Truth, Incoherence, and the Evolution of Science

property. Now the key question is: What is the linguistic role of “truth” that could be used to substitute the abstract concept of truth? Sellars’s view is that for a proposition to be true, it means that it is assertible: “True is the same as semantically assertible” (Sellars 1967, 101). Brandom’s interpretation of Sellars’s position is that talk about truth is “misleading talk about what one is doing in saying something in the sense of making a statement: the use of ‘truth’ is to be understood in terms of the platitude that asserting is taking true” (Brandom 2015, 258). The Sellarsian view of truth is a form of deflationarism in something like the following way. The proper use of “true” enables one to make the following inference: from “Bob is five feet tall is true” to “Bob is five feet tall.” In order for this to work, it is necessary to understand the kinds of inferences that are warranted. Sellars’s idea is that the use of language always takes place in a frame and in the space of reasons stipulated by a specific language game and its world view. The idea of frame-dependent inferences well serves Kuhn’s request that “truth” must be able to discriminate between epistemic candidates. “Truth” thus plays a special social-discursive role and its correct application in sentences means that the inferences taken are appropriate. The focus in judging whether an inference is warranted must be determined on the basis of the inferential specifics of a framework. It may be difficult to outline a general theory of correct inferences because we are dealing with material inferences whose validity depends on non-logical vocabularies. I finish this section on truth and coherence with an illustration of legitimate or warranted and illegitimate or unwarranted semantically assertible inferences in a frame of pre-Copernican and Copernican astronomy (cf. SSR-4, 115). A pre-Copernican could say that “the yellow object in the sky is a planet is true” (pointing to the Moon), dropping “true”, and inferring therefore that “the yellow object in the sky is a planet”. In the preCopernican framework this inference is legitimate and semantically assertible. In a Copernican framework, this exemplifies faulty reasoning. A Copernican would say something like “the yellow object in the sky is a satellite is true” inferring that “the yellow object in the sky is a satellite”. Although the notion of “truth” hardly adds anything substantial, this is one way in which it can be kept as a (more or less redundant) linguistic device, quite as Kuhn required: it indicates an approval of the stated, and by extension, correct inferences maintaining truth-values constant. In conclusion, this pragmatist notion of truth allows one to discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable inferences. It also sheds light on the frameworks and on how their legitimate rules of reasoning vary in the 220 jouni-matti kuukkanen C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/26474462/WORKINGFOLDER/WRAY-OPM/9781108498296C11.3D 221 [202–221] 29.12.2020 12:16AM history of science. Like Kuhn said it, there is no Archimedean platform. Finally, when this idea of truth is applied synchronically to different coexisting frameworks or lexicons of science, it becomes understandable how there can simultaneously be different and distinct truths, that is, semantically assertible statements, in disciplines despite the incoherence of the overall system of the sciences.