings necessary if the concept of intention is to grip, so to speak, are missing. There is thus a tension, when truth is realistically conceived, between the truth-conditional conception of meaning and the essential normativity of meaning. In effect, we should have given no meaning to an expression if the only 'constraint' on its correct use were such that, for the reasons just sketched, noone could aim compliance with them. The assignment, could it but be effected, of evidence-transcendent truth-conditions would impose just such 'constraints'. In so far as there are operational constraints on the correct use of statements whose meanings the realist views as determined by their association with evidence-transcendent truth-conditions, they are accordingly misrepresented by his view.
