Chap31 Lynch a Functionalist Theory of Truth

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31A Functionalist Theory of Truth

Michael P. Lynch

To copy a reality is, indeed, one very important way of agreeing with it, but it isfar from being essential.

William James

The question is not whether [``true'' and ``false''] are in practice applied to ethicalstatements, but whether, if they are so applied, the point of doing so would be thesame as the point of applying them to statements of other kinds, and if not, inwhat ways it would be different.

Michael Dummett

The history of attempts to identify the property that all and only true

propositions have in common has not been a happy one. Traditional

theories that aim to provide us with the essence of truthcorrespondence,

coherence, pragmatist, and so oneach face well-known difculties that

prevent their advocates from striking their tents and declaring victory.

Indeed, it is just these problems that deationists point to when arguing

that it is best to simply abandon robust theories and admit that truth has

no underlying nature.1

This lack of success in explaining the nature of truth is doubtless due

to a number of causes, not the least of which is the difculty of the sub-

ject. But when I look back over the various attemptsmany of which are

represented in this volumeI see a particular pattern of failure. Baldly

put, that pattern goes something like this. A theory of truth is proposed

and argued for by appeal to propositions of a certain domain, the truth

of which the theory seems to explain quite nicely. The theory is then

extended to cover propositions of every domain. But this extension runs

up against counterexamples; that is, the theory does not explain how

propositions from certain domains can be true.

Consider how this problem of scope arises for a popular form of the

correspondence theory. That theory understands the correspondence

relation in terms of the referential/causal properties of a proposition's

constituents.2 The proposition that the book is on the table is true in

virtue of its components being causally/referentially related to certain

mind-independent objectsa particular book and a particular table. But

as plausible as this account may be when applied to propositions about

middle-sized dry goods, it is much less plausible when applied to propo-

sitions about numbers, such as the proposition that the number six is

even. Whatever else numbers might be, they presumably are not physical

objects. No number is ever in causal contact with our thought. Thus

our thought that the number six is even can't be true in virtue of a causal

relationship between its components and the number six. Or consider

propositions like those we hear on the nightly news about the status of

the economy or the constitutionality of particular laws. Some of these

propositions are true. But economies and laws are dubious candidates

for physical, causally efcacious objects. Further, far from being mind-

independent, economies and laws are paradigmatically conventional.

Thus it is a puzzle how propositions about them can be understood in

terms of correspondence with mind-independent objects.

I bring up the causal theory of correspondence only as an example. In

my view, similar problems of scope await other traditional theories of

truth as well.3 Epistemic theories are notoriously unable to explain the

truth of propositions about humanly inaccessible parts of the universe or

about the past. A theory that denes truth in terms of what would be

justiedly believed cannot explain how the proposition that the number

of the stars in the universe right now is odd can even have a truth value.

Even the deationary view of truth faces this problem of scope. This may

be a bit surprising because one might think that deationism would not

have a problem explaining the metaphysical nature of truth. After all, the

core of the position is that truth has no nature. Yet this itself is a meta-

physical position (see Devitt, chap. 25), and if deationism is to succeed

as its advocates wish, it must be equally plausible in every domain. Yet as

several essays in this volume reveal, deationary views face their own

problems explaining our commitment to certain classes of propositions

blind ascriptions of truth, generalizations involving the concept of

724 Michael P. Lynch

truth, and indeterminately true propositions, to name just three examples

(see Gupta, chap. 23, and Field 1997).4

Proponents of both robust and deationary theories will protest that

there are responses available to these problems. And, of course, there are.

I shall not argue here that each set of counterexamples is insurmount-

able. Rather, I note that two facts stand out when looking at all these

problems together. First, each traditional theory of truth is more plausi-

ble in some domains than in others. Second, all of the theories mentioned

are assuming that the question ``What is truth?'' has a single answer. In

other words, most of the players in the contemporary debate over truth

share an unnoticed allegiance to a certain type of monism: truth has but

one underlying natureif any nature at all.

Once these facts are noticed, it is hard not to see them as related.

Therefore, it seems relevant to reconsider our commitment to this alethic

monism. At the very least, it seems important to think through possible

alternatives. A further reason for pursuing this course is that the monism

that comes so naturally to philosophers runs contrary to the way most

other people think about truth. Most folks think that different sorts of

propositions can be true without being true in the same way. Their intu-

itive thought is that moral or legal propositions can be true all right; it is

just that their truth is of a different kind than that of propositions like the

cat is on the mat. Such considerations are not decisive, but they suggest

that alethic monism is an artifact of philosophical theory, not a result of

ordinary practice.

Until recently, discussions that questioned alethic monism were absent

from the contemporary literature. But the subject has been broached by

several philosophers in the last few years, most notably by Crispin

Wright: ``The proposal is simply that any predicate that exhibits certain

very general features qualies, just on that account, as a truth predicate.

That is quite consistent . . . with acknowledging that there is a prospect of

pluralismthat the more there is to say may well vary from discourse to

discourse'' (Wright, 1992, p. 38). The general features Wright is talking

about here are what he calls ``platitudes,'' or a set of a priori principles,

about the concept of truth. These include the principles that the propo-

sition that p is true if and only if p, that truth is distinct from justication,

that truth is timeless, and so on. In his original statement of the view,

A Functionalist Theory of Truth 725

Wright argued that any predicate that satises a minimal set of these

platitudes qualies as a truth predicate. But in some discourses, the truth

predicate may have more robust content, depending on the types of

additional platitudes about truth that the discourse brings along in its

wake. In short, Wright's view allows for the possibility that there may be

different kinds of truth.

In recent essays, both Hilary Putnam and Terry Horgan have also

entertained this idea (e.g., Putnam, chap. 30; Horgan, chap. 4).5 Most

philosophers, however, continue to look askance at the suggestion that

truth itself might come in different kinds. Different kinds of truths

(propositions), yes; different kinds of truth, no. The prevailing thought

seems to be that even if the nonphilosopher might sometimes talk as if

she thought moral truth was of a different kind than physical truth, this is

not a claim we should take seriously; such talk is just that: talk.

One reason for this skepticism is that a plurality of kinds of truth

seems to imply a plurality of truth concepts. And a plurality of truth

concepts entails that the word ``true'' is ambiguous.

The worry is a real one. The ambiguity of truth would have several

ill consequences. First, it would undermine one of the most useful and

important functions of the truth concept. As is often remarked, our

concept of truth allows us to generalize ``blindly'' over propositions of all

sorts, as in ``Everything Socrates said was true.'' If the word ``true'' were

ambiguous in the way that ``bank'' or ``step'' happen to beif its meaning

completely changes from context to contextthen attempts to ascribe

truth to everything Socrates ever said, no matter what the context, would

be impossible. Yet clearly we can generalize over propositions in this

way, and hence truth must not be ambiguous.

Second, the equivocality of truth would make validity and logical

inference mysterious. Instances of valid argument forms whose premises

are mixed, i.e., whose premises stem from different discourses, would end

up equivocating (see Sainsbury 1996). Consider a simple argument:

If violence causes pain, then it is wrong.

Violence does cause pain.

Therefore, violence is wrong.


This is obviously valid; its premises are truth-preserving. Yet its second

premise is a descriptive statement about cause and effect relations in the

world, while its conclusion is a moral evaluation. Were the ambiguity

thesis to hold with regard truth, these statements could be true in com-

pletely different senses; they could literally have different properties, each

expressible by the predicate ``true.'' The argument might no longer ``pre-

serve'' a single property at all.

In my view, these considerations suggest that our semantic or concep-

tual account of truth must be uniform across context.6 But it does not

imply, I shall argue, that our account of the deep nature of truth must be

similarly uniform. We can be monists about the concept of truth while

being pluralists about its underlying nature. The key is to see the concept

of truth as the concept of a multiply realizable property.7

1 Truth as a Functional Concept: A First Pass

In the philosophy of mind, it is common to the point of dogma to say that

mental states are functional states. A particular mental state such as pain,

or the belief that it will rain, is the state that it is in virtue of the func-

tional role it has within our overall cognitive system. But what realizes or

plays that role in any particular organism may vary: mental states are

therefore said to be ``multiply realizable.''

The terms ``function'' and ``functional role'' mean different things to

different people.8 In the general and intuitive sense I am concerned with,

a function is a type of job. To occupy a functional role is therefore to

satisfy a certain job description. Consequently, a functional concept is

the concept of a property, state, or object that occupies or plays such a

role. So for example, being a head of state, being a carburetor, and being

a heart are all functional concepts in my sense. A heart is anything that

has the function of pumping the blood throughout the body of an organ-

ism, and various structures, organic and inorganic, might play or ``real-

ize'' this role within some particular cardiovascular system. Indeed, the

underlying nature of what plays the heart role in a given system can be

quite different in different organisms. But it is the underlying nature of

whatever plays that role that explains the performance of that function.


As an intuition pump, consider one of our most basic platitudes about

truth: a proposition is true when the world is as that proposition says

that it is. This platitude (and its more formal brethren, the disquotational

and equivalence schemata) captures something about the very essence of

truth. Yet paradoxically, it tells us nothing specic about that essence.

Robust theorists take platitudes of this sort as the starting point in any

theory of truth, a minimum requirement that every theory must meet,

while deationists take it to be the end of any such theory. Both attitudes

overlook a subtly different way of understanding the main lesson of the

platitude. Rather than attempting to read it as the key to truth's deep

metaphysical nature (or lack thereof), we can understand our platitude

as specifying truth's ``job'' in our conceptual schemeits functional role.

We can understand it as telling us that our concept of truth is the concept

of whatever property a proposition has when the world is as that prop-

osition says that it is. Roughly speaking, ``saying it like it is'' is part of the

functional role of true propositions, and propositions that do so (and

also fulll various other conditions, as we shall see) have the property of

truth.

Consider another analogy.9 The position of head of state is found in

almost every constituted government. It is held by presidents, prime

ministers, kings, queens and even religious gures, all of whom are head

of state in virtue of performing a certain job, namely, being the chief

executive ofcer for the government. This job will vary from country to

country in some respects (although it will remain constant in others), and

individual heads of state may have properties that others do not have

(such as being elected, which is true of presidents and popes but not of

most kings). And yet when we say that both Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton

are heads of state, we are not equivocating. They simply perform or realize

the functional role of being a head of state differently. In the same sense,

for the functionalist about truth, truth talk is not equivocal, because the

concept of truth is everywhere understood as naming a particular func-

tional role. Nonetheless, what realizes that role may vary from context to

context.

Much more needs to be said, of course, to make sense of this idea. But

we can already see that a functionalist theory of truth will leave room

for the possibility that in the case of propositions about middle-sized dry


goods, the claim that a is F may be true in virtue of the referential prop-

erties of that claim. Causally understood correspondence relations might

realize the functional role of truth in such cases. Yet the functionalist

account could also allow a different propertycoherence with other

propositions, for instanceto occupy the role of saying how things are

in other contexts. Functionalism about truth is therefore consistent with

alethic pluralism at the deep metaphysical level: the underlying nature of

what realizes truth in any particular mode of thought is still an open

question.

If the concept of truth can be seen as naming a functional role, we

should be able to specify that role in an informative way. Doing so is the

goal of the next section.

2 The Alethic Network and the Role of Truth

According to what is often called ``commonsense'' functionalism, mental

concepts such as belief and desire come together in a package deal. Like

the concepts of solider/army and teacher/student, they apply together or

not at all (Armstrong 1999, 84). These concepts are not individuated one

by one but by their place in the network of interrelated psychological

generalizations that make up our commonsense psychology, or ``the psy-

chological platitudes which are common knowledge among usevery

one knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so

on'' (Lewis 1972, 208). These and an indenite number of other such

platitudes jointly carve out the causal roles of our mental states. If we

take the mental state of pain, for example, the relevant platitudes will

include such chestnuts as ``People who are in great pain are usually not

happy about it,'' ``One is typically aware of one's pain,'' and ``A threat of

pain typically causes fear.'' String such platitudes together and we have a

job description for pain, namely, that pain is a state that is typically

causally related to certain inputs, outputs, and other mental states. The

concept of pain will therefore apply to any property or state that ts this

job description, that realizes this causal role. As Lewis says, a mental

concept is ``the concept of a member of a system of states that together

more or less realize the pattern of causal generalizations set forth in

commonsense psychology'' (1980, 112). So the concept of pain, on this


account, is the concept of the state that more or less realizes the role of

pain in our psychology, and whatever state does realize that role is pain.

A similar model helps us understand our concept of truth. Like our

psychological concepts, what we might call our alethic concepts, or con-

cepts like truth, fact, proposition, and reference, package-deal concepts.

It has long been recognized that concepts like proposition and fact are

denable only in terms of each other: a proposition is whatever is true or

false, a fact is what makes propositions true, true propositions t the

facts, and so on. The fact that these sorts of concepts form such a tight-

knit family is part of what needs to be explained by any theory of truth.

Adopting a functionalist perspective on these concepts does just that. Just

as our psychological concepts are denable in terms of their roles in a

network of interrelated psychological platitudes, so the common-sense

set of principles and platitudes that together constitute our having a

robust sense of the true and the real form the alethic network. Some of

the most central of these principles are the following:

. The proposition that p is true if and only if p.

. The proposition that p is false if and only if it is not the case that p.

. Propositions are what are true and false.

. Every proposition has a negation.

. A proposition can be justied but not true, and true but not justied.

. True propositions represent, or correspond to, the facts, and false onesdo not.. Facts are what make propositions true.

Crispin Wright (chap. 32) suggests that platitudes of this sort can be taken

to compose what he calls an ``analytic theory'' of truth. On his account,

these principles jointly determine the meaning of the word ``true'' without

providing necessary and sufcient conditions for the application of the

term.

Like Wright, the functionalist sees such principles as constituting our

grasp of the concept of truth. But there are also some interesting differ-

ences between Wright's view and an explicitly functionalist theory. First,

it is important to see that on the functionalist account, these and other

alethic principles aren't simply a list. They form a structure. In the phi-

losophy of mind, the relevant principles can be divided into those that


primarily concern the inputs and outputs of the system (typically, sensa-

tions and behavior, respectively), and those that concern relations between

the mental states themselves. Not all of the principles involved need fall

neatly into one category or another, although most will, and not all

mental states need be functionally dened, although most will. Similarly,

some alethic platitudes will primarily concern the relationship between

truth and other closely connected core notions (fact, proposition), while

some relate these concepts to those that are intuitively farther outside

these core concepts. As an example of the latter, consider the following:

. To claim that p is true implies that one believes that p.

. One knows that p only if it is true that p.

. Honest people typically speak the truth.

. Deliberately asserting what you know to be false is a lie.

Relative to core platitudes concerning truth and fact, principles like the

above serve to relate the core concepts to others in our overall cognitive

system. Again, it need not be entirely clear how ``central'' a platitude is,

or whether it primarily concerns relating alethic concepts to nonalethic

concepts. Here, like everywhere else, types of concepts shade off into one

another. And while central alethic concepts will be functionally under-

stood, it will remain an open question whether concepts further removed

from the center (concepts like knowledge, for example) will also be

functionally dened.

In the case of human psychology, most of the platitudes will be causal

in nature (e.g., ``Pain causes worry''). But not all will be. Others, like ``A

toothache is a type of pain,'' will be quasi-logical. With regard to alethic

terms, this order is reversed: one would suspect that most of the alethic

principles would be quasi-logical, although there is nothing to rule out

the possibility that some may also be causal.10

If we grant the existence of the alethic network as a whole, we can

characterize each of the alethic concepts in terms of the role it plays

within the network. This is a second way in which the functional account

of truth differs from Wright's analytic theory. Since truth, fact, proposi-

tion, etc., are explicitly package-deal concepts according to functional-

ism, the same platitudes that demarcate our concept of truth will also

demarcate our other alethic concepts. In short, we can take a core alethic


concept as the member of a system of properties that together realize the

interlinked structure of platitudes partially set forth above. Thus truth,

for example, can be seen as whatever property plays the role demarcated

by the associated principles and platitudesthe truth role, in other

words. Other central members of that system will similarly be function-

ally understood. Propositions are whatever is true or false, whatever is

asserted or denied, that which can take the place of the unquoted vari-

able in `` `p' says that p,'' and so on. Similarly, we can understand a fact

as whatever makes a proposition true, as conforming to the schema `Ìt is

a fact that p if and only if p'' etc.

The functionalist can spell this out in greater detail, and with much

more rigor, by employing F. P. Ramsey's and David Lewis's method for

dening theoretical terms (see Lewis 1970). This method treats the term

(or concept) being dened as if it were a new term being introduced into

an ongoing scientic theory. To employ the method here, we would rst

form a conjunction of all, or some weighted subset, of the commonsense

or ``folk'' platitudes about truth and related concepts in our network, A.

This conjunction will include both T terms and O terms. T terms are the

names for properties with unspecied natures that the theory is being

used to introduce or dene, in this case, terms like ``true'' or ``fact.'' O

terms are the terms in the `òld,'' introducing vocabulary, such as

``cause,'' `òbject,'' ``person,'' ``snow,'' and so on. To make things easier,

we'll stipulate that each T predicate explicitly represents a property (so

that, e.g., ``x is true'' becomes ``x has the property of being true''). We

can then imagine A being written down in one long sentence roughly like

this:

AT1; . . . ;Tn;O1; . . . ;OnThe next step is to replace the T terms (but not the O terms) with vari-

ables, and then to prex an existential quantier for each variable. The

result is the modied ``Ramsey sentence'' of A. If ``t1'' is a variable

standing in for ``true,'' then the modied Ramsey sentence of A could be

used to dene ``true'' roughly as follows:

(FT) x is true,df bt1; . . . ; btnAt1; . . . ; tn;O1; . . . ;On & x has t1This says that x (a proposition, say) is true just when there are certain

alethic properties t1; . . . ; tn that are related among themselves as well to


nonalethic properties as specied in A and ``x has t1.'' By functionally

dening the word ``true,'' (FT) gives us a way of understanding the con-

cept of truth according to which a proposition is true just in case it has a

property that plays the truth role marked out in A. Further, (FT) reveals

that the identity of every alethic concept depends on its relation to every

other concept; in a sense, we dene each concept not one by one but all

at once, or en masse. That is, we dene every alethic concept in terms of

having a property that uniquely bears certain relations to the other

properties expressed by our alethic concepts and to the referents of the O

terms.

So, to be true is to play the truth role. But functionalism allows that

this role might be realized or occupied by different properties. We can say

that a property realizes the truth role for a discourse just when it is the

unique realizer (or near perfect realizer; see below) of that role for the

propositions that compose the discourse. Thus propositions from two

different discourses may have distinct properties that realize the truth

role. Naturally enough, how one understands the nature of a particular

discourse will determine which property, if any, one takes as uniquely

playing the truth role for that discourse. For example, if one understands

moral propositions to be about the subjective feelings of the speaker,

then this metaphysical position will rule out moral propositions' being

true in virtue of their relation to mind-independent facts. As we will

shortly see with the case of legal discourse, one's overall metaphysical

views provide a collection of a priori constraints or conditions on the

realization of truth for that discourse. But functionalism itself remains

neutral on just what these constraints will be.

We should not expect there to be a sharp and clear line between dis-

courses or forms of thought. In ordinary life, we know the difference

between talking about physics and talking about ethics. But sometimes

we may say things that don't clearly fall into either category, as we might

if we were involved in a discussion about the ethical consequences of cer-

tain physical experiments for instance. It follows that we should expect

some vagueness as to what discourse a particular proposition belongs.

But I don't need to know what discourse I am engaging in to know what

I mean when I say that something is true. According to the functionalist

view, it is a fact about the concept of truth that no matter what discourse


I may happen to be engaged in, what I say will be true just when it has

a property that plays the truth role for that discourse. If what I say,

the proposition I express, is not clearly a member of one discourse or

another, how its truth is realized will also be unclear. But that is a ques-

tion for deep metaphysicsnot something I need to know in order to

understand what I mean by the word ``true.''

A functional characterization of the alethic concepts ts well with

our holist intuitions about concepts like truth and fact. Because of their

obviously interconnected nature, we learn such concepts not one by one

but more or less all at once, as the functionalist theory implies. This is

really no more mysterious than learning a complex skill like riding a

bicycle (Heil 1998, 102). Acquiring this skill requires the coordination of

a whole set of tinier skillsbalancing, pedaling, steering, etc.none of

which are learned in isolation. You learn to master one as you come to

master another, and vice versa. The alethic concepts are similar in this

respect. Here as elsewhere, ``light dawns gradually over the whole''

(Wittgenstein 1969, sec. 141).

So far we've seen how (FT) explicates the concept of truth. But we also

want to know what truth is, or about the property of truth. Those

familiar with the debates over psychological functionalism know that we

face a choice at this point. Functionalist theories in the philosophy of

mind differ over whether to take mental properties as identical to the role

properties or the realizer properties. The rst alternative sees any given

mental property as a ``higher-order'' property, or the property of having

a property that plays a certain causal role; the second identies properties

with the ``rst-order'' properties, or properties that realize that causal

role in a system. In the same vein, we must choose between saying that

the property of truth is the higher-order property of having a property

that plays the truth role and saying that it is identical to the lower-order

property that realizes that role in a particular discourse.

There are two reasons to prefer the former alternative when it comes

to truth. First, to identify truth with its realizer property in some context

(coherence, correspondence or whatever it might turn out to be) would

immediately raise the ugly problem of ambiguity. Should it turn out that

the truth role is realized by different properties in different contexts, we

would no longer be able to talk of truth simpliciter but only of moral


truth, mathematical truth, physical truth, and so on. Second, truth is our

chief cognitive goal. We want our beliefs to be coherent, or to correspond

to fact, because we want them to be true, not the other way around. But

this means that in cognition we are aiming at truth itself, not the prop-

erties that exemplify or realize it. Therefore, we should take truth itself as

the higher-order or role property.

If we do so, then we can still be pluralists about the realizer properties

of truth but without any threat of ambiguity. This means that by adopt-

ing functionalism, the alethic pluralist can explain universally applicable

concepts like validity as well as can the alethic monist. Valid inference

preserves truth. According to functionalism, truth is a higher-order

functional property. Therefore, on the functionalist account, valid infer-

ence preserves that higher-order property. Of course, what makes this or

that premise true (what realizes its truth) may be quite different from

what constitutes or realizes the truth of the conclusion. But that is a

question of deep metaphysics, not a formal, conceptual concern.

By acknowledging that truth is always and everywhere the property of

playing the truth role, functionalism is not abandoning pluralism. Con-

sider the case of a mental state like pain. According to functionalist

accounts that take pain as a (higher-order) role property, there is indeed

a sense in which the nature of pain is uniform across species. This is

because, by and large, the pain role is uniform across species. But

explaining the pain role does not explain what pain is in a more funda-

mental sense. It does not explain how that function is performed in a par-

ticular organism. For that, we must look to the details of the organism's

neuronal structure: we must look for the lower-level property that real-

izes the pain role. In the same way, the functional role of truth does not

explain how that role is lled in a particular discourse. For the underly-

ing nature of truth, we must look to the details of the type of thought in

question.

3 A (Brief) Case in Point: Juridical Truth

Let us consider a type of thought where the underlying nature of truth is

plausibly other than correspondence with mind-independent facts. The

domain in question is the law, or juridical truth. I emphasize that the


discussion will be extremely rough. My overall concern isn't with the

nature of juridical truth itself. In this paper, juridical propositions are an

example to aid in spelling out my main concern: the abstract structure of

a functionalist theory.

When I write ``juridical propositions,'' I have in mind what Ronald

Dworkin calls ``propositions of law'' or ``all the various statements and

claims people make about what the law allows or prohibits or entitles

them to have'' (1986, 4). This includes both general claims, such as the

proposition that segregation is illegal or that the law protects ag burn-

ing, and specic propositions, e.g., that Exxon must compensate Alaska

for an oil spill. Propositions like this are surely capable of being true. We

assume that in most cases, ag burning is or isn't protected under the law

and that Exxon either is or is not required to pay compensation.

In a platitudinous sense, juridical propositions like these will be true

when they correspond to the facts, tell it like it is, and so on. But in

this case, it seems unwise to read the platitude as picking out a substan-

tive metaphysical relation between propositions and mind-independent

objects. Laws and legal entities are in some sense conventional; they are

human constructs. But this hardly means that propositions of law are

incapable of being true or false. It means only that it is unlikely that they

are true in virtue of referential relations with mind-independent objects

and properties. It is innitely more plausible that, as Dworkin notes,

``propositions of law are true or false (or neither) in virtue of other, more

familiar kinds of propositions of which these propositions of law are (as

we might put it) parasitic. These more familiar propositions furnish . . .

the `grounds' of law'' (1986, 4).

Dworkin's point is that legal propositions are naturally thought of

as true because of their relation to other ``grounding'' propositions, not

because they correspond to mind-independent objects called ``laws'' (or

worse, ``The Law''). Of course, just what is included within the grounds

what types of propositions, in other words, make propositions about

the law trueis a matter of serious dispute. But at the very least, they

include those propositions expressed in the Constitution, previous stat-

utes, and past judicial decisions. It is these sorts of propositions that

we think matter for whether it is true that a particular corporation is


required to pay compensation. Collectively, we might refer to them as the

body of law.

This suggests a particular way of thinking about purely legal truth.

Roughly, we think that a proposition of law is true when it coheres with

its immediate grounds and with the grounds of propositions inferentially

connected to it. In short, legal truth consists in coherence with the body

of law.

A virtue of the functionalist theory is that it helps to explain this intu-

itive thought. Without the functionalist theory, the idea that legal truth

consists in coherence with the body of law would seem to raise the ugly

ambiguity problem. But with a functionalist story of truth in place, we

can say that when it comes to propositions of law, the truth role is real-

ized by a coherence relation of some sort. The fact that purely legal

propositions concern conventional, mind-dependent matters does not

mean that they are not really true or that they have a second-class status,

but only that their truth is realized by a property different than what

realizes truth about the physical world.

Of course, what it means for a proposition to cohere with the body of

law would be (were this proposal worked out) a matter for substantive

metaphysical inquiry. One question concerns the strength of the coher-

ence relation involved. For example, for it to be true that ag burning is

protected under the law, is it enough that this proposition cohere with

the body of the law now? Or, weaker still, would it be enough that it was

presently believed to cohere with the body of law? The latter certainly

seems too weak. We need to allow room for mistakes about the lawfor

objectivity, in other words. One suggestion would be to understand

juridical truth along the lines of what Wright calls ``superassertibility.'' A

proposition is superassertible when it is ``justied by some accessible

state of information and will continue to be so justied no matter how

that state of information is improved'' (1999, 236). In other words, to be

superassertible is to be durably justied without defeaters. Roughly,

Wright's view (1999, 228; see also this volume, chap. 32) is that super-

assertibility is a legitimate realizer of the ``truth concept'' for a class of

propositions when those propositions are knowable and when evidence

for or against such propositions is (in principle, at least) always accessi-

ble (1999, 236). These conditions seem to be met by legal truth. It is a


priori that legal truths are all knowable. It would be absurd to think that

certain actions could be illegal without anyone even being capable of

determining that they are. Second, the states of information that bear on

the truth of juridical propositions, such as the empirical facts and the

written laws themselves, are accessible to human investigationat least

in principle. Thus perhaps what makes a proposition of law true is that it

durably or continually coheres with the body of the law. If so, then what

is believed to be legal or illegaleven by a judge or the entire legal

communitymay not be. In short, juridical truth might turn out to be

realized by ``supercoherence'' with the body of law, where a proposition

can fail to have this property even if it coheres with the law in the short

run, or coheres with judicial decisions that are later overturned.11

Much more would have to be said to make the case that juridical truth

is realized by either coherence or supercoherence with a body of law. But

I won't be saying it here. I mention it simply as an illustration of what it

would be for truth to be realized by something other than correspon-

dence with mind-independent fact.

4 A Note on Realization

Denitions like (FT) allow for multiple realization: in different contexts,

different properties may occupy the functional role it describes. Yet (FT)

describes that role in terms of the conjunction of all the alethic platitudes.

If so, then one might wonder how any sort of epistemic property like

supercoherence could play that role. For one may well think that one of

our alethic platitudes is that every proposition is either true or false.12

But it is a matter of serious dispute (see, e.g., Dworkin, 1986, 37 ff.)

whether this platitude applies in the legal case. Further, one might think

that if legal truth is a matter of coherence or supercoherence, then there

may be juridical propositions that are neither completely true nor com-

pletely false. Perhaps there are cases where a proposition is neither super-

coherent nor not supercoherent with a given body of law, because all

possible evidence would fail to determine the matter. In any event, if such

cases are possible and if juridical truth is realized by supercoherence,

then not every juridical proposition need be determinately true or false.

But how could this be if (FT) implies that whatever plays the truth role


must satisfy all alethic platitudes? The worry, in short, concerns how

(FT) could be realized by such different types of propositions.

The solution is to see that a putative realizer property needn't satisfy

every last one of the platitudes in A in order to count as realizing the

truth role. After all, sophisticated functionalists in the philosophy of

mind (those of the commonsense or analytical sort that we've been dis-

cussing) have long acknowledged that there might not be any single

neural property that perfectly satises every folk-psychological platitude

connected with pain (e.g., Lewis 1972). Indeed, it would be surprising if

the world was so accommodating of our folk intuitions. It seems much

more sensible, both in the alethic and psychological cases, to count prop-

erties that are nearly perfect in realizing the role in question as realizers

of that role.

Recall that a functional role is a job, and (FT) is a job description.

Suppose that we were wondering who was doing a certain job in a big

company. It could turn out that no one person could fulll management's

written job description more than slightly. No one would then be doing

that job. Or it could turn out that two or more people were each doing

various aspects of the job, in which case, again, no one person would

have that job. Or it could turn out that while no one could do every aspect

of the job in that company, one person was in fact doing 90 percent of

the job. In that case, no one was doing the job perfectly, but the job was

getting done.

In the same fashion, we can allow that while there may be no perfect

realizer in a discourse of the role marked out by (FT), there may be a

property that is a near perfect realizer of that role in that discourse. In

such cases, we can take whatever property uniquely fullls the truth role

near enough to be the property of truth in that discourse. If there is no

property that comes close to realizing the role in the context, or if there

are two or more properties that equally fulll the role in that context, the

discourse in question will remain unalethic.

Of course, what counts as ``near enough'' may be rather difcult to

pin down precisely. Clearly, a property's fullling all but one of the

platitudes in (FT) would seem to be near enough. Yet it seems reasonable

to hold that the principles that comprise the alethic network may have

different weight or importance within that network. Relatively central


principles like the equivalence schema or the idea that a proposition can

be justied but not true will likely receive more weight than, e.g., the

intuition that it is propositions that are true or false. Thus it may be that

satisfying many of the heavily weighted principles will count more than

satisfying all of the less heavily weighted ones. If this amendment is

allowed, and there seems no reason why it shouldn't be, one can give

truth a functional denition in terms of the total set of alethic platitudes

but still allow that looser forms of thought can be true or false.

5 Objections

In discussing functionalism with other philosophers, I sometimes en-

counter puzzlement over how this theory differs from minimalism or

deationism about truth. I suspect that the main cause of this puzzlement

is that the typical deationist, like the functionalist, rejects the traditional

correspondence and coherence accounts of truth. Further, the reasons

given for this rejection are often similar, e.g., that the traditional theories

fail to explain what truth is across the board (see, e.g., Horwich 1998,

12). Nonetheless, the lessons that minimalists draw from the failure of

the traditional theories are quite different from those drawn by the func-

tionalist. From the fact that the traditional theories can't explain how

truth can have the same nature in every discourse, minimalists conclude

that truth has no nature. This is often put by saying that the word ``true''

fails to express a genuine or substantive property of propositions. In

contrast, the functionalist holds that truth does have a nature, and that

``true'' does express a substantive property.

This metaphysical difference between minimalists and functionalists

about truth is like the difference between eliminativists and functionalists

in the philosophy of mind. Eliminative materialism is the view that folk-

psychological concepts like pain, belief, desire, etc., fail to pick out any

actual physical properties or states. According to the eliminativist, there

is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the nature of pain. The function-

alist, on the other hand, holds that pain is a functional property, one that

can be realized by distinct brain states in different species. The function-

alist does not deny that pain has a nature; she holds that it can have more


than one. In the same way, an alethic functionalist holds that truth is a

higher-order property that can be realized differentlyor have a different

naturein different discourses.

Besides the metaphysical differences between deationary theories and

alethic functionalism, there is also a signicant epistemological differ-

ence. Deationists hold that truth is a philosophically unimportant con-

cept. This is sometimes put by saying that we do not need to appeal to facts

about truth in order to explain, e.g., knowledge, meaning, or any other

philosophically troubling notion. Not so for functionalism. Just as under-

standing the underlying facts about how pain is realized is important for

understanding a host of other psychological phenomena, so understand-

ing the underlying facts about how truth is realized is essential (on the

functionalist view, at least) for understanding a host of related philo-

sophical concepts. Unlike the deationist, the functionalist theory sees

truth as having a job that impacts the entire philosophical economy.

Of course, there are differences between psychological and alethic

functionalism. One might argue that these differences are greater than

I've allowed, and as such, they undermine the case for calling alethic

functionalism a type of ``functionalism'' at all. One objection of this sort

is the following. In the case of mental concepts, analytic functionalists

typically hold that it is a contingent a posteriori matter as to what occu-

pies, e.g., the pain role. But surely it is an a priori matter whether some

property plays the truth role, and if so, then perhaps this property must

play that role in every discourse.13 And this might be thought to under-

mine the claim of alethic functionalism that truth is multiply realizable.

In fact, there is not much difference between alethic and psychological

functionalism on this matter. For according to alethic functionalism,

truth in any discourse is the higher-order property of having a property

that plays the truth role for that discourse. So realizers, as we noted

above, are always realizers for a discourse. And as we saw in the case of

legal discourse, what plays the truth role in any given discourse is deter-

mined by the nature of the discourse in question. Analogously, what

plays the pain role for a given organism depends on that organism's

material constitution. Given the way the organism is constituted, there

will be one and only one property that best plays the pain role. And given


the way a discourse is constituted, there will be one and only one prop-

erty that best plays the truth role. So what plays either sort of role is a

contingent matter in that it is a contingent matter as to how any organ-

ism or any discourse is constituted. Given that constitution, what plays

the role in question will do so necessarily. The difference between the two

cases rests only in the differences in the subject matter. Figuring out what

realizes the pain role in a particular organism is an a posteriori matter;

guring out what realizes the truth role in a particular discourse is

(mostly) an a priori task. But these are epistemic facts; they do not impact

the metaphysical question of multiple realizability at all.

A different type of worry is that functional denitions of alethic con-

cepts like (FT) will be subject to what Michael Smith (1994) has called

the ``permutation'' problem. According to Smith, the permutation prob-

lem arises for functional analyses of a type of concept when the plati-

tudes used in the denitions are so tight-knit that they don't connect the

things to which the concept apply to things outside the network. When

that happens, Smith suggests, we won't have enough relational informa-

tion left (after we've stripped the platitudes of the type of concepts we

wish to dene) to x on any unique properties that we can identify as the

realizers of the concepts. This means that there may be more than one

property realizing every concept in the network. As a result, we lose the

ability to distinguish the members of the network from each other.

As Smith acknowledges (1994, 54) one can never be sure that a given

functional analysis is subject to the permutation problem unless one

actually goes out and completes the analysis for each of the concepts in

question. Fortunately, we can be condent that alethic functionalism is

immune from the permutation problem without engaging in this task.

Two points are relevant. First, there are plenty of platitudes connecting

alethic concepts to other sorts of concepts. It is these platitudes that dis-

tinguish the various alethic concepts (and their realizers) from each other.

Consider, for example, the differences elicited by the following simple

principles: the fact that the butler's prints are on the murder weapon can

cause us to suspect that he is guilty of the crime, but no proposition, true

or false, can cause anything; facts make propositions true, not vice versa;

propositions can be doubted, facts cannot be; and so on.


Second, what determines the best realizer for the truth role isn't the

alethic network alone. As I've repeatedly emphasized, part of what

determines which property best realizes being true (or being a fact or

being a proposition) in a discourse depends on a priori facts about that

discourse. If, being committed physicalists, we were to take it as a priori

that there could be no properties such as rightness or goodness, then the

range of possible realizers for truth in the moral realm is signicantly

limited. Again, just as an organism's neural structure will determine what

unique property best plays the pain role, so the constitution of a partic-

ular form of thought determines what unique property best plays the

truth role.

The nal objection I'll discuss also concerns functionalism's analysis of

the concept of truth. In the philosophy of mind, Ramsey-Lewis denitions

are frequently taken as reductions of our mental vocabulary to physical

vocabulary (see Lewis 1972). The idea is that since functional denitions

of mentality contain no mental terms (only variables), we can be said to

have explained our mental concepts without circularity. One objection to

alethic functionalism is that a moment's reection indicates that the pool

of O terms (terms that don't presuppose alethic concepts) in our alethic

platitudes is too small to do the job required. There are bound to be

concepts in (FT) that indirectly presuppose the concept of truth. As a

result, (FT) cannot be an informative, noncircular analysis of truth.

The underlying assumption behind this objection is that functional

denitions like (FT) can be informative only if they are completely reduc-

tive. But this is surely a fallacy. The functional method of denition sup-

plies a way of giving the job descriptions for every property of the type in

question all at once. But the fact that we can do so does not guarantee,

either here or in the philosophy of mind, that we have entirely reduced

the concepts in question to another set of concepts without remainder.

And in the present case, our inability to reduce truth to more simple

concepts is neither surprising nor avoidable. Arguably, truth is the most

basic concept we possess; one cannot even get logic off the ground without

some concept of truth. Prima facie, there is little reason to hope for any

account of alethic concepts in terms that do not already presuppose them

at some level of analysis or other. But to claim on this basis alone that a


functional specication of truth is uninformative is to assume without

argument that the only informative analyses are those that are completely

reductive. Yet clearly one can informatively and usefully explicate a

concept without completely reducing it to more basic concepts. If we did

have to live up to such high standards, we would be able to understand

very few of our concepts indeed.

A more concessive answer to this objection is also possible for the

functionalist. I have described alethic functionalism as (in part) a concep-

tual project, one that, roughly speaking, attempts to specify the meaning

of alethic terms. Yet as Jackson has recently emphasized (1998, 143; see

also Chalmers 1996, 6164), there is more than one way to understand

how a description of truth conditions like (FT) can ``specify meaning.''

The more traditional way, which I have thus far implicitly assumed,

takes (FT) as a priori and necessary. On this understanding, (FT) says

that p's being true means that p has the higher-order property of having a

property that plays the truth role for that discourse.14 On the other hand,

we can take ``true'' to ``rigidly predicate'' a particular property in every

possible world in which it predicates anything at all.15 If we do, we will

take the right-hand side of (FT) as giving us the meaning of ``true'' in a

very different sense, that is, as xing the reference of ``true.'' But since

``true'' is a rigid predicator and the description on the right-hand side of

(FT) is not, this would be similar to treating ``is the man who taught

Alexander'' as what xes the reference for ``Aristotle.'' And of course,

Aristotle is only contingently the man who taught Alexander. On this

alternative, (FT) is a priori but not necessary (Jackson 1998, 144). On

this latter method, there is no barrier to employing other alethic concepts

in our explanation of what ``true'' happens to ascribe to propositions.

We take (FT) as xing the reference of ``true,'' not as ``dening'' it in the

traditional sense. Nonetheless, there is a sense of ``meaning'' in which

(FT) is telling us the meaning of our concept of truth.

I see functionalism as engaged in the traditional project of meaning

giving or conceptual explication without, as I've emphasized above, that

project being necessarily reductive. But ofcially, the functionalist can

remain neutral on the status of (FT). Taken either as a nonreductive

conceptual explication or as xing the reference, (FT) reveals important,

a priori facts about the concept of truth.


6 Conclusion

A complete functionalist theory of truth has to meet at least three major

demands. It must explain what it means to say that truth is a functional

property; it must give a detailed account of how truth might be realized

differently in distinct contexts; and it must explain the theory's impact on

other important philosophical concepts, such as meaning, knowledge, or

(what has come to be called) truth-aptness. In this paper I have been

concerned with the rst demand, having touched only briey on the

second. I have left the third aside altogether. Nonetheless, I think it is

already clear that a complete functionalist theory would have signicant

advantages.

First, the functionalist theory of truth manages to satisfy both pluralist

and monist intuitions. At one level, the functionalist theory is consistent

with monism. In every discourse, the concept of truth is the concept of a

particular higher-order propertythe property of having the property

that plays the truth role for that discourse. But at the level of deep

metaphysics, alethic functionalism allows that this role may be realized

by distinct properties that depend on the discourse in question. So to

have the property of truth is to have a property that can, by its very

nature, be realized in multiple ways.

Second, the functionalist theory explains the interrelatedness of the

alethic concepts that has often made more traditional theorists about

truth uncomfortable. A common reason for dismissing, e.g., ``fact talk''

among many deationary-minded philosophers is that they are the mere

shadows of propositions; that is, one cannot say what a fact is without

invoking the notion of truth. But as just noted, this is what the func-

tionalist would expect. In the philosophy of mind, it is common to think

of belief and desire as so interrelated that the one cannot be explained

without reference to the other. Yet this fact does nothing to show that

such concepts, and the properties they are concepts of, are metaphysi-

cally suspect.

Third, the theory is ecumenical. Functionalism does not dictate in

advance how truth will be realized in various discourses. To specify how

truth is realized, we must look to the particulars of our thought. But once

we do so, the functionalist theory may act as a neutral frame for a less


reductive picture of how our forms of thought relate to each other and to

the world around us.

Notes

Many people have helped me in writing this paper. The essential ideas wereoriginally expressed in papers read at the 1999 Bled Epistemology Conferenceand at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. For conversations and corre-spondence I also thank William Alston, Terry Berthelot, Paul Bloomeld, RobertBarnard, Marian David, Hartry Field, Charles Fletcher, Terry Horgan, FrankJackson, Peter Klein, Philip Pettit, Matjaz Potrc, Tadeusz Szubka, Robert West-moreland, Michael Williams, Cory Wright, Crispin Wright, and audiences at theabove places and at Connecticut College and the University of Southern Missis-sippi. Thanks also to the Master of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, where,with the help of a grant from the University of Mississippi, I was able to completea rst draft of this paper.

1. See Quine (chap. 20), Horwich (chap. 24), Field (chap. 21), and Grover (chap.22).

2. I refer here to the causal-relation theory of correspondence, espoused by Field(chap. 16) and Devitt (1984, see also chap. 25).

3. For objections of this sort to epistemic theories, see Lynch 1998, 107 ff., andAlston 1996. For a defense of the claim that epistemic theories work in somecontexts, see the appendix to Wright 1999.

4. For a more detailed discussion of the problem of scope faced by correspon-dence, epistemic, and deationist theories of truth, see Lynch 2000.

5. For further remarks on how my view differs from Horgan's and Wright's, seeLynch 1998, 129 ff.

6. Wright has emphasized (e.g., 1995, 215) that he too thinks that the concept oftruth is univocal. In his contribution to this volume (chap. 32) Wright secures thisunivocality by distinguishing, much as I do below, the concept of truth and theunderlying properties that realize truth. Nonetheless, as I note, Wright stops shortof endorsing a functionalist account of alethic concepts.

7. I rst began to suggest this idea in 1998, pp. 125 ff. Subsequently I learnedthat Philip Pettit had made the suggestion that truth could be understood func-tionally in his 1996 comments on Wright. Correspondence with Pettit conrmsthat our views on this matter are quite similar; I have also benetted from Jack-son's 1998 account of moral functionalism (although Jackson does not endorsethe functionalist theory of truth).

8. For instance, in the philosophy of mind, one can understand functions com-putationally (Putnam), causally (Lewis, Armstrong), or biologically (Millikan,Dretske).

9. The analogy is Bob Barnard's (correspondence).


10. As I see it, there is no reason to settle which is which in advance. That isexactly the sort of information we would hope our theory would reveal. Thus,the platitude that a proposition is true because it corresponds to some fact may ormay not mean that this correspondence with fact is the literal cause of the prop-osition's being true. The ordinary word ``because'' can also be used to mean ``invirtue of,'' and x can be the case in virtue of y without x being causally related toy. Which relation ``because'' ends up picking out may depend, for all we know inadvance, on the type of propositions and facts being considered.

11. Of course, lawyers and judges often disagree about what the law is; that is,they disagree about what is or should be included within the body of law. Oftenour decisions about what lies within or without the body of law depends in parton what we might call metalegal propositions, or propositions concerning a law'sjust or unjust nature, its accordance with ``natural'' law, its usefulness for society,and so on. Although the distinction cannot be an absolutely precise one, metal-egal propositions are surely distinct from propositions of the law proper (or whatwe might call purely legal propositions). As such, we should expect that ouropinions about metalegal matters (our opinions about what to include within thebody of law) will be true or false in a different way than purely legal propositions,which the present proposal takes to be true in virtue of coherence with the bodyof law. See Walker's essay (chap. 6) for further discussion of what he calls alimited coherence theory of truth.

12. One reason that it is reasonable to suppose this is because an endorsement ofthe equivalence schema, together with a similar schema for falsity and the law ofexcluded middle, entails that a proposition is either true or false.

13. A related worry is this. According to recent ``two-dimensional'' semantics,terms can be understood as having both a primary and secondary intension(Chalmers 1995, 56 ff.; Jackson, 1998). A primary intension is a function fromworlds considered as actual to a property, while a secondary intension is a func-tion from worlds considered as counterfactual to a property. Now the primaryand secondary intensions of ``water'' pick out different properties at a givenworld. When Putnam's Twin Earth world is considered as actual, ``water'' picksout XYZ, but when it is considered as counterfactual, ``water'' picks out H2O.The worry is that any true functional term or concept must be similar to ``water''in this respect. That is, it must have a primary intension that picks out differentproperties from what its secondary intension picks out in some worlds. But ofcourse, ``true'' does not work like this. When I imagine that some other world isthe actual world, I don't think that another property is being ascribed by ``true'';indeed, the primary and secondary intension of the word ``true'' seem to be thesame.

Like the problem above, this worry is unfounded. The key is to remember thaton the functionalist theory I've presented here, truth is identical to the role prop-erty. For any discourse, truth is the higher-order property of having a propertythat plays the truth role in that discourse. Thus, like the higher-order property ``iscolored like the sky at this world'' (where ``this'' refers to the world in question,


whether or not it is the actual world), the truth property will remain constantacross worlds (discourses). But in both cases, it is obvious that different lower-level properties can realize the higher-order property. (I thank Philip Pettit forhelp with this point.)

14. If we were to take (FT) as giving the primary intension of the concept of truth(see last note) we would have to say that (FT) is necessarily true in all possibleworlds considered as actual (Chalmers 1996, 63; also see Jackson 1997, chap. 2).

15. I take this term from Sydney Shoemaker 1975, 400.

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