Topics Truth

Question What makes a statement (particularly one not factually-based, such as about society) true, and who decides? Not sure if this is more philosophy or sociology, but in studying for end-of-school exams my English class have a few problems unearthing the syllabus' meaning! We've read something of the basic theories about Truth, such as proof by correspondence, but we are completely confused by the need to discover (without help from our teacher who is determined to keep us away from philosophical debate) the 'processes by which statements come to be accepted as true', including who has the authority to make such statements and the ways in which statements are explored, tested, endorsed or refuted, etc. While we suspect that all the answer required is to mention something about the legal system (the focus of our text), it is still frustrating not being able to fight this out ourselves and we were hoping that you could help us by providing a few ideas as to what really does make statements true (the 'authority' part in particular sounds strange, as though we are supposed to unearth characteristics that automatically set apart certain people as knowing far more than the rest of society - is this just an illusion of semantics, meant to refer to the way our author is establishing an authoritative voice?). Since we do not have the time or resources to test or research our ideas with any justice to them we were hoping for a little educated guidance (even if it's just to reinforce the idea that the syllabus doesn't know what it's on about!). Thanks for considering our question!

Accepted:
July 14, 2007

Comments

The view that there is something which makes true a statement or something in virtue of which the statement is true is usually referred to as the conception of truth as correspondence. It presupposes that the something which makes true the statement - say the statement that the cat is on the mat - and which is is "out there" in the world, i.e a cat being on a mat, or some sort of "fact" or "truthmaker". This view is often considered problematic because we do not know exactly the nature of the "facts" in question, which seem to be arbitrary depending upon the language wxho use to describe them. For instance is "the cat is on the mat" is made true by the presence of *several* cats on the mat ( in which case it is false to talk of "the" (unique) cat, or by an animal who is boardline for a cat (say a lynx)? Some facts seem to be identical although the descriptions differ ( for instance that I gave you 100 $ is the same fact as that you received 100 $ from me, but not quite) We feel that in this case it's a matter of language, hence of choice of description, and that descriptions are relative. In the case of historical truths, we also feel that they cannot be made true by historical facts, since a) these are long past, hence difficult to confront to our present day statements, b) these facts are most of time human actions, which can be relative to human interpreters ( a battle can be understood as a victory for one camp, as a defeat for another). So the temptation of relativising the facts to our descriptions of the facts, hence to reject the correspondence conception of truth for historical statements is very tempting. But we should resist this temptation. That a fact can be vague or precise depending upon our language of description is often a feature of our language and of our ignorance rather than a feature of reality. The difference between a mountain and a valley is often vague, or the baldness of a man may be evaluated with respect to different standards of loss of hair, but there is a difference between mountin and valley , and between a hairy person and a very un-hairy one. That truths are often relative to our language of description, including metaphorical ones ( if Mother tells to Child that he is a pig when he eats does not mean that Child has a snout and makes piggish noises) does not mean that they are not truths. We may pick up the facts, but ignore exactly how the world is sliced.

The matter is difficult in legal contexts, where aguably interpretation is very present and sometimes essential. There is a whole school of though in legal theory who claims that there is no objectivity in law. But there are also good reasons, from a realist camp, to believe in objectivity and truth in legal matters too.

To say that facts could be decided by authorities is to sucribe to a for of the argument from authority. But this kind of argument is usually considered invalid, even though some authorities ARE reliable. Arguably a Nobel Prize in physics is more reliable about the physics of the universes than Homer Simpson.

A famous article by the philosopher of law Ronald Dworkin , "Objectivity and truth: you'd better believe it" (http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/ronalddworkin) is very useful in this respect.