[This is a guest post by Joel Katzav (University of Queensland)--ES]
The speculative philosopher Theodore de Laguna’s 1922 paper, ‘A Nominalistic Interpretation of Truth’ (NT)* is being published in English for the first time. NT is, as far as I know, the first extended defence of the deflationary view of truth; neither Frank P. Ramsey’s ‘Facts and Propositions’ (1927) nor analytic philosophy were the origin of it all (see here for NT, and here for a discussion of de Laguna’s theory of truth and its place in history). In what follows, however, I want to draw attention to how de Laguna’s deflationary theory of truth is related to other deflationary positions he articulates in NT, positions that depend on his view that the meaning of a word is given by its use. Analytic philosophers, it will become clear, did not even come close to inventing ordinary language philosophy. I also want to offer a partial explanation of why de Laguna, despite being a first-rate analyst, would have thought that analytic epistemology was muddled and, along with his wife, Grace de Laguna, never thought of analysis as more than a sideline; their epistemology was a speculative, evolutionary theory of judgment and had its conscious heritage in Absolute idealism, Darwinism and pragmatism.
(Theodore) de Laguna held (1915) that – and the terminology here is his – the meaning of words is given by their use. Further, anticipating views that ordinary language philosophers would develop decades later, he took philosophical problems relating to truth, existence, universals, identity and inclusion to arise from the misuse of natural language (2019). He notes that, in general, our utterances are susceptible to a variety of interpretations but that some of these interpretations easily become illegitimate in a way that generates philosophical confusion. Thus, for example,
John is good may be regarded as a statement about John, or about John's character, or about goodness; or it may be regarded as asserting a relation between John and goodness, which may be more explicitly expressed by saying that John possesses the quality in question, or that the quality inheres in him. This last mode of interpretation leads, to be sure, to certain difficulties which may raise a doubt as to whether it is strictly valid. For one thing, it points to an infinite regress of relations; for if there is a relation between John and goodness, is there not equally a relation between John and goodness on the one hand and the relation of possession on the other hand -- as appears when one says that the relation or possession connects John and goodness (2019).
And, similarly,
John is good is capable of still another interpretation -- one by which the proposition, as originally proposed, becomes the subject and receives as predicate the quality of truth: It is true that John is good. This predicate may be again applied to the proposition as thus reconstituted: It is true that it is true that John is good; and so on without limit. Here too, then, we have to do with an infinite regress; and we need scarcely recall the fact that the notion of truth is the basis of the family of paradoxes that are associated with the name of Epimenides (2019).
It is, unfortunately, only one deflationary view, namely that of truth, that de Laguna goes on fully to articulate. Here is a succinct statement of the core of his position on truth:
When the subject of the nature of truth is proposed for discussion, it appears to be assumed that truth has a nature -- that is to say, that there are a body of characteristic properties which universally distinguish true propositions from false. It is the object of the present paper to call in question that assumption, and to maintain that on the contrary truth, as such, has no nature; that there is no property whatsoever which is possessed by all true propositions and by no others; and, accordingly, that the problem of truth, as here proposed, is an illegitimate problem, the attempted solution of which can lead only to an endless circle of deception. Truth, in other words, is not a concept capable of clarification, but an idol of the market-place -- a mode of speech exalted to the position of a category (2019).
Interestingly, the concept of knowledge too is among the concepts that de Laguna is inclined to take a deflationary attitude towards. An obvious objection to the proposal that knowledge has no nature is that, at a minimum, knowledge has the property of being true (see, e.g., Prichard 2004). De Laguna, however, recognised that, if truth is not a property, then one cannot rightly claim that knowledge claims at least share the property of being true. So he had a ready response to the suggestion that the nature of knowledge includes, at least, the property of being true.
No less interesting is the fact that de Laguna, despite adopting a deflationary view of knowledge, continued to think of epistemology as central to philosophy. While he found the enterprise of providing analyses of knowledge to be a hopeless muddle, and while he and his wife were among the best analysts of their time and well ahead of their fellow non-speculative analysts in many ways (see here), analysis was for them a relatively unimportant sideline. They took the development of an empirical, evolutionary theory of judgement to be the central task of epistemology. Such a theory, on their view (1910), aims, in part, to uncover the (historical) origin of judgement, including how it evolved from simpler kinds of representations and how it developed into relatively complex forms of judgement such as those found in culture and science. An evolutionary epistemology also includes, on their view, a theory of the functional relationships between judgments and other kinds of mental phenomena (see here for more on their epistemology and how it outdoes Willard V. O. Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’).
*This can be found at Bryn Mawr College’s special collections archive.
References
De Laguna, T. and de Laguna, G. A. (1910) Dogmatism and Evolution: Studies in Modern Philosophy, the MacMillan Company.
De Laguna, T. (1915) ‘The Postulates of Deductive Logic’, The Journal of Philosophy, 12(9), pp. 225-236.
De Laguna, T. (2019) ‘A Nominalistic Interpretation of Truth', edited by J. Katzav, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, doi:10.1080/09608788.2019.1574107.
Katzav, J. (2019) 'Theodore de Laguna's Discovery of the Deflationary Theory of Truth', British Journal for the History of Philosophy, doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2019.01.001.
Prichard, D. (2004) ‘Epistemic deflationism’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, XLII, 104-134.
Ramsey, F. P. ‘Facts and Propositions’. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 7 (1927): 153–170.
From what I’ve read, the Bryn Mawr College archives should be a treasure trove of interesting material. But first people have to be persuaded to read the DeLaguna’s published work.
Posted by: Margaret Atherton | 02/08/2019 at 03:48 PM