can we say more about factual discourse?

Can We Say More about FactualDiscourse?

barry c. smith

Birkbeck College, University of London

It should pass as the merest commonplace, at least among philoso-

phers of language, that a sentence is true when and only when reality

is as the sentence describes it to be. However, elaborating this idea

in the service of particular philosophical proposals is fraught with

danger, as Stephen Neale shows in detail in Facing Facts (Oxford

University Press, 2001) With considerable precision and care, Neale

examines the commitments of both those who advocate, and those

who argue against those who advocate, the view that a sentence

stands for a situation or state of affairs in the world, or that a true

sentence corresponds to, or is made true by, a fact. Neale’s close

examination results not only in a definitive and impressive account of

the various collapsing arguments against facts that have come to be

known as slingshots, but also yields insights into the underlying

philosophical motivations of those who have wielded slingshot

arguments.

One of the most impressive aspects of these explorations is Neale’s

perspicuous presentation of the logical and metaphysical foundations

of Donald Davidson’s semantic programme: the culmination of fruit-

ful exchanges over the years between Neale and Davidson about the

nature of the latter’s work. Sadly, Neale’s chapter counts as the last

word in those exchanges, but thankfully it is the best and most

worked out account of the details of Davidson’s semantic theory we

have to date. I will concentrate on part of that chapter in the

remarks that follow.

1. Realism and anti-representationalism

At the end of Chapter Two, Neale explores the connected themes of

realism and representation, objectivity and truth. He attempts to say

why, and in what sense, Davidson is a realist despite his having dis-

pensed with facts as the worldly correlates of true sentences. Neale

Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVol. LXXIV No. 2, March 2007� 2007 International Phenomenological Society

CAN WE SAY MORE ABOUT FACTUAL DISCOURSE? 413

shows how Davidson’s ‘anti-representationalism’ differs from Richard

Rorty’s interpretation of it in allowing that (some) linguistic items can

be paired with objects and events. And while applauding Neale for

curbing the excess of Rorty’s altogether irrealist reading of Davidson, I

think more can be said than Neale does about the true source and na-

ture of Davidson’s realism. I also wish to challenge the assumption that

Neale shares with Rorty and Davidson that a substantial debate

between realists and anti-realists (for particular areas of discourse) can

only get going if one endorses the unworkable idea of facts as entities

that make sentences true.

Rorty tells us that ‘there is no point to debates between realism

and anti-realism, for such debates presuppose the empty idea of

beliefs ‘‘being made true’’ ‘ (Rorty 1986, p. 128, quoted by Neale p.

71). For it is only if we presuppose ‘that bits of the world ‘‘make sen-

tences true’’, he tells us, that we will ‘be interested in trying to distin-

guish between true sentences which correspond to ‘‘facts of the

matter’’ and those which do not (the distinction around which the

realist-vs.-antirealist controversies revolve)’ (Rorty 1992, p. 372,

quoted by Neale p. 71) And certainly, Davidson tells us that ‘If we

give up facts as entities that make sentences true, we ought to give

up representation at the same time, for the legitimacy of each

depends on the legitimacy of the other.’ (Davidson 1990, p. 304). But

Rorty goes further than Davidson: ‘If one gives up thinking that

there are representations, then one will have little interest in the rela-

tion between mind and the world or language and the world’. This

cannot be Davidson’s position since relations of reference between

particular linguistic items and objects and events are necessary for

constructing Tarski-style semantic theories of the sort Davidson pro-

poses. However Neale thinks that so long as we safeguard Davidson’s

realism about objects and events——the ontological categories we need

to posit in constructing semantic theories for natural languages——we

can see Davidson as agreeing with Rorty in rejecting talk of realism

as committing us to facts as entities represented by true sentences. Of

course, Neale points out that Davidson accepts that the truth of an

utterance depends on ‘how the world is arranged’ (and what the

words as spoken mean) and is ready to accept talk of sentences being

made true by the world (p. 70): ‘an objective world independent of

our knowledge of it’ (Davidson 1984 pxviii quoted by Neale p. 64)

But, says Neale, there is ‘neither harm nor explanatory value in say-

ing that a true belief, sentence, or statement is made true by the

world as long as this is not taken to mean that individual facts in the

world are truth makers’ (ibid.) Is Neale right about the lack of

explanatory value here?

414 BARRY C. SMITH

2. The Roots of Semantic Realism

Michael Dummett takes realism to be, not a thesis about the existence

of entities but, a semantic thesis:

…one may be a realist about certain entities——mental states,

possible worlds, mathematical objects——and not about others.

But it seems preferable to say that realism is a view about a

certain class of statements——for instance, statements in the

future tense, or ethical statements——since certain kinds of real-

ism, for instance realism about the future or about ethics, do

not seem readily classifiable as doctrines about a realm of enti-

ties.(Dummett 1993, p. 230)1

Dummett’s semantic realist does not appear to be committed to a claim

about the existence of entities such as facts, posited to explain what

makes sentences true. Dummett insists that semantic realism is:

a thesis about what, in general, renders a statement in the

given class true when it is true. The very minimum that realism

can be held to involve is that statements in the given class

relate to some reality that exists independently of our knowledge

of it, in such a way that reality renders each statement in the

class determinately true or false, again independently of wheth-

er we know, or are even able to discover, its truth-value. (ibid.,

p. 230 italics mine)

There is no invocation of an unacceptable ontology of facts here, pace

Rorty. And what is said by Dummett is compatible with Davidson’s

view, as reported by Neale, that the truth of an utterance depends on

‘how the world is arranged’ and his acceptance of sentences being made

true by the world. So wherein lies the source of Davidson’s realism?

For Dummett, realism about a given class of statements involves adop-

tion of the principle of bivalance for every statement in the class, even

when there is no guaranteed way of knowing the truth-values of those

statements. (Dummett takes a commitment to bivalence to secure real-

ism about the given discourse). There are statements about the remote

past and mathematics whose truth conditions may lie forever beyond

our epistemic reach. So what guarantees for such statements that they

are nevertheless true or false? For the realist, this is guaranteed by a

metaphysical assumption that there is a determinate reality concerning

1 References are to Michael Dummett’s Seas of Language (Oxford University Press,

1993).


mathematics or the past that confers truth on each mathematical or

past-tensed statement or its negation. The metaphysical picture envis-

ages a relationship between language and reality that outstrips our

powers of scrutiny. The relationship language enters into with reality

settles the truth-values of undecidable sentences whose truth conditions

transcend our powers of recognition. It is just this epistemically uncon-

strained view of how truth-values are determined that is rejected by the

anti-realist.

Is Davidson a realist in Dummett’s sense? At first sight it is hard to

see why he qualifies. Surely, using a particular truth theory for L to

interpret the language of L-speakers requires the interpreter to concen-

trate on the evidence of observable conditions under which speakers

hold L-sentences true. So where does Davidson incur a commitment to

recognition-transcendent truth of the sort the Dummettian anti-realist

rejects? The answer lies in further refinements of the realist picture.

Dummett tells us that:

To have a realistic view it is not enough to suppose that state-

ments of the given class are determined, by the reality to which

they relate, either as true or false; one has also to have a cer-

tain conception of the manner in which they are so determined.

This conception consists essentially in the classical two-valued

semantics: and this, in turn, embodies an appeal to notion of

reference as an indispensable notion of the semantic theory.

(Dummett 1993, p. 231)

An appeal to the apparatus of reference, as Neale shows, is an essential

part of the Davidson’s semantic programme, even if there is no unique

pairing of words with objects that serves. But beyond that, Dummett

offers a further conditon:

on a realistic interpretation of some class of statements, the

classical logical constants can always be intelligibly applied to

those statements; for instance, classical negation or existential

quantification, classically construed. (Dummett 1993, p. 230)

Now Davidson does commit himself to reading the classical logical

constants (and thereby a commitment to bivalence) into each interpret-

able language. Davidson tells us we have no choice but to impose our

logic on the language of the interpreted speaker (see 1984, p. 33 and

p. 151), and that logic will be first-order classical logic. This assump-

tion he takes from Quine’s similar insistence in the case of radical

translation that we find our logic at work in the native speaker’s

416 BARRY C. SMITH

language; where the logic in question is simply assumed to be classical

logic. With these resources we can construct logically complex senten-

ces of the interpreted language whose truth or falsity outstrips human

judgement but which are nonetheless rendered true or false by reality.

It is not obvious what the justification of Davidson’s insistence on clas-

sical logic is: the imposition of classical logic is not mandated by the

logic of the meta-language; intuitionistic logic will suffice to derive all

the T-theorems for a speaker’s language. But whatever the justification,

or lack of it, Davidson’s willingness to read classical logic into any

interpretable language, along with his adoption of truth conditional

semantic theory with the apparatus of reference qualifies him as a

semantic realist in Dummett’s terms. Once again, Dummettian realism

is ‘a [semantic] doctrine about the sort of thing that makes our state-

ments true when they are true’ (Dummett 1993, p. 270):

the fundamental thesis of realism…is that we really do succeed

in referring to external objects, existing independently of our

knowledge of them, and that the statements we make about

them carry a meaning of such a kind that they are rendered

true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which

is, again, independent of our knowledge. (Dummett 1993,

p. 270)

None of Dummett’s careful statements make any appeal to individual

facts. He even praises Frege for not going ‘down the dreary path which

leads to presenting facts, propositions, states of affairs or similar enti-

ties as referents of sentences’ (quoted by Neale, p. 83). Commitments

to how language and reality jointly settle the truth values of our state-

ments, independently of our means of knowing their truth-values, are

incurred not by adoption of a dubious thesis about facts as entities rep-

resented by true sentences but by choice of logic and the adoption of a

scheme of reference that assigns objects and events to singular terms

and variables.2

3. Matters of Fact

Can we go further still in pursuit of disputes between realists and anti-

realists without having to invoke the idea of individual facts that make

sentences true? Neale seems to accept, along with Davidson, that the

2 Of course there may be no unique scheme of reference, but all we need is that there

be some pairing of words with objects that will ensure delivery of the correct truth

conditions of sentences by the compositional workings of a truth theory for the lan-

guage.


notions of correspondence, facts, representational fit, and the scheme-

content distinction all go together as a package, where the fall of one

brings down all the others. Hence, the importance of the slingshot in

Davidson’s philosophy. But is this wholesale dismissal right? Neale

quotes Rorty as adding ‘facts of the matter’ and disputes between real-

ists and anti-realists to the list of rejected notions. According to Rorty,

if we give up facts and the idea of sentences as representations of them

we need no longer engage in disputes that aim ‘to distinguish between

true sentences which correspond to ‘‘facts of the matter’’ and those

which do not’. But if we accept that there are legitimate questions to

be pursued about moral or mathematical realism, need we buy into the

whole package of rejected notions in order to press such questions?

There is no reason to suppose we do, and no reason to suppose that

Davidson’s slingshot argument would contribute to the issues. It may

be possible to subscribe to a slingshot argument against facts as the ref-

erences of true sentences while rehabilitating talk of representational

discourse and facts of the matter in order to pursue the realist-antireal-

ist debates. How would this go?

What we want to know is whether assertions in a given area of dis-

course concern genuine matters of fact? Are assertoric statements about

the moral, the mathematical, or even the comic, examples of genuinely

factual discourse? Defenders of facts as the non-linguistic correlates of

true sentences take those sentences to represent particular regions of

reality and take a sentence’s truth to be a matter of correspondence

with a particular part of that reality. How philosophically committal is

such talk in trying to decide the status of ethical, mathematical or

comic statements? Are the assertions we make in these regions of dis-

course answerable for their truth or falsity to matters of facts or merely

to our opinions? Notice that realism-relevant debates about the subject

matter of these kinds of statement are not settled by whether such

statements can be said to be true. It is relatively easy to construct a

minimal truth-predicate for the kinds of discourse in question. So long

as there are standards that warrant the assertion of mathematical or

ethical statements, or statements about what is funny, and so long as

such statements can serve as the antecedents of conditionals and are

embedded by logical operators, we may define a disquotational truth-

predicate for the discourse. This mimimalist’s view of truth and truth-

aptitude settles nothing in debates between realists and anti-realists

about the status of such statements. Notice also that Dummettian real-

ism is not the right way to characterize realism about the ethical or the

comic. For it is not the adoption of classical logic for the language in

question that makes us realists about the ethical or the comic. We do

not point to sentences whose truth-values are effectively undecidable to

418 BARRY C. SMITH

make out the difference between realist and anti-realist construals of

moral talk. It is surely right to suppose that moral and comical mat-

ters, if there are any, do not always elude us. Instead, the realist may

stake his or her claim to be engaged in factual talk by assuming that

what he or she says is morally right, or funny, concerns some fact of

the matter about the case in question. Statements that purport to say

how things really are do correspond, it will be said, to the facts, really

do represent some feature of reality. But such talk is cheap, and indeed

platitudinous. To claim that what one says is true just is to claim that

what one says it corresponds to the facts. To inject more into the rep-

resentational content of one’s talk, to see what one is saying as genu-

inely engaging with ‘a fact of the matter’, we could appeal to the

criterion recently put forward by Crispin Wright. Wright’s criterion

governs any discourse with genuine representational ambitions.3 It

appeals to what is called Cognitive Command, a way in which one’s

judgements of truth and falsity in a given region of discourse are

answerable to the reality sentences in that discourse represent. Wright’s

condition on what it takes for a class of statements to be apt for sub-

stantial truth depends not just on opinions in that area converging but

on what we say about diverging opinions. For the contents of state-

ments in a region of discourse to be genuinely representational:

It is a priori that differences of opinion formulated within the

discourse, unless excusable as a result of vagueness in a disput-

ed statement, or in the standards of acceptability, or variation

personal evidence thresholds, so to speak, will involve some-

thing which may properly be regarded as a cognitive shortcom-

ing. (Wright, 1992 p. 144)

In disputes about matters of fact, as opposed to disputes concerning

mere matters of opinion, the notion of truth we operate with must be

governed by this condition. Disputes of the latter sort may be intract-

able and involve cognitively blameless disagreement on the part of each

disputant. (See Wright, 2001 and 2003.) Disputes in a robustly factual

discourse do not tolerate the option of agreeing to disagree. One or

other of the parties to a dispute has overlooked some crucial informa-

tion or is guilty of a cognitive shortcoming. Thus there is a difference

between areas of discourse that ‘would be merely minimally truth-apt,

and areas of discourse where, in addition, differences of opinion would

3 See Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Harvard 1992), ‘On Being in a Quandry’

in Mind vol. 10, 2001, reprinted in his Saving the Differences, (Harvard 2003). All

page references to ‘On Being in a Quandry’ are to Wright 2003.


be subject to the constraint of Cognitive Command’ (Wright, 2003

p. 453). To adopt the latter condition for a given region of discourse is

to be a factualist about its subject matter: to believe that ‘matters stand

thus and so independently of us and our practice’ and that the opinions

expressed in the discourse in question are exercises ‘in the representa-

tion of self-standing facts’ (Wright, p. 456) Notice that invoking this

condition of Wright’s on the substantial truth of statements in a given

discourse, and pointing to the genuinely representational nature of their

contents, is not a matter of invoking an unwanted scheme-content dis-

tinction. The invocation of representational talk, and the play being

made with genuine matters of fact, is foist on us from within our con-

ceptual scheme and is due to its objectivist commitments. The dangers,

if there are any, in talking this way, must lie elsewhere.

Is there still room for disputes between realists and anti-realists

about given areas of our thought and talk, even when one has

absorbed the lessons Stephen Neale has for us about what it takes to

provide a theory of facts or to dispense with one? The answer is yes.

There is more room, it seems, for a distinction between genuinely fac-

tual and other merely truth-apt discourses than either Davidson, Rorty,

or Neale have led us to believe.4

Bibliography

Davidson, D. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University

Press, 1984)

Davidson, D. ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’ in Journal of Phi-

losophy, 1990

Dummett, M. Seas of Language (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Neale, S. Facing Facts (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Rorty, R. ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth’ in E. Lepore (ed.) Truth

and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald David-

son (Blackwell, 1986)

Rorty, R. The Linguistic Turn (Hackett, 1992, 2nd edition) ‘Twenty-

Five Years On’

Wright, C. Truth and Objectivity (Harvard, 1992)

Wright, C. ‘On Being in a Quandry’ in Mind vol. 10, 2001, reprinted in

his 2003

Wright, C. Saving the Differences (Harvard 2003)

4 My thanks to Ian Rumfitt for a very useful discussion on the topic of this paper.

420 BARRY C. SMITH

can we say more about factual discourse?

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