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Truth, Sense and Assertion*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2015

G.E.M. Anscombe
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Abstract

Protagoras and his pupil Euthalos argued against one another in paradoxical fashion regarding the fulfilment of a contract. Protagoras was a Sophist, the first European inventors of logical puzzles who also argued that there cannot be false thinking. A paradox, however, does not say anything, and there is no solution to the question as to who is right in the exchange between Protagoras and Euthalos. On the other hand there is a real question as to how it is that a false proposition makes sense, and the Sophists were right in as much as a false proposition, while it does say something does not, being believed, tell its believer anything. The exclusion of paradoxical propositions is not to be achieved, as Russell supposed, by applying some general principle; rather matters need arguing through in particular cases as they arise.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 3 - 14
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Editorial note. The following is transcribed from the typescript of the Lovejoy Lecture given at Johns Hopkins University in April 1987. Some of the ideas are recapitualed in a highly compressed form in the first half (43–4) of ‘Truth, Sense and Assertion, or: What Plato should have told the Sophists’, in Ewa Żarnecka-Bialy (ed.), Logic Counts (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990). The present essay along with others on philosophy of language and logic is to appear in Logic, Truth and Meaning: Writings by G.E.M. Anscombe edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Exter: ImprintAcademic, 2015). This is the fourth in a series of Anscombe's writings and it includes a reprint of her Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

References

1 Editorial note. The source of the story is the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, Bk V, Ch. 10 ‘On the argument which by the Greeks are called ἀντιστρέφον, and in Latin may be termed “reciproca” [a convertible proposition]’: ‘Protagoras began as follows: “Let me tell you, most foolish of youths, that in either event you will have to pay what I am demanding, whether judgment be pronounced for or against you. For if the case goes against you, the money will be due me in accordance with the verdict, because I have won; but if the decision be in your favour, the money will be due me according to our contract, since you will have won a case.” To this Euathlus replied: “I might have met this sophism of yours, tricky as it is, by not pleading my own cause but employing another as my advocate. But I take greater satisfaction in a victory in which I defeat you, not only in the suit, but also in this argument of yours. So let me tell you in turn, wisest of masters, that in either event I shall not have to pay what you demand, whether judgment be pronounced for or against me. For if the jurors decide in my favour, according to their verdict nothing will be due you, because I have won; but if they give judgment against me, by the terms of our contract I shall owe you nothing, because I have not won a case.”

Then the jurors, thinking that the plea on both sides was uncertain and insoluble, for fear that their decision, for whichever side it was rendered, might annul itself, left the matter undecided and postponed the case to a distant day.’ The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius translated by John C. Rolfe (Cambridge. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1946) vol. 1.

2 Editorial note. Anscombe might have in mind a brief argument in Augustine's Soliloquies, 2, 2, 2. There, however, it is only the imperishability of truth that Augustine argues for via his internal interlocutor ‘Ratio’:

R. What if Truth itself should perish, would it not be true that Truth had perished?

A. And who denies that?

R. But it cannot be true if Truth is not?

A. That I have conceded, a little way back.

R. Truth can, then, in no way perish?

See The Soliloquies of St. Augustine, translated by Rose E. Cleveland (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1910), 55.

3 De Veritate, c.2.

4 Editorial note. The translations in the text are Anscombe's own. There is a full English translation of De Veritate by Ralph McInerny in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works edited by Brian Davies and Gillian Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); the exchanges she quotes appear there on pages 153–155.

5 I intentionally keep to the Latinate spelling.

6 Editorial Note. Dummett writes: ‘Let us compare truth and falsity with the winning and losing of a board game. … It is part of the concept of winning a game that a player plays to win, and this part of the concept is not conveyed by a classification of the end positions [in which there are no further permissible moves] into winning ones and losing ones. … The whole theory of chess could be formulated with reference only to the formal description; but which theorems of this theory interested us would depend upon whether we wished to play chess or [a] variant game. Likewise, it is part of the concept of truth that we aim at making true statements; and Frege's theory of truth and falsity as the references of sentences leaves this feature of the concept of truth quite out of account’. Dummett, Michael ‘Truth’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1959), 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar reprinted in Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978).

7 Editorial note. Again the translations are Anscombe's own; inserted in the text are the numberings from the Tractatus.

8 The German runs: ‘Beachtet man nicht, dass der Satz einen von den Tatsachen unabhängigen Sinn hat, so kann man leicht glauben, dass wahr und falsch gleichberechtigte Beziehungen von Zeichen und Bezeichnetem sind.’ Ogden translates this as ‘If one does not observe that propositions have a sense independent of the facts, one can easily believe that true and false are two relations between signs and things signified with equal rights.’ Pears and McGuiness have ‘It must not be overlooked that a proposition has a sense that is independent of the facts: otherwise one can easily suppose that true and false are relations of equal status between signs and what they signify.’

9 Editorial note. The quoted passage is from Russell's review of Hugh MacColl's book Symbolic Logic and its Applications, Mind 15 (1906), 256Google Scholar.

10 Editorial note. The person in question was G.G. Berry then a part-time member of the Bodleian Library staff. Russell gives different details of the episode in separate reports but the common theme is that Berry came to Russell's house Bagley Wood and by way of introducing himself presented Russell with a visiting card. According to one account on each side of the card was written ‘the statement on the other side of this is false’. Subsequently Philip Jourdain who was another source of paradoxes for Russell published a short story entitled ‘The Philosopher's Revenge’ recounting a similar episode though with the subsequent deletion of ‘false’ and substitution of ‘true’ on one side of the paper. This appeared in the Cambridge University magazine Granta in 1906 and he reproduced it in a later article ‘Tales with Philosophical Morals’ Open Court 27 (1913) 310–15Google Scholar. Probably on account of these publications, in which the puzzling juxtaposition is actually rendered inconsistent, the invitation card paradox is now generally attributed to him as its author.

11 B. Russell ‘Introduction’ in A.N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 64.

12 Op. cit., 65.