Truth-bearers: sentences or propositions?
The question oftruth bearer is important in cases when this question can bring us closer to the understanding of whether or not it is possible to give anyphilosophical justification or explicit definition, which sends to reality itself, to the concept of truth. In the case of inflationary approachthe most consistent solution of this problem is to recognize existence of a special kind of truth bearers - propositions (or facts), to whichthe property of truth is initially attributed. The need for such recognition is due to the identification of truth and reality: truth, first of all,is what there is, and vice versa. However, in this case there is a problem of metalinguistic specification of such entities as propositions(or facts). Whenever you want to fix a thought (proposition or fact), it is necessary to resort to language. But then truth becomes immanentto language and the primary truth bearer should be the sentence. In the paper it is demonstrated that ambivalence in recognition ofthe primary truth bearer is a characteristic of both inflationary and deflationary approaches. The most vivid expression of the ambiguityof talk about the truth bearer is found in the works of those thinkers who, though they are recognized as the founders of deflationism,sometimes inclined to take a pronounced inflationary (realist) position. In particular, it is concluded that Freges semantic theory, whichseeks to move from talk about the language to talk about the world, is unsustainable in its attempt to answer the question about the ontologicaljustification of our judgments. At least, such a justification can be given only insofar as language is recognized as only obviouslygiven. The representative kinds of deflationism (such as the redundancy theory and minimalism), in fact, are close to the inflationaryconceptions in terms of answering the question of what entity we might initially ascribe the property of truth to - sentences or propositions?Deflationary approach raises the problem of the truth bearer, the solution of which the inflationary theory unsuccessfully tried togive, but it is not able to provide the justified answer either. It turns out that the proposition as the truth bearer has a dual interpretation.On the one hand, proposition is the content of the statement (sentence, assertion, etc.). On the other hand, proposition (thought or fact) isnothing but an objective (extralinguistic) entity. In both cases, there is a question whose answer is not explicitly given either by inflationismor by deflationism: can a proposition be fixed (expressed) irrespective of the language?
Keywords
дефляционизм, носители истинности, предложение, пропозиция, deflationism, truth bearers, sentence, propositionAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Tarabanov Nikolay A. | National Research Tomsk State University | nikotar@gmail.com |
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