We have been been talking about truth-bearers. A truth-bearer is an entity that can be meaningfully characterized as either true or false. Beliefs are candidate truth-bearers: it makes sense to say of a belief that it is true or false, in a way in which it does not make sense to say of a brain state (or any physical state) that it is true or false. The same goes for judgments. Now consider the sentence-token 'Deniz mavidir.' In itself it is neither true nor false since it is just a string of marks. Whether or not it is true depends on what sense it expresses. This sense (roughly, Frege's Sinn) is nothing physical. You can't see it with your eyes. To 'see' it you must use the 'eye of the mind.' In other words, you have to understand the sentence, and that is not accomplished merely by running your eyes over a string of physical marks, or allowing acoustical disturbances to enter your ears.
Let us define a proposition (roughly, Frege's
Gedanke) as the sense of an indexical-free declarative sentence. Interrogatives, optatives, etc. no doubt have senses as well, but they are not propositions. We can then say that the Turkish 'Deniz mavidir' expresses the proposition that we express with 'The sea is blue.'
The proposition The sea is blue is obviously distinct from any sentence used to express it. This is because there are indefinitely many sentences in indefinitely many languages that can be used to express one and the same proposition. If you said that the proposition The sea is blue is identical to the sentence-token 'The sea is blue,' then you would be committed to saying that all tokens of the type 'The sea is blue' are identical with each other — which is absurd.
Now given that The sea is blue is true, we can and must ask two further questions:
Q1. Can a proposition be true if there is nothing to which its subject-term refers?
Q2. Can a (contingent) proposition be true if there is no fact or state of affairs that makes it true?
The questions are distinct since a negative answer to the first is consistent with an affirmative answer to the second. I incline toward a negative answer to both questions. Consider
1. Bush is inarticulate.
It is difficult to see how this could be true if there is nothing to which 'Bush' refers. The existence of Mr. Bush is a presupposition of its being true of him that he is inarticulate. This seems as clear as anything. Call it the veritas sequitur esse principle: truth follows being. If the predicate 'F' is true of x, then x exists. But now consider
2. Sherlock is clever
where 'Sherlock' refers to A. C. Doyle's fictional character.
Obviously, Sherlock doesn't exist. So if we adhere to veritas sequitur esse(VSE), we will have to deny that (2) is true. And this doesn't seem right. What we need to do is preserve the truth of (2) while upholding VSE. Perhaps we can do this if we analyze (2) in terms of
3. The fictional world of A. C. Doyle is such that Sherlock is clever.
Although (2) appears to be about Sherlock, it cannot be about him since he doesn't exist; it is about something that does exist, namely, Doyle's fictional oeuvre and predicates of it the property of featuring a clever detective named 'Sherlock.'
I'm not sure this works, but let's move on. The main point I want to make is that veritas sequitur esse is distinct from the truthmaker principle. In the case of (1), what VSE commits us to is the existence of the referent of 'Bush.' It sanctions the inference from (1) to 'There exists an x such that x is inarticulate.' But truthmaker says more. It says that corresponding to (1) there is a state of affairs, or a concrete fact, that makes (1) true. VSE implies that in the realm of concreta there is Bush; TM implies that in the realm of concreta there is the state of affairs, Bush's being inarticulate.
I find the truthmaker principle very attractive. For if a contingent sentence like (1) is true, it it cannot just be true; it is true in virtue of the way the world is. And it is not enough that the domain of existents contain Bush; it must also contain Bush's being inarticulate. For the bare existence of Bush is consistent with both the truth and falsity of (1).
Related Posts (on one page):
- Veritas Sequitur Esse and the Truthmaker Principle
- Terminology and Distinctions: Use and Mention
It seems that in your answer to Q2, you assume that (2) is true but 'Sherlock' has no referent. Why can't we say that Sherlock exists thanks to the creative work of Doyle? We don't want to say that Sherlock's existence does not depend upon whether Doyle wrote novels and I'm not certain that I'd want to say that of the things that don't exist, Sherlock is one of the cleverest.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.