Paul Horwich

Each sentence derives its meaning from what its component words mean and from its syntactic structure. And the thesis of this chapter is that this is so because the meaning‐property of a sentence is nothing over and above the property of being constructed in a certain way from primitives with certain meanings. In this explanation of how sentence meanings are ’composed’, absolutely nothing is presupposed about the source of word meaning. Thus the possibility of compositionality imposes no constraint on how the meanings of words are engendered. In particular, we see that compositionality gives us no reason to accept Davidson's explication of meaning in terms of truth conditions.

Let me start with an example. Presumably our understanding of the sentence ‘dogs bark’ arises somehow from our understanding of its components and our appreciation of how they are combined. That is to say, ‘dogs bark’ somehow gets its meaning from the meanings of the two words ‘dog’ and ‘bark’, from the meaning of the generalization schema ‘ns v’, and from the fact that the sentence results from placing those words in that schema in a certain order. However, as Davidson was the first to emphasize, it is not possible to produce a strict logical deduction of what ‘dogs bark’ means from these more basic facts alone. So a question arises as to which further premises are required. What assumptions about the character of meaning should be added in order to obtain an explanation of the meaning of the sentence on the basis of the meanings of its words?

The correspondence conception of truth involves two claims: that truths correspond to reality; and that such correspondence is what truth essentially is. And the minimalist response, urged in this chapter, is to concede the first of these theses but to deny the second. The rationale for this response is that the minimalistic equivalence biconditionals can easily be supplemented with characterizations of correspondence and fact to show that, indeed, for any true proposition or sentence, there is a corresponding fact. However, it is shown that there are no advantages—and substantial disadvantages—in supposing that this entire construction constitutes the basic theory of truth. One merely imaginary benefit is that a correspondence account, by reducing truth to reference and reference to causation, would leave us with a finite, naturalistic model—and thereby make the concept of truth scientifically respectable. It is argued, however, that reference, satisfaction, correspondence, and fact are just as non‐naturalistic, and in need of infinite, deflationary theories, as truth is.

Paul Horwich gives the definitive exposition of a prominent philosophical theory about truth, `minimalism'. His theory has attracted much attention since the first edition of Truth in 1990; he has now developed, refined, and updated his treatment of the subject, while preserving the distinctive format of the book. This revised edition appears simultaneously with a new companion volume, Meaning; the two books demystify central philosophical issues, and will be essential reading for all who work on the philosophy of language.

What is truth. Paul Horwich advocates the controversial theory of minimalism, that is that the nature of truth is entirely captured in the trivial fact that each proposition specifies its own condition for being true, and that truth is therefore an entirely mundane and unpuzzling concept. The first edition of Truth, published in 1980, established itself as the best account of minimalism and as an excellent introduction to the debate for students. For this new edition, Horwich has refined and developed his treatment of the subject in the light of subsequent discussions, while preserving the distinctive format that made the earlier edition so successful.

Paul Horwich's main aim in Reflections on Meaning is to explain how mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental symbols are able to capture the world--that is, how words and sentences (in whatever medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to be true or false of reality. His answer is a groundbreaking development of Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a term is nothing more than its use. While the chapters here have appeared as individual essays, Horwich has edited them to make a continuous argument, focused on articulating and developing an important new conception of language.

This chapter begins with criticism of ‘description’ and ‘causal’ theories—arguing that they should not be regarded as theories of reference. There then follows a deflationary account according to which our meaning what we do by ‘refers’ consists, roughly speaking, in our acceptance of the schema, ‘n’ refers to n —and, more accurately, in our acceptance of ‘’, where is the prepositional constituent expressed by the singular term, “n”. Finally, there are accounts of the utility of this notion of reference and of the meanings of names.

This chapter scrutinizes Quine's three‐stage critique of meaning. It starts by considering how one might get from the existence of multiple adequate translations to the non‐existence of meanings. Next it examines the main premise of this argument and shows how Quine derives it from his view of the conditions sufficient for adequate translations: that is, how he gets to the lemma that many non‐equivalent translation manuals will exist from his assumption that any good predictor of assent/dissent dispositions will be an adequate translation manual. Then it considers the basic stage in Quine's critique : his derivation of the adequacy of any assertibility‐preserving manual from the pragmatic raison d’etre of translation. At the end of the chapter, the main defect in this reasoning is rectified and it is shown that proper standards of adequacy will leave us with unique translations and with a use theory of meaning.

A good theory must explain the possibility of knowing what words mean; the nature of the relation, ‘x means y’; the fact that language can be used to represent reality; the epistemological import of understanding; compositionality—i.e. the dependence of the meanings of sentences on the meanings of their component words; the normative character of meaning; and the explanatory and evidential relations between the meaning of a word and its deployment. It is argued that these constraints have often been imposed in unreasonably inflated forms but that they can be satisfied, when properly understood, by a neo‐Wittgensteinian use theory of meaning.

Insofar as our aim is merely to understand our conception of truth, and not to promote some allegedly better one, we have no choice but to acknowledge that truth is primarily attributed to what we believe, question, suppose, etc.—i.e. to so‐called propositions. However, there are a couple of influential sources of scepticism about this article of common sense—an article wholly embraced by minimalism—and the aim of this chapter is to respond to them. First, a case is sketched in favour of propositions ; and the usual counter‐arguments are undermined. Second, there is a tendency to think that our conception of ‘proposition’ presupposes the notion of truth, so that the minimalist order of explanation would seem to be the wrong way round. In reply, it is suggested that we employ a Wittgensteinian account of meaning—hence ‘proposition’—in terms of use, which would not require a prior grasp of truth. Finally, for those who are not convinced by these arguments, it is shown how minimalist theories of ‘truth’ for utterances and belief‐states can be given without making a commitment to propositions.

In this influential study of central issues in the philosophy of science, Paul Horwich elaborates on an important conception of probability, diagnosing the failure of previous attempts to resolve these issues as stemming from a too-rigid conception of belief. Adopting a Bayesian strategy, he argues for a probabilistic approach, yielding a more complete understanding of the characteristics of scientific reasoning and methodology. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Colin Howson, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this engaging work has been revived for a new generation of readers.