J Robert G Williams

In the previous post, I set out what I took to be one folklore conception of a non-classicist treatment of indeterminacy. Essential elements were (a) the postulation of not two, but several truth statuses; (b) the treatment of “it is indeterminate whether” (or degreed variants thereof) as an extensional operator; (c) the generalization to this setting of a classicist picture, where logic is defined as truth preservation over a range of reinterpretations, one amongst which is the interpretation that gets things right.

I said in that post that I thought that folklore non-classicism was a defensible position, though there’s some fairly common maneuvers which I think the folklore non-classicist would be better off ditching. One of these is the idea that the intended interpretation is describable “only non-classically”.

However, there’s a powerful alternative way of being a non-classicist. The last couple of weeks I’ve had a sort of road to Damascus moment about this, through thinking about non-classicist approaches to the Liar paradox—and in particular, by reading Hartry Field’s articles and new book where he defends a “paracomplete” (excluded-middle rejecting) approach to the semantic paradoxes and work by JC Beall on a “paraconsistent” (contradiction-allowing) approach.

One interpretative issue with the non-classical approaches to the Liar and the like is that a crucial element is a truth-predicate that works in a way very unlike the notion of “truth” or “perfect truth” (“semantic value 1”, if you want neutral terminology) that feature in the many-valued semantics. But that’s not necessarily a reason by itself to start questioning the folklore picture. For it might be that “truth” is ambiguous—sometimes picking up on a disquotational notion, sometimes tracking the perfect truth notion featuring in the nonclassicists semantics. But in fact there are tensions here, and they run deep.

Let’s warm up with a picky point. I was loosely throwing around terms like “3-valued logic” in the last post, and mentioned the (strong) Kleene system. But then I said that we could treat “indeterminate whether p” as an extensional operator (the “tertium operator” that makes “indet p” true when p is third-valued, and otherwise false). But that operator doesn’t exist in the Kleene system—the Kleene system isn’t expressively complete with respect to the truth functions definable over three values, and this operator is one of the truth-functions that isn’t there. (Actually, I believe if you add this operator, you do get something that is expressively complete with respect to the three valued truth-functions).

One might take this to be just an expressive limitation of the Kleene system. After all, one might think, in the intended interpretation there is a truth-function behaving in the way just described lying around, and we can introduce an expression that picks up on it if we like.

But it’s absolutely crucial to the nonclassical treatments of the Liar that we can’t do this. The problem is that if we have this operator in the language, then “exclusion negation” is definable—an operator “neg” such that “neg p” is true when p is false or indeterminate, and otherwise false (this will correspond to “not determinately p”—i.e. ~p&~indeterminate p, where ~ is so-called “choice” negation, i.e. |~p|=1-|p|). “p v neg p” will be a tautology; and arbitrary q will follow from the pair {p, neg p}. But this is exactly the sort of device that leads to so-called “revenge” puzzles—Liar paradoxes that are paradoxical even in the 3-valued system. Very roughly, it looks as if on reasonable assumptions a system with exclusion negation can’t have a transparent truth predicate in it (something where p and T(p) are intersubstitutable in all extensional contexts). It’s the whole point of Field and Beall’s approaches to retain something with this property. So they can’t allow that there is such a notion around (so for example, Beall calls such notions “incoherent”).

What’s going on? Aren’t these approaches just denying us the resources to express the real Liar paradox? The key, I think, is a part of the nonclassicist picture that Beall and Field are quite explicit about and which totally runs against the folklore conception. They do not buy into the idea that model theory is ranging over a class of “interpretations” of the language among which we might hope to find the “intended” interpretation. The core role of the model theory is to give an extensionally adequate characterization of the consequence relation. But the significance of this consequence relation is not to be explained in model-theoretic terms (in particular, in terms of one among the models being intended, so that truth-preservation on every model automatically gives us truth-preservation simpliciter).

(Field sometimes talks about the “heuristic value” of this or that model and explicitly says that there is something more going on than just the use of model theory as an “algebraic device”. But while I don’t pretend to understand exactly what is being invoked here, it’s quite quite clear that the “added value” doesn’t consist on some classical 3-valued model being “intended”.)

Without appeal to the intended interpretation, I just don’t see how the revenge problem could be argued for. The key thought was that there is a truth-function hanging around just waiting to be given a name, “neg”. But without the intended interpretation, what does this even mean? Isn’t the right thought simply that we’re characterizing a consequence relation using rich set-theoretic resources—and in terms of which we can draw differences that correspond to nothing in the phenomenon being modelled.

So it’s absolutely essential to the nonclassicist treatment of the Liar paradox that we drop the “intended interpretation” view of language. Field, for one, has a ready-made alternative approach to suggest—a Quinean combination of deflationism about truth and reference, with perhaps something like translatability being invoked to explain how such predicates can be applied to expressions in a language other than ones own.

I’m therefore inclined to think of the non-classicism—at least about the Liar—as a position that *requires* something like this deflationist package. Whereas the folklore non-classicist I was describing previously is clearly someone who takes semantics seriously, and who buys into a generalization of the powerful connections between truth and consequence that a semantic theory of truth affords.

When we come to the analysis of vagueness and other (non-semantic-paradox related) kinds of indeterminacy, it’s now natural to consider this “no interpretation” non-classicism. (Field does exactly this—he conceives of his project as giving a unified account of the semantic paradoxes and the paradoxes of vagueness. So at least *this* kind of nonclassicism, we can confidently attribute to a leading figure in the field). All the puzzles described previously for the non-classicist position are thrown into a totally new light. Once we make this move.

To begin with, there’s no obvious place for the thought that there are multiple truth statuses. For you get that by looking at a many valued model, and imagining that to be an image of what the intended interpretation of the language must be like. And that is exactly the move that’s now illegitimate. Notice that this undercuts one motivation for going towards a fuzzy logic—the idea that one represents vague predicates as some smoothly varying in truth status. Likewise, the idea that we’re just “iterating a bad idea” in multiplying truth values doesn’t hold water on this conception—since the many-values assigned to sentences in models just don’t correspond to truth statuses.

Connectedly, one shouldn’t say that contradictions can be “half true” (nor that excluded middle is “half true”. It’s true that (on say the Kleene approach) that you won’t have ~(p&~p) as a tautology. Maybe you could object to *that* feature. But that to me doesn’t seem nearly as difficult to swallow as a contradiction having “some truth to it” despite the fact that from a contradiction, everything follows.

One shouldn’t assume that “determinately” should be treated as the tertium operator. Indeed, if you’re shooting for a combined non-classical theory of vagueness and semantic paradoxes, you *really* shouldn’t treat it this way, since as noted above this would give you paradox back.

There is therefore a central and really important question: what is the non-classical treatment of “determinately” to be? Sample answer (lifted from Field’s discussion of the literature): define D(p) as p&~(p–>~p), where –> is a certain fuzzy logic conditional. This, Field argues, has many of the features we’d intuitively want a determinately operator to have; and in particular, it allows for non-trivial iterations. So if something like this treatment of “determinately” were correct, then higher-order indeterminacy wouldn’t be obviously problematic (Field himself thinks this proposal is on the right lines, but that one must use another kind of conditional to make the case).

“No interpretation” nonclassicism is an utterly, completely different position from the folklore nonclassicism I was talking about before. For me, the reasons to think about indeterminacy and the semantic and vagueness-related paradoxes in the first place, is that they shed light on the nature of language, representation, logic and epistemology. And on these sorts of issues, the no interpretation nonclassicism and the folklore version take diametrically opposed positions on such issues, and flowing from this, the appropriate ways to arguing for or against these views are just very very different.