Abstract
Well over half a century before the development of contemporary experimental philosophy, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss conducted a number of empirical investigations intended to document non-philosophers’ convictions regarding a number of topics of philosophical interest. In the 1930s and 1950s, Næss collected data relevant to non-philosophers’ conceptions of truth. This research attracted the attention of Alfred Tarski at the time, and has recently been re-evaluated by Robert Barnard and Joseph Ulatowski. In this paper I return to Næss’s research on truth in order to better develop an account of how such empirical data does or doesn’t bear on the philosophical study of truth. I examine Næss’s findings from his various studies on truth, and challenge the interpretation of those studies offered by Barnard and Ulatowski.
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Notes
We could further distinguish between, say, (folk) conceptions of truth, truth, and ‘truth’. Whether such finer-grained things exist depends on whether people are actually drawing these distinctions themselves (either implicitly or explicitly). I’ll be thinking of conceptions of truth as collections of beliefs concerning any of the various dimensions of truth.
See, e.g., Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich 2001 for a canonical example of bringing experimental results to bear on conceptual analysis.
Furthermore, truth is often considered a paradigm abstract concept, as in Barsalou and Prinz (1997: 289–292), which could further isolate it from empirical investigation.
Note that Ulatowski here is quite cautious (and rightly so) about the inferences we may and may not draw for “normative” theory from “descriptive” theory. (Thanks to a referee for stressing this point.) For a bolder perspective on empirical data making inroads into philosophical disputes, see Greene 2007. For a perspective on the futility of using the sort of data experimental philosophers have collected to make philosophical inroads, see Kauppinen 2007.
This use of empirical data—see Reuter and Brun (forthcoming) for an example involving truth—is of a piece with what has been called the “negative program” of experimental philosophy (see, e.g., Alexander, Mallon, and Weinberg 2010), which comes in for criticism by Deutsch 2015.
And stable: the same attitude is present when he returns to these results decades later in Næss 1981.
A more thorough defense of Næss’s claim here would require an evaluation of Næss’s standards for grou** individuals’ responses into the relevant categories, modifying those standards if necessary, and then assessing the frequency of the different groups. That lies beyond the scope of the present paper, but it’s safe to say that Næss’s own analysis revealed no close contender for a majority view.
Ulatowski (2017) motivates his own view, which he labels ‘endoxic alethic pluralism’, in part by looking to Næss’s results. It is notably different from the more familiar forms of alethic pluralism (e.g., Wright 1992 and Lynch 2009) which focus on the metaphysical plurality of there being multiple properties of truth.
We should bear in mind that it’s possible that some of Næss’s subjects didn’t have any conception of truth until asked to reflect upon the topic during the study. As Næss writes: “The reader may ask whether one may look upon the definitions [of truth offered by the test subjects] as real opinions of the test-persons or whether they are mere > > Einfälle>>, mere > > words > > occurring to them during examinations” (1938a: 49). Indeed, a person possessing some concept may have no theory about the nature of the phenomenon associated with it, but still be able to come up with something on the fly when questioned. (See also Crockett 1959: 109.) In fact, Næss points out that he has “never heard a non-philosopher state something similar to a “definition of truth” without being urged” (1938b: 18; cf. 1938a: 43). Probing subjects for their theory of truth in an experimental setting may well be bringing those theories into existence.
Næss was concerned with the nature of synonymy for its own sake, and its implications for philosophy. A major theme of his monograph Interpretation and Preciseness, which reports on the greater research project to which the 1953 study on truth belongs, is that sameness of meaning—which Næss painstakingly endeavors to study empirically—is far more elusive than philosophers imagine, whether we are concerned with interpersonal synonymy or even intrapersonal synonymy. (See, for instance, his study of the Soviet writer Zaslavski and his use of ‘démocratie’ (1953b: 300–334).) Regarding inter- and intrapersonal synonymy with respect to ‘truth’, see Næss 1953b: 237–238 and 258–264.
The simplification is due to the fact that two clusters, those featuring negation, had seven assertions. The results involving these extra assertions were lumped together with the results for the four basic ones in Næss’s analysis.
Technically there is no cluster 4. Question 4 asked participants if they would change their answers regarding cluster 3 if ‘May 17’ were replaced by ‘tomorrow’. 80% said ‘no’, 14% said ‘yes’, and 6% didn’t answer (Næss 1953a: 22). Because of the different format to the question, there is no column for cluster 4 in Table 1 below.
Synonymy is also emphasized in Toulmin’s (1956) brief review.
Næss might dispute this claim (which I must admit I find incontrovertible). He writes: “The proportion of persons who do not equate untruth and uncertainty but equate truth and certainty, is large” (1953a: 27). If ‘equate’ means ‘judge to be expressive of the same assertion as indicated in the directions’, then this is a straightforward report of the data. But if it means ‘equate’, then I can’t imagine coherently interpreting the subjects this way. If ‘true’ and ‘perfectly certain’ are two names for the same thing, then ‘not true’ and ‘not perfectly certain’ are two names for the lack of that thing.
It might be objected here that this reading imposes an infallibilist understanding of knowledge on the subjects. If there is a knowledge norm of assertion present, and it’s operating in conjunction with a perfect certainty norm, that indicates a commitment to knowledge requiring perfect certainty. I for one wouldn’t find that surprising, and it’s a worthwhile empirical enterprise to detect which norms of assertion are operant in the wild. (See Turri 2016 and 2017.) My own speculation here fits well with the sentiment David Lewis expresses when he writes: “it seems as if knowledge must be by definition infallible. If you claim that S knows that P, and yet you grant that S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which not-P, it certainly seems as if you have granted that S does not after all know that P. To speak of fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities of error, just sounds contradictory” (1996: 549). I would add, furthermore, that the study drives the participants into a high-standards epistemic context, where we should expect more stringent epistemic norms to be in force, if contextualists are correct.
Cf. Næss: “It seems that some subjects have come to the conclusion that in question 7A, the theory of Darwin is supposed to be formulated but not affirmed, whereas in question 6A a theory or hypothesis is not only formulated but also affirmed” (1953a: 13). Whether this seeming is due to Næss’s following up with participants or just speculation to explain the divergence is unknown.
In the schema, the sentence ‘p’ needs to be a translation of X, so Tarski may be committed to ‘p’ being synonymous with X. But that’s not to say that ‘p’ is synonymous with ‘X is true’.
To illustrate somewhat evocatively, Barnard and Ulatowski seem to be inferring from ‘S judges that ‘p’ and ‘q’ are not synonymous’ to ‘S would judge that ‘p if and only if q’ is false’. Since I think the two sides of the Tarski biconditionals are not synonymous (and I highly suspect you, as well as Tarski, agree with me), I am inferred to be rejecting as false all of the Tarski biconditionals. That is certainly news to me. This line of thinking is made explicit at Barnard and Ulatowski 2019: 164.
Barnard and Ulatowski replicated Næss’s study, and avoided Næss’s operator/predicate switch. They highlight that they still found a statistically significant difference between their versions of clusters 1 and 7 (2019: 159). But note that whereas Næss found (A)/(B) synonymy to drop from 87 to 44% between clusters 1 and 7 (a 49% decrease), Barnard and Ulatowski found a drop from 94.2 to 80.9% (a 14% decrease).
Barnard and Ulatowski have also developed their own empirical studies covering a number of alethic issues, including attempts to replicate Næss’s 1953 study (Barnard and Ulatowski 2013, 2019, and 2021). See also Reuter and Brun (forthcoming).
Thanks go to a referee for the journal for pushing me on this point.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks go to Kristy Lam for her assistance in putting together the statistical analyses and tables for the paper. I’m grateful also to the referees of the journal for their helpful, constructive feedback. Thanks also go to Bob Barnard, Max Deutsch, and Joe Ulatowski for helpful discussion of the paper. The research presented here was partially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project number HKU 17618420), and funding from the University of Hong Kong’s Outstanding Young Researcher Award.
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Asay, J. Arne Næss’s experiments in truth. Erkenn 89, 545–566 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00544-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00544-8