Justification conditions

On the internal realist view there cannot be a mismatch. The real structures are the structures our recognition abilities and justification conditions identify. The real boundaries coincide with the boundaries we draw, since the former are identical with the latter. Something is a dog, if the sentence This is a dog is justified when it is applied to it, for the very kind DOG owes its existence to the justification conditions. As a result, at least some of our sentences are bound to be true, namely, those simple sentences whose justification conditions are responsible for drawing the boundaries. So truth cannot completely diverge from justification. There are sentences for which to be true is to be justified. Consequently, there is a conceptual connection between truth and justification. The connection is not purely contingent. Truth is then not completely non-epistemic. 

The interesting question concerns the justifications within the subset, the justifications of simple sentences which fix the reference of words and thereby constitute the structure of reality. Can sentences like This is a dog be justified and yet false Yes, in two different ways. The first way is when the justification procedure is not executed properly. I may fall victim to an illusion, or I may be too careless. I may then believe that the justification conditions are satisfied, but they are not. In a weak sense, I have justification, but my justified view is wrong. This does not present a difficulty for the view summarized in Figure 2, which maintains that the criteria of identity of entities are identical with justification conditions. One may misjudge whether a justification condition is satisfied. But this does not change the justification condition. Of course, a justification condition should be such that it can be easily and uncontroversially settled whether it is satisfied. (Otherwise it would not be a justification condition.) But it would be far too much to demand that no mistake should be possible about it. If the justification conditions are not affected by the occasional mistakes, they may fix the reference of words and provide criteria of identity. The occasional mistakes just do not matter. 

Before moving on to (IR3), it is useful to contrast the ideas behind (IR2) with related approaches, the logical positivists and Dummett s verificationism. According to logical positivism, all synthetic sentences should be verifiable, at least in principle, on the basis of experience unverifiable sentences are meaningless. The view developed above differs from this in two respects. First, it is not committed empiricism, so it does not constrain admissible verifications in the way logical positivism does. If it turns out that mathematics is synthetic a priori, as Kant believed, that is perfectly acceptable. The justification conditions which determine... 

IR3) is the thesis which distinguishes internal realism from the doctrines it is most closely related to. Kant would have endorsed some version of (IR1). Peirce would have accepted (IR2) as well. But the sort of conceptual pluralism (IR3) represents has not traditionally been part of the picture that reality and truth are not independent of the human mind. We must start approaching this thesis from a distance. We already know that a conceptual scheme is a relatively self-contained group of words or concepts. The referents of the words that make up conceptual schemes are determined by the justification conditions of some simple sentences in which they occur. So we may also say that a conceptual scheme is the set of justification conditions for a set of sentences. The determination of reference is the same as the constitution of the structure of reality, because the entities - individuals, kinds, etc. - are carved out by justification conditions which provide criteria of identity for them. So the structure of reality is constituted by conceptual schemes. 

Step 2 Identify the truth conditions of these sentences with their justification conditions. 

Let me run through an example. Suppose the word we are concerned with is dog . Step 1 the sentence This is a dog will be one that plays a part in the fixation of reference. Step 2 the truth conditions of this sentence are identical with the justification conditions, so it is decidable whether it is true on a given occasion. Step 3 dog refers just to those things which are demonstrated by the tokens of this on those occasions when the sentence is true. 

First of all, the justification conditions I am talking about are different from the customary justification conditions. The crucial difference is that they are infallible guides to truth. If they are satisfied, the sentence must be true. Their satisfaction is sufficient for truth. Customary justification conditions are usually only necessary conditions of truth. Consider the case when a scientific theory is tested through a prediction. The failure of the prediction refutes the theory. So the success of the prediction is necessary for the truth of the theory. But a successful prediction does not provide full justification. The theory may still prove false if its other predictions fail. In other cases the satisfaction of the justification condition is not even necessary for the truth of the sentence. Lots of justification procedures rely on a high correlation between two properties, say A and B. They check for A and infer to B. Having A is then a justification condition for having B. Since the correlation is not perfect, an object may have B even if it tests negative for A. 

InfaUibilism is not particularly popular these days. It is important to warn therefore that this infallibilism is very restricted. First, it holds only for the reference-fixing sentences, which is a very narrow class. Second, it is formulated with respect to justification conditions rather than justifications. As I noted in the previous chapter, the justification procedures may be improperly executed. As a result, our judgements whether an infallible justification condition is satisfied are themselves fallible. A daltonian knows very well what procedures he has to use decide whether something is red or green. But his condition prevents him from... 

We have finally arrived at Step 1, the selection of the reference-fixing sentences. Two quick remarks before we face the main question. One, all of these remarks are about sentence types, not about tokens. The properties of sentence tokens which do not result from belonging to a particular type have no bearing on reference. Two, we should not make much of the distinction between sentence and sentences. If reference is fixed by a complicated conjunctive justification condition, we are free to treat it either as the justification condition of one long conjunctive reference-fixing sentence, or the conjunction of the justification conditions of several separate sentences. 

It follows from this rudimentary account that we can have analytic sentences only in so far as the reference-fixing justification conditions are clear. If there are many sentences in which a word occurs, but it is unclear the justification conditions of which sentences bear on the reference of a word, we cannot say any more which sentences containing the word are analytic. Consider electron . This word occurs in a vast number of sentences. Some of them have to do with the experimental techniques which make electrons observable, like cloud-chambers. Most of them are highly theoretical sentences, some of which contradict one another - for physicists have said contradictory things about electrons. It is difficult to pinpoint the sentences whose justification conditions play a part in the fixation of the reference... 

We may now compare this account with the accounts of reference implicit in the major theories of truth. First of all, this account is verificationist. As far as the fixation of reference is concerned, it does not really differ from a verificationist view like Dummetf s. Dummett would probably require though that the reference-fixing justification conditions be fully operational. The major difference concerns what happens after the fixation of reference. Whereas I will use reference to construct genuine, i.e. possibly verification-transcendent truth conditions, a fully-fledged verificationist semantics would construct verification conditions, instead. 

The deflationist would find some points objectionable, but the account can be easily adapted to her needs. The first point is that Step 2 accepts a substantial notion of truth for certain sentences. But this step may be reformulated in this way take the justification conditions of the reference-fixing sentences . In this way the notion of truth can be kept as a thin notion. The second point is that in the disquotation formulae of Step 3 the notion of truth shows up in the parentheses, so truth seems to play an explanatory role in the fixation of reference. A deflationist would refuse that truth can explain anything. Notice, however, that the disquotation formulae do their job even if the parentheses, in which truth is mentioned, are cut off. So the machinery works even if one does not accept a verificationist conception of truth for these sentences and refuses to attribute any role to truth in the determination of reference. If you wish, the internal realist has a choice to be deflationist about truth. Naturally, this does not mean that after these changes the deflationists will automatically subscribe to the present account. They may reject the idea of reference-fixing sentences, or they may reject that for these sentences truth coincides with justification, or they may favor an account of our linguistic ability that does not mention justification at all. 

The correspondence theory of truth in the stipulated sense of the previous chapter is incompatible with this account on two counts. The correspondence theory in the stipulated sense is a Tarskian theory with reference understood as a non-epistemic relation to entities that are mind-independent in the sense of (MR1). The present account considers reference an epistemic relation, since it hinges on justification conditions, which are clearly epistemic. It also fits badly with the idea that the entities words refer to are ontologically independent of the human mind. The disagreement concerns both the nature of the reference relation but also one of the relata. This latter point may be less clear, since the three-step recipe does not say anything about the ontological status of the entities we refer to. So why does it naturally tie in with (IR1) rather than with (MR1) ... 

To understand this, we must first see in more detail how the reference-fixing justification conditions depend on the features of the human mind. Remember the operationality constraint mentioned couple of pages back a reference-fixing justification condition is either operational, or if it is not, there must be operational... 

This tacit commitment to (IR1) shows that the internal realist account of reference is indeed a species of the anti-realist answer to the skeptical challenge. The challenge, posed by Putnam s model-theoretic argument was this. If the structure of the world were independent of the human mind, how could concepts and words, which are human inventions, refer to the elements of the structure The answer provided here is that the structure of the world is not independent of the mind. The criteria of identity for entities derive from the justification conditions which govern the use of concepts. So the entities out there and the entities our words are intended to apply to are bound to be the same. We should not be surprised that the top slices meet the bottom slices. We just slice from the top and reach the bottom. 

The point may be put more sharply as follows. If we take sense to be whatever fixes reference simpliciter, than the users of Pre did not know the sense of water . What fixes the reference of a word is the justification condition in the adequate scheme. The adequate scheme is Post. They did not have Post, so they did not know the sense of water . Thus even if (1) is granted, the Twin Earth argument still does not work against my account, because (1) cannot be applied to our pre-Daltonian ancestors. 

If we compare the details, in so far as they can be compared, we find no evident conflict. The teleological theory holds that it is not the conditions under which the concept comes to mind which determine its reference. The internal realist view holds that many concepts are routinely used without checking whether their justification conditions are satisfied. In fact, many speakers do not even know the justification conditions. 

In the previous chapter I described in some detail how reference is fixed. There are simple sentences associated with each word which are responsible for its reference. Once we know the truth conditions of these sentences, the reference of a word is given by disquotational schemas. The truth conditions of these sentences are identical with their justification conditions. In the final analysis, reference is fixed by justification conditions. However, some justification conditions are inadequate, they are not conducive to truth in other words, they fail as truth conditions. What these inadequate justification conditions determine is relative reference the sort of reference we attribute to users of inadequate conceptual schemes when we give rationalizing explanation of their behavior. As to adequate justification conditions, we cannot do better than to identify them with our current justification conditions. Our current justification conditions may turn out to be inadequate. But we must take what we have. 

This is important, because it is in virtue of this that the Tarskian mechanism yields truth conditions which may go beyond verification conditions. Let us see an example of how this happens. Suppose a physicist derives from his theory that a certain elementary particle p has a certain property Q. Suppose further that the justification condition which fixes the reference of includes the description of an elaborate experimental set-up. Suppose that the reference-fixing justification condition for g includes the description of a completely different sort of... 

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