McDowell's identity conception of truth: a reply to Fish and Macdonald

Abstract

1. In my (1995) I argued that John McDowell adopts an identity concep tion of truth that turns out to be incoherent. Whilst McDowell clearly holds what he is now happy to call the 'the identity of true thinkables with facts' (2005: 87), I claimed then that his respective conceptions of facts and thinkables stymie his identity claim.1 Let me briefly explain why I thought this. We can start by focussing on the nature of facts. The centrepiece of McDowell's thinking on this matter is his commitment to 'a Tractarian conception of the world as everything that is the case' (1999: 93). For McDowell (1996: 27, 197), as for Wittgenstein (1922: ??1-1.1), the world is the totality of facts. But what, if anything, does McDowell's Tractarian conception of the world reveal about his view of facts' ontological nature? A tempting answer goes like this. If we read 'world' in a philosophically nuanced way (and not, for instance, merely as 'heavens and earth'2), then the world must be what Frege termed 'the realm of reference' (Gaskin 2006: 216).3 One of the roles philosophy assigns to the world is that of determining what we say and think as true or false; and if this right, then the world must be constituted by the things our thinkables are about. Consequently, if it is correct to attribute to McDowell such an identifica tion of the world with the realm of reference, then his Tractarian concep tion of the world thereby commits him to a Tractarian conception of facts: that is, an account that places facts on the level of reference along with objects and properties. The most natural way of spelling out such a conception is Wittgenstein's own: facts have objects and properties as their constituent parts (1922: ??2.011); objects and properties are combined in facts (1922: ??2.031).4 Now let us see what McDowell says about thinkables. Thinkables, for McDowell, are Fregean: they are combinations, not of objects and