Linguistic-Analytical Theories of Truth
摘要
The redundancy theory claims that there is no “problem of truth,” but rather that supposed problems of truth are based on linguistic confusion. Frank P. Ramsey illustrates this by explaining that sentences such as “It is true that Caesar was murdered” state nothing more than “Caesar was murdered.” The word “true” adds no additional information to the sentence and serves at most for emphasis or stylistic purposes. This view is not new and can already be found in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the nominalists of the late Middle Ages. Gottlob Frege expressed a similar view in 1892, emphasizing that the predicate “true” adds no new information to a statement. However, a problem arises when the word “true” appears in sentences like “Everything the Pope says is true.” Here, the word “true” cannot be eliminated without loss of meaning, since it refers to each individual statement of the Pope and thus describes a particular proposition. Ramsey’s approach to resolving this by transforming such sentences is not always clear and can lead to problems of interpretation. The prosentential theory of truth attempts to circumvent these problems by considering the word “true” as a prosentential, not as a predicate. Prosententials are dependent sentence units that refer to and repeat previous expressions in the sentence, similar to pronouns. This theory sees “true” as a fragment of a prosentential, which does not describe an independent property but merely refers to another part of the sentence. The disquotational theory of truth, advocated by philosophers such as Quine, states that “true” functions as a logical operator that points to the metalinguistic reference of a sentence. The word “true” enables us to make statements about statements and thus to move to a meta-level of language. This function is crucial for distinguishing between statement and statement content and makes possible fundamental concepts such as possibility, falsity, and conditionality in the first place.