Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Irreplaceable truth

  • Original Research
  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Conceptual engineers are always on the lookout for concepts that can be improved upon or replaced. Kevin Scharp has argued that the concept truth is inconsistent, and that this inconsistency thwarts its ability to serve in philosophical and scientific explanatory projects, such as developing linguistic theories of meaning. In this paper I present Scharp’s view about what makes a concept inconsistent, and why he believes that truth in particular is inconsistent. Then I examine the concepts that he suggests should replace truth for various explanatory and expressive duties. I argue that those concepts are not up to the tasks for which they are posited, and so Scharp’s replacement methodology itself needs to be reengineered.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Words in small caps denote concepts. Properties are frequently identified with italics.

  2. See Scharp (2019, pp. 438–446) for the most detailed presentation of his view on constitutive principles, where he presents it as a measurement theory.

  3. I write ‘contradict the facts’ rather than ‘are false’, as Scharp does (2007b, p. 608, 2013a, p. 36, 2019, p. 422). This is because, as I argue below, Scharp is committed to nothing being false.

  4. See also my (2022, pp. 689–691).

  5. Scharp refers to these concepts as being “unsatisfiable” (2013a, p. 39, 2019, p. 458), but that doesn’t distinguish them from inconsistent concepts.

  6. And likewise for falsity: nothing is false, either, given that falsity suffers the same inconsistency as truth. Given Scharp’s negative appraisal of what he calls the “error theory of truth” (2013a, p. 241, 2013b, p. 468, and 2021b: S672-S673), and his positive “assessment-relative” account of truth (2013a: chapter 9, 2013b), it seems that he would resist this implication. But I don’t see how he can. He is very clear that he believes that there is no property of truth because truth is an inconsistent concept (2013a, p. 263, 2013b, p. 493, 2014, p. 636, 2020, p. 413, 2021a, p. 673, 2021b: S650), and that “When something is true, it has the property of being true” (2021a, p. 675, 2021b: S648). It plainly follows that nothing is true.

  7. Scharp advocates holding onto and employing truth for ordinary (i.e., non-paradoxical) situations and non-explanatory purposes (e.g., 2013a, p. 2, 174, 275 and 2020, p. 412). Previously he had endorsed “retiring” truth from our conceptual scheme (2007a, p. 273): “inconsistent concepts should not be employed” (2007a, p. 298). I argue below in Sect. 4.2 that this retention is untenable.

  8. Ripley (2014) concurs. See also Greenough (2019, p. 416).

  9. As Bacon observes, it is consistent with ADT that no statement not covered by (D5), (D6), and (D7) is descendy (2019, pp. 383–384).

  10. Scharp gives an informal gloss on unsafety: “the rough idea is that if applying [(A1)], [(D1)], and their converses to a sentence leads to contradiction, that sentence is unsafe” (2007b, p. 616). But this offers only a sufficient condition on unsafety, and so only a necessary condition on safety. The point remains that we can’t apply (D1) until we know which sentences are descendy, and we don’t know that independently of knowing which sentences are safe.

  11. I don’t have a formal definition of same-saying to offer here, as different theorists may disagree about its nature, given the various strengths of equivalence that may hold between claims and attributions of truth to those claims. But I hope that the examples offered help to isolate the general phenomenon in question.

  12. See Scharp 2013a, p. 281. Cf. Ripley 2014 and Greenough (2019, p. 407), as well as Scharp’s reply to the latter that concedes that his replacements don’t always serve their advertised role (2019, pp. 460–462).

  13. Fictionalists about truth disagree. See Beall 2004 and Armour-Garb and Woodbridge 2015. Scharp distances himself from the fictionalist approach to inconsistency (2013a, pp. 136–137).

  14. Though Scharp also says that it’s not good for “serious theorizing” (2013a, p. 134).

  15. Note that this exercise is quite easy, and Edna doesn’t need to endorse Scharp’s assessment-sensitivity theory to accomplish it (see chapter 9 of Scharp 2013a and 2013b). Scharp claims that an advantage of assessment-sensitivity views is that those who believe truth to be inconsistent and possess ascendy and descendy can “interpret people—in a consistent way—who use ‘true’” (2013a, p. 260). So can Edna.

  16. At one point Scharp uses the language of approximation, but doesn’t provide the relevant metric that would make sense of it (2013a, pp. 169–170; see also 266). As noted earlier, any such metric can’t be given extensionally. The extensions of ‘true’ and ‘ascendy’ do not approximate one another; the former is empty, the latter vast.

  17. The notion of approximate truth itself, of course, is not without issues. See Schurz (2018) for discussion.

  18. The metaphysics of properties corresponding to partial concepts deserves some consideration, since they also appear to be misbehaved: no extension seems to correspond to them in particular. If the right conclusion is that partial concepts are also unsatisfiable, then we have another problem for Scharp’s replacements: ascendy and descendy appear to be partial, and so nothing may be ascendy or descendy after all.

  19. Cf. Bacon: “In so far as we have a grasp on these notions [i.e., ascending truth, descending truth, and safety] at all, it is acquired solely by the things Scharp tells us about them” (2019, p. 383).

  20. Bacon claims that Scharp treats safety as a primitive (2019, p. 375). I don’t see that in the text, though he may be latching on to the idea that Scharp can only claim that ordinary sentences are safe by assuming that they are. In responding to Bacon, Scharp claims (2019, p. 430) that he “stipulates” that all grounded sentences are safe at Scharp (2013a, p. 170), though I don’t find that obvious in the text. Nor is he bestowed with any such power.

  21. Burgess (2014, p. 1089) argues that Scharp is cavalier in his inference here. Scharp responds not by engaging the argument but by mocking him (2019, p. 453).

  22. Cf. Scharp (2007b, pp. 611–612), where this criticism is also directed at Azzouni (e.g., his 2003).

  23. Furthermore, Scharp declares meaning inconsistent (2020, p. 397). Therefore, being meaningful is not a property that something could have. Yet Scharp tells us he can’t imagine “reading in the newspaper that scientists have discovered that the entire French language is meaningless” (2007b, p. 611, 2013a, p. 128).

  24. Indeed, the claim that nothing is true, which I have argued is a consequence of the inconsistency view, has long been seen as self-refuting. If nothing is true, then something is true, namely, the claim that nothing is true. Liggins argues that this ancient argument is question begging (2019, p. 14).

References

  • Armour-Garb, B., & Woodbridge, J. A. (2015). Pretense and pathology: Philosophical fictionalism and its applications. Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Asay, J. (2022). Something is true. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 105, 687–705.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Azzouni, J. (2003). The strengthened liar, the expressive strength of natural languages, and regimentation. Philosophical Forum, 34, 329–350.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bacon, A. (2019). Scharp on replacing truth. Inquiry, 62, 370–386.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beall, J. C. (2004). True and false—as if. In G. Priest, J. C. Beall, & B. Armour-Garb (Eds.), The law of non-contradiction: New philosophical essays (pp. 197–216). Clarendon Press.

  • Burgess, J. P. (2014). Review of Replacing Truth, by Kevin Scharp. Studia Logica, 102, 1087–1089.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and meaning. Synthese, 17, 304–323.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eklund, M. (2019). Inconsistency and replacement. Inquiry, 62, 387–402.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greenough, P. (2019). Conceptual Marxism and truth: Inquiry symposium on Kevin Scharp’s Replacing Truth. Inquiry, 62, 403–421.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liggins, D. (2019). In defence of radical restrictionism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 98, 3–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Merricks, T. (2001). Objects and persons. Clarendon Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Patterson, D. (2009). Inconsistency theories of semantic paradox. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 79, 387–422.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pinder, M. (2015). A revenge problem without the concept of truth. Thought, 4, 151–161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pinder, M. (2021). Not wanted: On Scharp’s solution to the Liar. Erkenntnis, 86, 1567–1584.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ripley, David. 2014. [Review of Replacing Truth, by Kevin Scharp]. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. ndpr.nd.edu/news/replacing-truth

  • Scharp, K. (2007a). Alethic vengeance. In J. C. Beall (Ed.), Revenge of the liar: New essays on the paradox (pp. 272–319). Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2007b). Replacing truth. Inquiry, 50, 606–621.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2013a). Replacing truth. Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2013b). Truth, the liar, and relativism. Philosophical Review, 122, 427–510.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2014). Truth, revenge, and internalizability. Erkenntnis, 79, 597–645.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2019). Replies to Bacon, Eklund, and Greenough on Replacing Truth. Inquiry, 62, 422–475.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2020). Philosophy as the study of defective concepts. In A. Burgess, H. Cappelen, & D. Plunkett (Eds.), Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics (pp. 396–416). Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2021a). Conceptual engineering and replacements for truth. In M. P. Lynch, J. Wyatt, J. Kim, & N. Kellen (Eds.), The nature of truth: Classic and contemporary perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 671–691). MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scharp, K. (2021b). Conceptual engineering for truth: Alethic properties and new alethic concepts. Synthese, 198, S647-688.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schurz, G. (2018). Truthlikeness and approximate truth. In J. Saatsi (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of scientific realism (pp. 133–148). Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to Max Deutsch for all his support in the development of the ideas here.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Jamin Asay

Authors
  1. Jamin Asay
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jamin Asay.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

There are no conflicts of interest to declare.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Asay, J. Irreplaceable truth. Synthese 203, 85 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04498-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04498-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation