 Is it true that my car's tires are going to be under pressure because it's cold outside? As of right now, all I have is a deflationary theory. Last week we discussed some philosophical theories of what it is exactly that makes something true, including the correspondence theory, which is the default way that many of us think about the subject, that truth is a relationship of accuracy between a belief and the world, more or less like the relationship between a map and the territory that map represents. When a belief or statement corresponds with the facts, it's true. Simple. However, numerous philosophers have objected to the correspondence theory's claims, either by questioning the validity of its underlying assumptions, as we described last time, or more startlingly, asserting that it's just tautological, that it doesn't really explain anything. If I claim that truth happens when beliefs correspond with the facts, you can see how someone might raise an eyebrow and wonder if maybe the phrase corresponds with the facts might just be another way of saying is true. It does kind of seem like I'm just saying true things are true and high-fiving myself for cracking the case. According to this famous fillpapers poll of professional philosophers, almost half of them believe something other than correspondence theory. So why is it the default concept you and I use when thinking about these sorts of things? Why might alternatives, like the coherence theory, seem somehow insufficient to satisfy what we feel truth ought to be? Well, one famously controversial point of view was advanced by philosopher Richard Rorty, who suggested that Enlightenment thinkers did the evolution of human thought a service by shaking off the chains of religious dogmatism, but they didn't finish the job, essentially replacing one supposedly inerrant external authority with another, swapping God or scripture for the concept of a single objective, arguably sacred, capital T, truth. Every person's interpretation of the world, Rorty claims, is inherently subjective and artificial, built from concepts instilled by culture and personal history. Those concepts may or may not represent the world faithfully, but we have no way of crawling outside our subjectivity to see the world as it truly is, to verify if they're valid or just imaginary. If I put a shoe on my head, one person might say, Josh is wearing a hat. And another might say, Josh isn't wearing a hat. Which statement is true? Well, it depends on what is meant by hat, which they can argue back and forth, appealing to dictionary definitions or thought experiments or whatever, but never to some answer key for the universe that says, yes, it counts as a hat. The best that either one can do is convince more people that they're right. He suggests that what we usually mean by truth is really justification, a purely semantic characteristic of social argument and language. All this talk about some universal normative abstract property that true statements have and false ones don't, is just a sort of set dressing, a rhetorical framework we attach to statements that are especially well argued, that play the game of justification in a particularly convincing fashion, within a certain linguistic context or vocabulary. But where does that leave things like science or mathematics? Two plus two equals four is true, right? Well, Rordy asserts that there can be more or less useful statements. They can be evaluated based on how well they encourage success or failure in particular domains, as in the pragmatist approach. But because a human experience is inextricably bound up in interpretation, because our whole picture of the world is necessarily built out of ideas that are unique to our perspective. To imagine that the success of one statement or another is necessarily owed to some intrinsic relationship between it and objective reality, whatever that is, is at best wishful thinking. For Rordy, some sort of capital T truth, as in the correspondence theory, may exist somewhere. But if it does, it's inaccessible to humans. We can never know if our statements are true in virtue of anything but social consensus. The best we can do is to justify them well. That's a lot. It's a great microcosm of the sort of postmodernist attitude towards truth that followed in the wake of the massive skeptical suplex that occurred in the mid-20th century by such characters as Girdle, Quine, and Wittgenstein. Admittedly, naive postmodernism is absolutely intolerable. But Rordy's contempt for the whole enterprise of defining truth has some interesting practical implications. Rather than settling on a particular interpretation, one considers to be the truth of the matter. It encourages a continuous appraisal of new concepts to see if any part of them might be useful. Rather than focusing on coherence with our prejudices of what the world is like, it prompts us to evaluate practical efficacy, whether those concepts bring success to those who subscribe to them. And to top it all off, it's so extreme of you that it makes literally any other theory of truth sound at least feasible. Speaking of which, let's turn this dial down from 11. Instead of getting wrapped around the axle about defining the properties of truth statements or rejecting the notion of truth as a meaningful concept, let's take a look at an idea that's a little humbler, a little smaller. No, smaller than that. Even small, there we go. The deflationary or minimalist theory of truth is sort of aligned with Rordy's version in that it seeks to knock the usual idea of capital T truth down a peg or two. But rather than appealing to some insurmountable barrier between thought and reality, it's based on a much more straightforward and seemingly innocuous claim called the transparency property. When someone says X is true, they're really just saying X. In this context, the question, what is truth, is a bit of a weird thing to ask. Truth about what? What is the statement you're attempting to prove is true or not true? Because that's what will determine how we might go about finding out. It's not like other qualifiers you might think of for statements, like Rebecca said X or it's peculiar that X. Those qualifiers modify the statement in particular ways that we might find some definition for, but under deflation, you can add the truth thing to any statement as many times as you want without changing its meaning. X is true. It is true that X is true. It is true that it is true that X is true. It's just like multiplying by one. You can always reduce the whole chain to just saying X. Okay, then why do we have this truth thing to begin with? If claiming a statement is true is just saying the statement, what's the point of such a term? Well, the Flationary theory asserts that it can be used as a sort of variable for a set of statements, a useful tool for talking about a whole bunch of stuff at once. For example, if Rebecca says that it's raining, it's raining. If Rebecca says it's warm out, it's warm out. If Rebecca says capitalism is flawed, capitalism is flawed. This is an extraordinarily boring way of making a series of claims. It's much quicker and easier to simply say, what Rebecca says is true. But hang on. This deflationary notion essentially reduces truth to a linguistic tool, which, as in Rorty's case, seems to undermine the legitimacy of appeals to practices we normally associate with truth as a property, stuff like science or reason. If we claim that truth is just a placeholder for statements, it would seem that we lose the ability to say that scientific theories are successful at predicting events because they are true. The correspondence theorists can easily explain how physicists know that orbiting black holes will produce gravitational waves or whatever. General relativity corresponds to the facts of the universe, so general relativity is true. But the deflationary theorist has to work a little bit harder. Well, what do we mean when we say something like general relativity is true? General relativity isn't just a single statement, it's a whole collection of equations and assertions about how bodies and space behave. If we look closely at the gravitational wave example, we'll find that what general relativity says about orbiting black holes is actually a series of statements, each of which has its own particular method of verification or falsification, depending on its domain. Saying that we detected gravitational waves because general relativity is true could be reduced to using that phrase for each of those statements in turn. We detected gravitational waves because equation one, which could be confirmed in this way. We detected gravitational waves because equation two, which could be confirmed like this. Considering postmodern theories of truth like Rortes or the humility of deflationism can seem silly or even threatening, especially in a world where a reality TV star is president of the United States. Correspondence has been the primary narrative through which we've been taught to understand the world and questioning its legitimacy, even knowing its inconsistencies, may seem like the most navel-gazing and absurd philosophical inquiry. But having these other ideas about what truth is available, even academically, can provide useful lenses through which we might understand our world better and as Rorty might say, useful may be the best an idea can aspire to. And that's the truth. Correspondence, coherence, coherence with pragmatism, postmodernism or deflationary theory. Which theory of truth is most compelling to you? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.