Reikšmės teorija: žvilgsnis į tiesos problemą

Abstract

It is generally supposed that the two central questions addressed in the analytical tradition of the philosophy of language are: What is it for a word or a sentence to mean what it does? What is it for a statement to be true? Thence the need to make explicit the double" problem concerning the theoretical notions of meaning and truth and the necessity to analyse thoroughly the relationship between these notions. It is these issues that the present study aims at. So-called truth-conditional theories of meaning are entangled in certain intolerable contradictions and face insoluble difficulties due to a particular interpretation of the concept of truth. The explanation of meaning in terms of truth leads to the antinomy of the connection between meaning and truth. This is due to the fact that if we decide to specify the meaning of a sentence by stating the condition under which it is true, we are supposed to know in advance what is meant by saying "it is true", i. e. we must know the meaning of the term "true" and the point of its application. It is possi- ble to introduce a truth predicate into a language only if we have a prior understanding of that language. But if so, the concept of truth in a theory of meaning must appear pointless. One way to resolve, at least partly, the above- mentioned antinomy is to appeal to concepts which relate to our use of language, without simply approving of the extreme doctrine that meaning is use. The truth of a sentence should be distinguished from the grounds (evidence) upon which we might base a judgement as to its truth, so that the truth conditions of an individual sentence be treated as not identical with its assertibility conditions. The proposed concepts of evidence and assert- ibility are epistemic. They embody a regulative prin- ciple governing the notion of truth: If a statement is true, it must be in principle possible to know that it is true, that is, we must be able to recognize the sentence as true. The required notion is, therefore, that of verifiability. According to such conception, the meaning of a statement lies in the conditions of its verification and assertibility and is not deter- mined by truth conditions independent of the ground of assertion and the method of verification. A truth- conditional theory provides us with no explanation as to how the knowledge of truth conditions is delivered to the speaker. The advantage of a verificationist theory is that the condition for a statement being verified, unlike the condition for its truth, is one which we must be credited with in terms of our capacity for effectively recognizing when it obtains. Hence, there is no difficulty in stating what knowledge of such a condition consists of - it is directly displayed by our linguistic practice.