Gary considers:
1) The claim "x" is true
2) "Truth" is an important aspect of inquiry.
1a) The claim "x" has undeniable truth status.
First, from the point of view of meaning, 1a and 1 are not at all
equivalent in terms of the semantic construction of a truth
judgment or evaluation. (1) is 'polar', unmodalized, and
unmarked; (1a), by adding the intensifier 'undeniable' mobilizes
a whole set of distinct semantic aspects that (1) omits (e.g.
arguability is foregrounded, the attitude of the speaker becomes
a marked assertion vs. an unmarked statement, etc.). The meaning
approach to truth can be quite revealing.
(2) not accidentally puts quotes around "truth", because we
recognize that we are now in the realm of meta-language. This
usage of the noun, a nominalization from the evaluative attribute
(adjective usually), tries to construct an abstract 'being' by
analogy with our usage of many other nouns. I think we could
reasonably use it to talk about the practice of making truth-
judgments or evaluations, or the class of propositions we deem
'true', but the Platonist eidolon notion of truth does not seem
to me to be a useful one. Gary makes clear that what really
concerns him is not that we have a notion that propositions can
be called true (or more or less true, probable, warrantable,
etc.), but rather a different usage of 'truth':
"there are truths that have not yet been put into truth claim
form,"
i.e. that truths exist in some absolute sense that is independent
of making meanings about the truth of this or that proposition.
For me this is the lineal descendant of Plato's view, and whether
it is or not, it reifies a practice and a constructed attribute
into a being, for which frankly I've never heard a convincing
warrant. Truth may be a noun in English, as in Plato's Attic
Greek, but both are later linguistic inventions, using the
capacity of the grammar to morph attributes-as-adjectives into
what should still be attributes(semantic)-as-nouns (grammatical),
but get confused (and yes, to me this is a simple category error,
however venerable and hallowed by philsophers) with the semantics
of other nouns and seen as a species of being.
As to those 'moons' Galileo saw, he saw no such thing, at least
he saw nothing like the Moon. He saw some dots of light, in
different relative positions at different observations. It's a
long, long chain of signs to connect that to any similarity to
the only Moon known at that time. Some of that chain could not be
constructed until we had interplanetary explorers and their
photographs. People ask, was it true there were moons before
Galileo claimed there were, but to evaluate a proposition for
meaning requires not just a proposition and some intertexts (e.g.
other described observations) to connect, but a (Presentational,
or ideational) meaning for the proposition. Evaluative judgments
(Orientational or attitudinal meaning) are interdependent with
interpretations of the content of the proposition, and in this
case "Jupiter" to some degree, but critically 'moons' illustrates
the slippery way we use abstraction to make a 'truth' seem that
it has to be independent of its construction, when it can't
possibly be.
There are 'truths' (count noun) but not 'truth' (mass/abstract
noun).
JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU