Prawda i prawdziwość sądów moralnych

Abstract

The author first seeks to elucidate the sense of the question “Is such and such a kind of judgement the kind of judgement that can be plainly or straightforwardly true?” By exploiting the Fregean elucidation of meaning as truth-conditions and then naturalizing the Fregean conception of meaning by connecting it with “radical interpretation”, he identifies five “marks” of truth (properties that we shall expect every judgement with the property of truth to enjoy). These marks do not comprise an analysis of truth. They do however serve to articulate what the property of truth is like. He then argues that, among moral judgements, many or most strictly evaluational judgements (e.g. “that was a cruel (kind, considerate ,impolite) thing to do”) have these five marks and are relatively straightforward candidates for truth, whereas practical judgements (judgements like “x must ø”, “x must not ø”, “x had better ø” etc.) import serious difficulties, even when properly understood in their context. Given the expectation that, if a statement is true, then it will under favourable circumstances command a convergence in beliefs the best explanation of which convergence requires the actual truth of the statement (the second mark of truth), it is the “essential contestability” that we rightly attribute to so many practical judgements that renders their truth status so problematic. Nevertheless truth is their aspiration.