The Nature of Truth by Maria Jose Frapolli

Author:Maria Jose Frapolli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

4.4 Particular Pragmatic Functions

Truth ascriptions present several distinctive semantic and syntactic traits. The diversity is not superfluous, for each kind of truth ascription is appropriate to a specific pragmatic job.

In what follows, the diverse types introduced in Chap. 3 will be further analyzed. Prosentences are the sentential analogues of pronouns, and both pronouns and prosentences are proforms. It is relatively uncontroversial that pronouns are used in acts of reference, both direct and anaphoric, and also as instruments for generalization. Checking whether proforms in general have roles corresponding to those carried out by pronouns will help to understand their behaviour. What prosentences and pronouns have in common cannot be the properties derived from their structural features: pronouns are singular terms and truth ascriptions are sentences. Nevertheless the analogy between the two kinds of expressions can be perceived by focusing on the actions the help to perform.

What is the kind of action beneath a directly referential use of a pronoun? Through the directly referential use of a pronoun the speaker intends to direct the audience’s attention to the item he wants to refer to; he brings the subject of his utterance in the public arena. If the speaker wants to place in front of his audience’s eyes a complete propositional content, he could use a truth ascription in which the content is displayed. This can be done by including in the truth ascription a sentence whose meaning somehow parallels the intended content. Singular exhibitive truth ascriptions are perfectly appropriate to accomplish this task.

Singular exhibitive truth ascriptions reproduce thus the pronoun’s role of picking up individuals and attracting the audience’s attention to them. The counterparts of individuals in the case of prosentences are propositions, and truth ascriptions “pick up” one of them and exhibit it. Apart from their role of exhibiting content, truth ascriptions of type A exhibitive are genuine truth ascriptions that take part in acts of assertion, acts in which the agent endorses a content and commits himself to its inferential aspects. An asserted content is one that is ready to be used as settled information. When a content is thus distinguished, the pragmatic significance of the whole act is naturally seen as a way of inserting the content in question into the set of potential premises. This pragmatic function will be dubbed the “vertical role” of truth-ascriptions (to fit the metaphor of pronouns “picking up” an individual).

Falsity ascriptions are also prosentences; a singular exhibitive falsity ascription, such as (3), (3)“Madrid is south from Granada” is a false sentence,

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