Kevin Winters at his blog deals with the topic of what is truth. It's actually an important discussion that is often taken for granted. Kevin does a nice brief job introducing the topic, especially for non-philosophers. I just want to move a little beyond Heidegger's notion of truth as "to pluck something out of its concealment, to make manifest or reveal." Instead I want to turn to an other figure with a somewhat similar view, albeit writing quite a bit earlier and on an other continent. Peirce.
I call "truth" the predestinate opinion, by which I ought to have meant that which would ultimately prevail if investigation were carried sufficiently far in that particular direction." (EP 2:458)
Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth. . .
In the above we have considered positive scientific truth. But the same definitions equally hold in the normative sciences. If a moralist describes an ideal as the summum bonum, in the first place, the perfect truth of his statement requires that it should involve the confession that the perfect doctrine can neither be stated nor conceived. If, with that allowance, the future development of man's moral nature will only lead to a firmer satisfaction with the described ideal, the doctrine is true. (CP 5:565-566)
Now at first one won't quite see the exact similarity between Heidegger and Peirce on this matter. Yet both assert that truth is in an essential relationship with humans. (Dasein for Heidegger) Further total truth is an impossibility. It can't be conceived of nor stated. Truth, however, can't be discussed independent of the investigator. It is fundamentally a phenomena within time. It can be conceived of as a kind of process of unveiling. While we can speak of the ultimate end of this unveiling, we can do so only as an ideal. We always know but in part.
I don't want to go too much further, both due to time and inclination. I'd just note that truth often isn't taken in this fashion. It is divorced from what is called the hermeneutic circle. (The role of inquiry and interpretation in truth's nature) Frequently while our limited knowledge is given lip service, people assert truth as something fully finished, fully present, and in effect treat truth as a "thing." The degree to which they do this varies, but it ends up leading to many philosophical errors.
I've never understood why Ramsey's redundancy theory of truth hasn't put an end to this kind of speculation.
For those not up on Ramsey, he contributed to Russell and Whitehead's Principia project. His theory of truth was less a theory of truth than simply the claim that it is redundant to claim a proposition is true if one asserts it. i.e. assertion is more fundamental claim than truth. If eliminative materialism is the claim one ought stop talking about mind in philosophy of mind, then I suppose Ramsey's view might be the equivalent for truth. It is classed into views of truth generally characterized as deflationary. However I think Ramsey's view is actually somewhat different in a few regards and ends up closer to Peirce than I think David's comments might suggest.
Ramsey actually follows Peirce in many issues. With respect to belief, for instance, he treats belief and its strength in terms of the actions it results in. However while I'm no Ramsey expert, I believe that in this he follows James rather than Peirce's subtle but important differences. Thus he sees this pragmatic development of belief as ultimately undeveloped whereas I think in Peirce it is very developed.
The reason this is important is because talking of the truth of a proposition is redundant for Ramsey only because of his pragmatic conception of believing a proposition. i.e. to assert p entails believing p which only makes sense in terms of the consequences of p which include what we'd call its truth. (Although for Ramsey this is its utility)
I'm afraid I'm just too ignorant to say much beyond this, except that it seems like Ramsey ends up heading too far in the caricature of James that one often finds described. I think Peircean pragmaticism offers important ways to avoid this problem of truth as what works. (Although to be fair, Ramsey, I believe, distinguishes between what really is useful and what we think is useful)
As an interesting aside, the pragmatic character of Wittgenstein is generally believed to come from Ramsey who gave Wittgenstein a lot of Peirce's ideas. The following paper from Arisbe (the Peirce site on my sidebar) has a pretty good paper on this. "Scholarship on the Relations Between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles S. Peirce"
Perhaps it'll make Keith happy as he is always after me to read up on Wittgenstein more. (grin)
By the way, for those interested, Ramsey's "Truth and Probability" which mentions Peirce a lot is available online. His whole discussion of habit is entirely lifted from Peirce.
Yours is definitely the pragmatic interpretation of Ramsey, and you've included his approach to knowledge. I take the basic import of the Redundancy Theory of Truth is that all questions of truth are reducible to questions of knowledge or belief. This reduction of metaphysics to epistemology sits quite well with those of a positivist tendency (why does that word keep coming up with me?).
His basic argument is that saying "It is true that London is the capitol of England" is the same as saying "London is the capital of England" and "It is false that Oxford is the capital of England" is the same as "Oxford is not the capital of England." Moreover, it is nonsense to say "I know that Oxford is the capital of England, but I also know that this is false." He concludes that questions of truth are all questions of knowledge or belief. Which theory of knowledge one inserts is up to the individual. Ramsey has his own theory of knowledge, but his theory of truth functions independently of it.
Also, this also works nicely with an epistemological approach to Tarski's T-sentences. Whether one takes these to be truth conditions or meaning conditions, a metaphysical explanation is not called for.
I'm certainly sympathetic with reducing truth to belief - as I think Peirce ends up doing. However I'm afraid I don't see how this in the least reduces metaphysics to epistemology.
Just a couple of quite additions to those last comments. The reason I find this "as epistemology" problematic might be due to ignorance of Ramsey's views on epistemology. I know he was basically a proto-reliabilist. In other words a person is justified in knowledge if they rely on a reliable process for believing. However I believe that typically this is thought of relative to justification and not total epistemology. Thus the objection that a process for belief can be reliable but result in untrue beliefs.
I believe Peirce's rather thorough-going fallibilism avoids this problem (assuming I have Ramsey right - as I said I'm not that up on the details of his thought.)
I don’t agree with Ramsey’s epistemology myself, and I consider this to be an area of his thought that he didn’t fully developed (he died very young, of course). But the redundancy theory actually jettisons any role of a metaphysical truth theory, and it does so independent of any epistemological outlook. Thus, it does equally good service for (say) late Russell’s, Ayer’s, and Carnap’s epistemologies (though I must admit that it’s a little odd to think of Russellian epistemology absent his correspondence theory of truth).
You bring up Peirce’s “thorough-going fallibilism” in contrast to reliablism. Is it that you find reliablism not to be fallibilistic? Reliablism is basically an attempt to defend the old-fashioned notion that knowledge is “justified true belief” from the onslaught of critique’s like that of Gettier.
Just to note, I'm a thorough going externalist. I've also been pretty well convinced by Williamson that knowledge is a unique mental state. So I do tend to discount the traditional way epistemology was conducted. As for Peirce, he really doesn't discuss knowledge much, except in a very loose sense. To him what counts is belief, fixing our beliefs, and making our ideas clear.
The clarification about metaphysics was helpful though. I thought you meant metaphysics in general but you really just meant a metaphysical truth theory.
An other problem, and this was more what I was getting at, is that I just don't see how it makes sense to discuss reliabilism without a notion of truth. It doesn't seem to accomplish much as it begs the question of what it means to be reliable. From what little I've read about Ramsey he'd tie this to whether something works in terms of the effects the belief has. i.e. reliabilism isn't taken the way say Alston takes it but more in the sense of usefulness.
You seem to want to take him as not being that pragmatic. But I'm not quite sure how that whole approach works without a more Jamesian view of pragmatism.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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