Abstract
It is argued that we should distinguish ontic truth––the True––that Frege claimed is sui generis and indefinable, from the semantic concept, for which Tarski provided a definition. Frege’s argument that truth is not definable is clarified and Wittgenstein’s introduction of the distinction between saying and showing is interpreted as an attempted response to Frege’s rejection of the correspondence theory. It is argued that conflicts between realism and Dummettian anti-realism result from their proponents not thoroughly distinguishing between the two closely connected ways of thinking about truth. Last, the distinction is used to clarify and endorse the Fregean claim that all true sentences indicate the True, identified as ontic truth.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Not everyone agrees with this assessment. Since the semantic concept of truth is defined as a relation, Tarski’s method, which is to show how to specify the relevant relation for various languages has been argued to amount to a characterization of the general concept (Smid 2014). I am sympathetic to this view, without agreeing that it was a successful non-circular characterization.
Adopting the practice of translating bedeuten and its cognates with ‘to indicate’ and its cognates, as recently recommended by Green (2020).
An anonymous comment on an earlier draft of this paper was, ‘If a sentence is true in virtue of expressing a thought, the thought itself must have a semantic property’. Suppose we say, ‘A cheese is smelly in virtue of emitting a gas.’ This implies that the gas must be smelly, but it does not detract from the fact that the cheese has the property of being smelly, it just explains how it manages to have this property. Similarly, if the sentence is true in virtue of expressing a thought, then the thought itself must be true, but, in this case, the thought’s being true amounts to no more than the sentences which express it being true. Although, in the case of the gas, we can perhaps identify the gas, capture it, and explain why it is smelly; in the case of the thought, it is not an independently existing stuff, but merely a way of speaking of a property that diverse sentences share. It is important to the argument offered here that the truth bearers in question are meaningful sentences, not thoughts or propositions, as assumed in Soame’s critique of Frege’s argument (Soames 1998, 21–29).
There has been some rather pointless debate as to whether Frege is claiming that any definition of truth involves circular reasoning, or an infinite regress. As interpreted here, he is arguing that a potential infinite regress can only be halted by assuming that one grasps the concept, ‘being true’, to be defined, and so by offering a circular account.
Although the standard translation of ‘Sachverhalt’ is ‘state of affairs’, the translation ‘object-states’ suggested by Schmitt does seem to capture Wittgenstein’s intentions better (Schmitt 2003).
Although the standard translation of the Tractatus renders ‘Satz’ as ‘proposition’, this appears to me to be unfortunate, since ‘proposition’ is now more often used for the meaning of a sentence, not the sentence itself. In 3.1–3.144, Wittgenstein is clearly using ‘Satz’ as Frege, whom he mentions (3.143), would have done, as the sensible expression of a thought (3.1).
Those familiar with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time may recognize a similarity to his notion of truth as the revealing of being (Heidegger 1962, I.6.44(a), 260).
The anti-realist allows that a gap can open up between truth and assertibility, but identifies truth with ideal or justified assertibility, in the perfected theory of the world.
Dummett deems Frege’s claim that true sentences are names of the True to be a ‘gratuitous blunder’ (Dummett 1973, 184). His dismissal of Frege’s idea that true sentences indicate the True has been shown to result from a failure to understand Frege’s logical notation (Landini 2012, 29–33; Green 2015). His easy dismissal of Frege’s circularity argument flows from this failure.
Hornsby rightly identifies this commitment to correspondence truth as at the origins of Dummett and Wright’s anti-realism (Hornsby 1997).
Spinney has suggested that it is only late in his career that Frege adopted the view that ‘sentences were a species of complex proper name’ (Spinney 2018). But in fact, in both his Begriffsschrift and Grundgesetze Frege’s ‘sentences’ are a species of complex proper name, in the first instance they name contents, in the second, truth values.
See also Beaney (2007).
References
Aristotle. (1941). Metaphysics. In R. McKeon (Ed.), The basic works of Aristotle (pp. 682–926). Random House.
Beaney, M. (2007). Frege’s use of function-argument analysis and his introduction of truth-values as objects. In D. Greimann (Ed.), Essays on Frege’s conception of truth (pp. 93–123). Brill.
Cook, R. (2013). Appendix: How to read Grundgesetze. In P. A. Ebert and M. Rossberg (Eds.), Basic laws of Arithmetic (pp. A1–42). Oxford University Press
Davidson, D. (1990). The structure and content of truth. The Journal of Philosophy, 87(6), 279–328. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026863
Devitt, M. (1983). Dummett’s anti-realism. The Journal of Philosophy, 80(2), 73–99 https://doi.org/10.2307/2026236
dos Santos, L., & Henrique, L. (2020). Frege: Judgement, truth and facts. In D. Perrin & J.-P. Narboux (Eds.), New essays on Frege’s logical investigations (pp. 121–141). Nonada.
Dummett, M. (1958–59). Truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LIX (pp. 141–162). https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4544609.
Dummett, M. (1973). Frege: Philosophy of language. Duckworth.
Dummett, M. (1976). What is a theory of meaning? (II). In G. Evans & J. McDowell (Eds.), Truth and meaning: Essays in semantics (pp. 67–137). Clarendon Press.
Frege, G. (1970). Begriffsschrift, a formula language, modeled upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought. In J. van Heijenoort (Ed.), Frege and Gödel (pp. 1–82). Harvard University Press.
Frege, G. (1980). In B. McGuinness (Ed.), Gottlob Frege: Philosophical and mathematical correspondence. Basil Blackwell. Translated by Hans Kaal.
Frege, G. (1997a). On Sinn and Bedeutung. In M. Beaney (Ed.), The Frege reader (pp. 151–171). Basil Blackwell.
Frege, G. (1997b). Thought. In M. Beaney (Ed.), The Frege reader (pp. 324–345). Balckwell.
Frege, G. (2013). Basic laws of arithmetic: Derived using concept-script: Volumes I and II. Translated by Philip A. Ebert and Marcus Rossberg. Oxford University Press.
Green, K. (2015). Dummett on Frege on functions. In B. Weiss (Ed.), Dummett on analytic philosophy (pp. 174–194). Palgrave.
Green, K. (2020). Indicating a translation for Bedeutung. History and Philosophy of Logic, 41(2), 114–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340.2019.1673690
Greimann, D. (2000). The Judgement-stroke as a truth-operator: A new interpretation of the logical form of sentences in Frege’s scientific language. Erkenntnis, 52(2), 213–238. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005594724745
Greimann, D. (2015). Is Tarski’s definition of truth circular from Frege’s point of view? South American Journal of Logic, 1(1), 163–178.
Greimann, D. (2020). What exactly is the content of Frege’s thesis of the indefinability of truth? In D. Perrin & J.-P. Narboux (Eds.), New essays on Frege’s logical investigations (pp. 71–88). Nonada.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Basil Blackwell.
Hornsby, J. (1997). Truth: The identity theory. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 97, 1–24 https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545250
Künne, W. (2008). Frege on truths, truth and the true. Studia Philosophica Estonica, 1(1), 5–42. https://doi.org/10.12697/spe.2008.1.1.02
Landini, G. (2012). Frege’s notations: What they are and how they mean. Palgrave Macmillan.
Perrin, D., & Narboux, J.-P. (Eds.). (2020). New essays on Freg’s logical investigations. Nonada.
Ricketts, T., & Levine, J. (1996). Logic and Truth in Frege. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary volume, 70, 121–75.
Schmitt, R. (2003). Frege’s letters to Wittgenstein about the Tractatus. The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, 120, 13–31.
Sluga, H. (2007). Truth and the Imperfection of Language. In D. Greimann (Ed.), Essays on Frege's Conception of Truth (pp. 1–26). Brill.
Smid, J. (2014). Tarski’s one and only concept of truth. Synthese, 191(14), 3393–3406. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0450-1
Soames, S. (1998). Understanding truth. Oxford University Press.
Spinney, O. T. (2018). Priority and unity in Frege and Wittgenstein. Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 6(5), 1–25. https://jhaponline.org/
Tarski, A. (1944). The semantic conception of truth: And the foundations of semantics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 4(3), 341–376.
Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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.
About this article
Cite this article
Green, K. On Semantic and Ontic Truth. Acta Anal (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00574-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00574-z