John Shotter - Movements of feeling and moments of judgment

An Interactional Theory of Truth: On Searle on Truth and Facts

Some observations on John R. Searle's theory of truth, formulated in the final chapter of his book on The Construction of Social Reality (1995).  These observations amount to an interactional critique of Searle's theory, and propose an alternative, interactionist theory of truth. (A complementary take on this interactionist notion of truth can be found in my article Opiniones sobre la verdad).

9. Truth and Correspondence

Searle: "I will in this chapter defend the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to facts" (Penguin ed., 1996, 199). There is an intuitive understanding of this: "On a natural interpretation, the disquotational criterion of truth, together with the appropriate understanding of the notions of 'fact' and 'correspondence', imply the correspondence theory of truth, because if the quoted sentence on the left-hand side of a T sentence really is true, then it must correspond to the fact stated on the right-hand side" (202).

E.g. "The cat is on the mat" is a true sentence if and only if the cat is on the mat.  

 

Strawson rejects the correspondence theory, arguing there is an implied linguistic structure to the facts on the right-hand side which makes the supposed definition circular; as to Searle, "I will argue that Strawson is right to point out the internal connection between fact and true statement but that this does not show that facts are in any sense linguistic entities, or that there is no relation of correspondence between true statements and facts" (208).

"For this reason, because of the definitional connection between fact and true statement, there could not be an inconsistency between the correspondence criterion of truth and the disquotational criterion. 'Fact' is just defined as that in virtue of which a statement is true, and disquotation gives the form of what makes each statement true by simply repeating the statement. But if the statement is true, then repeating it is just the same as stating the fact. The disquotational criterion tells us that the statement 'The cat is on the mat' is true if and only if the cat is on the mat. The correspondence criterion tells us that the statement 'The cat is on the mat' is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact. But which fact? The only fact it could correspond to, if true, is the fact that the cat is on the mat. But that is precisely the result given by the disquotational criterion, because that is the fact stated by the right-hand side of the T sentence: the statement 'The cat is on the mat' is true if and only if the cat is on the mat. And this is also why in order to know that it is true that the cat is on the mat, all we have to do is establish that the cat is on the mat. We don't have to establish in addition that the statement that the cat is on the mat corresponds to the fact that the cat is on the mat, because we have already established that correspondence when we established that the cat is on the mat" (212).

(Searle's argument is cogent in its appeal to facts as distinct from statements; but is mistaken in part because in spite of its being more metalinguistically-savvy, it disregards the role of English as metalanguage—try substituting "el gato está en la alfombrilla"; we obviously need to establish the correspondence between that statement and the statement of the language we use as metalanguage. Moreover, even if we discount the issue of metalanguage, Searle is analysing truth in a void, with laboratory statements addressed by no one to no one, or perhaps by himself to himself. To put it in a nutshell, Searle's truths are truths in themselves, not truths "for someone". The analyst himself is imaginatively bracketed off from the analysis, even as he still is, paradoxically, the implied guarantee for the facts being as they are stated in the proposition, through his recourse to both facts and language. But from the standpoint of a interactionist theory of truth (a theory indebted to the pragmatist tradition—see e.g. George Herbert Mead's A Pragmatic Theory of Truth) a truth is always a truth for someone. I.e. a truth is not true in itself or for just anyone. In actual situations where the establishing or determination of truth is relevant, we need to evaluate other people's statements with reference to the facts and to our own way of stating, or representing, the facts. We cannot bracket ourselves off in the way Searle does—except in an operational way when describing someone else's judgment of truth, e.g. the truths of dogma for Catholics, or those made from the standpoint of obsolete science. In these cases, the judgment of truth is ascribed to some other subject. Therefore, the judgement of truth involves not just ascertaining the correspondence between a statement and a fact, but also evaluating the correspondence between different languages, different representations of the facts, and different presuppositions about them. Evaluating some statement as true, or only partially true, or false, always involves taking sides or positioning oneself in some specific discourse situation, in which something is at stake. The statements about the matter of contention will differ; it is only by stating shared presuppositions that we can produce true statements in such a situation. Because, crucially, a statement is true not only if it "corresponds to the facts", but also if it is evaluated by someone as corresponding to the facts.—JAGL).

Another part of the question addressed by Searle is that our metalanguage for truth describes it in terms of statements. "'True' and 'false' are the crucial terms for assessing success in achieving fit in the mode appropriate to statements, just as 'obeyed' and 'disobeyed' assess success in achieving fit in the manner appropriate to orders." (218)

(Again, perhaps not quite. It is not 'obeyed' and 'disobeyed' that satisfies the direction of fit for orders, but 'appropriateness' or 'inappropriateness', i.e. of fulfilling the felicity conditions for orders, such as whether the order is coming from a person with the relevant authority, or not. Whether we choose to obey or not is quite another issue, a perlocutionary one, not a matter of illocutionary structure.— JAGL). (Moreover, in what follows, Searle's thought experiment in 'creating a language' to describe truth, statements, etc. disregards the conflict situations in which statements of truth typically occur, and the number of participants—because statements of truth need to be evaluated as such.).

From the summary and conclusion, in which Searle states the following: "3. The assignment of 'true' to statements is not arbitrary. In general, statements are true in virtue of conditions in the world that are not parts of the statement. Statements are made true by how things are in the world that is independent of the statement. We need general terms to name these how-things-are-in-the-world, and 'fact' is one such term. Others are 'situation' and 'state of affairs'" (219).

(Again, this leaves out a crucial element in the assignation of 'truth' to a statement. We need to take into account not just the statement, and its concomitant state of affairs understood as a representation by the speaker different from the statement itself; we also need to take into account the evaluator's representation of the state of affairs in question, and of the speaker's aim and performance in providing a linguistic representation of that state of affairs—of its features as they are relevant to the interactional situation. But then there are no speakers or interactants in Searle's model... Just imagine, as an example, how we might go about evaluating as true or false a statement such as "there was no America in the 13th century"—not to mention other complex statements and states of affairs such as "the cat is on the mat". —JAGL).

Other details of Searle's argument involve metalanguage. E.g. Searle assumes that substituting logically equivalent sentences does not mean that we preserve identity of reference; nor does the substitution of coreferring definite descriptions. Then again, facts are not the same as true statements. (Which seems straighforward enough, except perhaps to a philosopher of language. One would need no special arguments, it seems, to differentiate a fact from a statement about a fact... —JAGL). Analysis of facts, Searle concludes, requires more than disquotation. And finally, "9. One (only one) method in philosophy is to analyze the structure of the facts that make our statements true. In earlier chapters I have attempted to do that with the structure of social and institutional facts" (221).

(Perhaps one might then extend to Searle's analysis of institutional facts, helpful and insightful as it is, the critique we have addressed to his definition of truth and of facts. These institutional facts, interactional as they are by nature, lack a crucial interactional dimension; institutions, like truths and facts, stand on a partially unstable ground. They are made both of consensus, of shared and presupposed assumptions and practices, and they are made of dissent, confrontation between people and peoples about the very substance of the world, of the institution, and of the rules of the game, linguistic or otherwise, that we are playing. —JAGL).

Searle ends with a critique of Frege and Davidson's "slingshot argument", in order to show that "identity of facts is not preserved under substitutability of logically equivalent sentences" (225). Sameness of reference is not preserved, and Searle dismisses the argument as really nothing but a logician's sleight of hand.

Note - Davidson's 'slingshot argument', from Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, Clarendon, 1984, p. 42, qtd. by Searle, 235), runs thus: The principles are these: If a statement corresponds to the fact described by an expression of the form 'the fact that p', then it corresponds to the fact described by 'the fact that q' provided either (1) the sentences that replace 'p' and 'q' are logically equivalent, or (2) 'p' differs from 'q' only in that a singular term has been replaced by a coextensive singular term. The confirming argument is this. Let 's' abbreviate some true sentence. Then surely the statement that s  corresponds to the fact that s. But we may substitute for the second 's' the logically equivalent '(the x such that x is identical with Diogenes and s) is identical with (the x such that x is identical with Diogenes)'. Applying the principle that we may substitute coextensive singular terms, we can substitute 't' for 's' in the last quoted sentence, provided 't' is true. Finally, reversing the first step we conclude that the statement that 's' corresponds to the fact that 't', where 's' and 't' are any true sentences.  ______ Cf. also Tristan Haze's view and analysis: "There is a peculiar kind of logical fallacy which, ironically, is only committed by people who have an acquaintance with formal logical theory. Fallacies of this kind arise when principles of inference from formal logic are applied inappropriately to arguments carried out in a natural language." ("An Analysis of Davidson's Slingshot Argument", Sprachlogik 21 Sept. 2011).

Conclusion

In human reality as seen by Searle there is no opposition, or perhaps rather no solution of continuity, between the mental and the physical, or between culture and biology; "culture is the form that biology takes" (227). 

"The connecting terms between biology and culture are, not surprisingly, consciousness and intentionality. What is special about culture is the manifestation of collective intentionality and, in particular, the collective assignment of functions to phenomena where the function cannot be performed solely in virtue of the sheer physical features of the phenomena. From dollar bills to cathedrals, and from football games to nation-states, we are constantly encountering new social facts where the facts exceed the physical features of the undelying physical reality" (228).

(And, to pursue the biological reflection, human institutions rely always on a partially shared intentionality. Human groups share part of the institutional ground under their feet, and differ and debate about the extent of the institutional consensus, or about just which amount of ground is shared, and about the rules, and the facts, sustaining the property of that ground.— JAGL).

"Similarly, though there is a continuity in collective behavior between lions attacking a hyena and the Supreme Court making a constitutional decision, institutional structures have a special feature, namely, symbolism. The biological capacity to make something symbolize—or mean, or express—something beyond itself is the basic capacity that underlies not only language but all other forms of institutional reality as well. Language is itself an institutional structure because it involves the imposition of a special kind of function on brute physical entities that have no natural relation to that function. Certain sorts of sounds or marks count as words and sentences, and certain sorts of utterances count as speech acts. The agentive function is that of representing, in one or other of the possible speech act modes, objects and states of affairs in the world. Agents who can do this collectively have the fundamental precondition of all other institutional structures: Money, property, marriage, government, and universities all exist by forms of human agreement that essentially involve the capacity to symbolize." (228)

(And, I would rejoin, they are all contested ground (money, property, marriage, government, universities...), a matter both of agreement and of contention between groups, as to their status and rules, in a number of interactional situations. Joint assignment of function is essential to institutional behavior, but the questioning of the grounds of the institution, dissent, and paying close attention to the specific interactional situation, and what is at stake in it, seem to be crucial elements in institutional behavior as well.—JAGL).


I will conclude by saying that the shift in perspective proposed here as regards the nature of facts and truth is consistent with Stephen Toulmin's and John Shotter's account of the shift between a modern and a postmodern science of psychology (Conversational Realities, Sage, 1993: 95). Or, perhaps, we are moving further down the road which Searle has already traveled from a modern to a postmodern epistemology. Truths and facts would therefore be kinds of "conversational realities", to use Shotter's terminology. He describes the shift from modern to postmodern psychology as follows:

"Amongst the many other shifts it involves, there is a shift from the standpoint of the detached, theory-testing onlooker, to the interested, interpretative, and procedure-testing participant-observer; from one-way action to two-way interaction; from an interest in theories of underlying processes to an interest in accounting from the actual practices in everyday life. Indeed, this latter shift bespeaks a shift in our understanding of what we take rationality to be: there is now a growing recognition that the pursuit of formal rigour is not necessarily a route to rational soundness (Toulmin 1982b)."  (Shotter, Conversational Realities, 1993: 95).

The reference is to Stephen Toulmin, "The Construal of Reality: Criticism in Modern and Postmodern Science." Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 93-11). My critique of Searle's theory of truth and facts can be paralleled by a similar critique of Umberto Eco's account of legitimate statements, which suffers from a similar lack of interactional specificity. (See my paper "Sobre lo que no se puede decir").

John Searle: The Normative Structure of Human Civilization

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Ex post facto Facts & The Imaginary Construction of Reality

John Shotter's account of the role of the imaginary in social life, and P.G. Ossorio's notion of 'ex post facto facts', can help us understand how our present cognitive perspective shapes our world and gives it a misleading solidity. These concepts are powerful tools for the analysis of ideology, especially when set in the context of a cognitive narratological perspective.

This is a section from John Shotter's Conversational Realities (Sage, 1993), ch. 5, "Social Life and the Imaginary". It follows a discussion of how people create imaginary realities which allow social interaction, with an example from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Godot (or God, why not) may never appear but he plays a necessary function for Vladimir and Estragon:

"although they explain their activity to themselves by referring their supposed waiting to the supposed existence of a Godot, they actually get on in the meantime perfectly well without the existence of this Godot. It is an imagined Godot which plays a real part in their lives" (82); "But the one thing which alone seems clear to them—that they are waiting for Godot—is not a correct account of what they are in fact doing. It is a socially constructed and socially maintained illusion in terms of which they together make sense of their lives to themselves, to which they feel they must subordinate themselves" (82); "they are nevertheless, before our very eyes, living out a number of different, particular forms of life. Yet they cannot 'see' that fact; they have imprisoned themselves within an account of themselves of their own devising. And they, as the individuals they are, prevent themselves from 'seeing' its inadequacy: not just because it is the only 'currency', so to speak, in terms of which they can conduct their joint endeavours, but because they owe their being who they are, their identity in relation to one another, to its continued use. Thus they feel, if they are to avoid a certain ontological disorientation, they must hold each other to its use" (83).

The 'ex post facto fact' fallacy and the illusion of clarity

Yet clearly, in the middle of their confusion, the clarity they appeal to is illusory. And although they lack a sense of confusion, although they do not feel confused, to us, they are in fact still confused: for they have clearly mistaken features of their talk (about some 'thing') for the features of the supposed 'thing' itself. And the fact is, that no matter how clear (in certain special moments of reflection) the existence of Godot may seem to them—as a special and separate being beyond themselves who gives a meaning to their lives—not only need Godot not actually exist, they clearly in fact possess no actual knowledge of Godot at all. Indeed, they wonder at first if another wanderer in the wilds, Pozzo, is Godot. They can (and clealy do) live without an actual Godot or Godots. Yet if aked, that is how they explain their conduct: they are waiting for Godot. Without their waiting—false though it may be as an account of what they are actually doing—their life would seem at least to them to lack any sense of meaning. But the only Godot known to them is a Godot 'subsisting' in their ways of talking about such a being between themselves.

And the lesson for us here is that we too are living like his down-and-outs: no matter how clear and definable the topics of our talk and discussions may seem to us to be, no matter how strongly we may possess a sense of their 'reality', often, we are merely talking about and studying things which only subsist in the sppech we use for co-ordinating our activities with those of the others around us. We have 'given' or 'lent' the things we talk of a nature which—although that which grounds our talk may be such that it 'permits' or 'allows' such an account—they do not actually have. And when it comes to our talk about our own nature, then this issue becomes acute. We cannot 'give it up' and simply turn to an alternative, without a great deal of existential disorientation; yet, we must try.

For it is not just that our means of warranting, justifying, or explaining our actions to those around us—by reference to our supposed 'inner' mental states, to 'motives' and 'feelings' supposedly 'in' us somewhere—is false and hides from us the proper relation of our actions to their context, to their surrounding circumstances. Neither is it just that it supports the illusion of an individualistic, ahistorical, decontextualized from of human agency which falsely ignores the role of our relations to others, especially those of our predecessors who fashioned the current 'organized setting' into which we now act. The nature of the falsity involved is even deeper and more dangerous than that: it is to suppose that our essentially unknown and unknowable human nature, that all our meanings, can be captured within a circumscribed and well-defined, systematic discourse; it is to mistake the imaginary entities, that subsists only in our stories about ourselves, as actually being who we are. Thus, while the social constructionist approach suggests that our nature is such that it is always in the making, that it is never complete, that new aspects of our being are already emergin from the background to our lives, by contrast, our current attempsts to capture ourselves in a range of identifiable, well-defined 'images' or 'models' of our own making, in systematic discourses, suggests otherwise. Such images (or more properly 'we') can create a sense of —an illusion of— fixity and completeness about ourselves; we can 'lend' ourselves a nature which, although it is 'permitted' or 'afforded' by what we already are, only represents one small aspect of what in fact we are, and might next become.

But once we come to view the world from within the confines of an orderly, systematic discourse, the claim that something defined within that discourse essentially underlies all our action—seems undeniable; no one seems able to formulate a doubt about it within terms acceptable [to] followers of the system. What is at work here is a special kind of self-deceptive fallacy to which one becomes prone when one's ideal is that of construc ting, and thinking within a formal system. It is [a] fallacy of a hermeneutical kind, to do with interpreting the meaning of statements, or states of affairs, retrospectively (5), from within such systems, and ignoring the socio-historical processes of argument and contest which are involved in their formulation as such. Following (Ossorio, 1981), I shall call it the 'ex post facto fact' fallacy. The temporal sequence of events involved is as follows:

1. Firstly, a situation is described which, although we do not realize it at the time, is open to a number of possible interpretations.

2. We are, however, then tempted to accept one of these descriptive statements as true.

3. The statement then 'affords' or 'permits' the making of further statements, now of a better articulated nature, till a systematic account has been formulated.

4. The initial interpretation (already accepted as true, of course) now comes to be perceived, retrospectively, as owing its now quite definite character to its place within the now well- specified framework produced by the later statements.

In other words, the original situation has now been 'given' or 'lent' a determinate character, within the terms of the system, which it did not, in its original openness, actually possess.  This, I think, is a fallacy which operates on a grand scale in the social sciences, where we always attempt to make sense of social and psychological phenomena within well-defined systems of terms—that is, systematic discourses. It is what makes it seem that such systems can be detached from their origins in people's social activities, and exist in some free-floating sense 'outside' them. (6)

Someone who has studied its nature in relation to the genesis of the scientific fact is, as I have already mentioned, Ludwik Fleck (1979). As we saw earlier, in attempting retrospectively to understand the origins and development (and the current movement) of our thought, we describe their nature within our to an extent now finished and systematic schematisms. Thus, as he goes on to say:

Cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge. The situation ensures harmony within the dominant view about the origin of knowledge. Whence arises the 'I came, I saw, I conquered'  epistemology, possibly supplemented by a mystical epistemology of intuition. (Fleck, 1979: 86-7)

But the trouble is, once 'inside' such systems, it is extremely difficult to escape from them to recapture the nature of our original, open and indeterminate thoughts, the thought to do with the system's development. We can become as Stolzenberg (1978) puts it, 'entrapped'. Where, the attitudes and habits of thought which prevent those within the system from recognizing its inadequacies arise out of them ignoring what Stolzenberg (1978: 224) calls 'those considerations of standpoint that have the effect of maintaining the system'. In other words, their plight arises, not just from them ignoring the fact that they have located themselves within a particular discursive or intralinguistic reality (sustained by a discourse couched within a particular idiom), but also from the fact within that their (self-contained, systematic) way of talking does not 'afford' or 'permit' the formulation of questions about its relations to its socio-historical surroundings. syntax masquerades as meaning to such an effect, that 'We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it . . . ' (Wittgenstein, 1953: no. 104).



NOTES

5. Much as in linguistics, one studies only patterns of already spoken words, and not the activity of words in their speaking.

6. This process is also discussed of course by Marx and Engels in their account in The German Ideology of how the 'ruling illusion' of 'the hegemony of the spirit in history' (Hegel) is produced.



(Works cited:)

Beckett, S. (1956). Waiting for Godot. London: Faber.
Fleck, L. (1979). The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Marx, K., and F. Engels. (1977). The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.
Ossorio, P. G. (1981). 'Ex post facto': The Source of Intractable Origin Problems and Their Resolution. Boulder, Colorado: Linguistic Research Institute Report no. 28.
Stolzenberg, G. (1978). "Can an Inquiry into the Foundations of Mathematics Tell Us Anything Interesting about Mind?" In Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought: Essays in Honour of Eric Lennberg. New York: Academic Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.



This is a significant passage for the study of the cognitive value of retrospection and retroaction, especially when it is connected to a cognitive narratology, and to a perspectivist analysis of ideology. "The ex post facto fact fallacy" is another term for (or rather a subclass of) what has been called 'hindsight bias', or what (in a narratological context) I call the narrative fallacy par excellence.

Concepts such as Morson and Bernstein's sideshadowing  and backshadowing are also apposite to this analytic perspective. The present, in sum, changes the landscape of the past, which must be reopened and explored in order to fully understand it. (Although the imaginative reopening of the past is always effected from a virtual bracketing of hindsight, not an actual suppression of it. We cannot renounce the benefits of hindsight, even as we reinterpret the past in terms which are less univocally indebted to present priorities).

A perspective reorders the past and erases the process which generated it, or dispels and discredits the systems which preceded it. The cognitive coherence of a perspective is thus enhanced and reinforced, and its genesis and prehistory are dowplayed or obscured. The present or dominant cognitive perspective is thus naturalized as self-explaining; it is bootstrapped into its present position, and the representations it provides are interpreted as nature itself. Roland Barthes's reflections on the naturalization of ideology come also to mind as a related topic for reflection. If our cognitive landscape structures and shapes the fabric of reality, it is reality itself which is cognitively remade through this narrative fallacy, this hindsight bias. Reality rests therefore, to some extent, on an illusion created by hindsight.

Retropost: En el retrovisor

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Conversational realities

John Shotter (Professor of Interpersonal Relations, Dpt. of Communication, U of New Hampshire). Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. (Inquiries in Social Construction). London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE, 1993.*

Converational Realities challenges the traditional scientific view that naturally occurring psychological and sociological 'realities' of a systematic kind are to be discovered underlying appearances. Instead, this book claims that such orderly 'realities' are both socially constructed and sustained within the context of people's disorderly, everyday conversational activities.

John Shotter's interdisciplinary analysis highlights the socially contested but imaginary nature of many of the 'things' we talk about in social life, and illuminates the processes of their 'construction'. He offers a broad-ranging exploration of the rhetorical, argumentative nature of conversational communication, using interesting examples taken from psychotherapy, management and everyday life.

Drawing on psychology, communication studies, anthropology, sociology, history and socio-linguistics, this imaginative and original book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in current debates across the social and human sciences.


From the reviews:

`I like this book, will recommend it to colleagues and students, and expect it to become a staple citation in articles and books I publish... Sometimes books an academic reads enable a person to make connections among previously disconnected pieces of experience, recurring preferences and passions, and particular life decisions. Reading Conversational Realities accomplished this for me... it is theoretically rich, philosophically thoughtful and experientially evocative' - Human Studies


`[An] immensely thoughtful, informative and persuasive treatment of the "rhetorical-responsive version of social constructionism" via an eclectic blend of, principally, European and American linguistics, philosophy and social psychology... Shotter's book is most important for continuing the work begun by Billig and others bringing recognition via recollection to the rhetorical corpus. He claims to target his recovery of these materials toward psychologists; readers in related disciplines will certainly also benefit' - Discourse & Society

`This book is fascinating... It is important for several reasons. First, it provides an overview of an approach to the social sciences known as social constructionism... Second, Shotter maintains that the fundamental human reality is persons in conversations... Third, Shotter is concerned with practical implications, not just theoretical conceptions' - Studies in Second Language Acquisition

 Montaigne y la construcción social de la realidad

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