Theory of truth involving a virtual omniscient being

Question

I think a correct theory of truth would have to involve a correspondence of some kind between the world and the proposition, but there are problems with trying to explain the connection between cognition and the world. It has occurred to me that one way to avoid these problems is to abstract away from the world and instead appeal to a correspondence between a proposition and the knowledge of an omniscient being. Let G be an omniscient being who never lever lies. The sort of theory I have in mind is:

A proposition P is true iff G would agree with the proposition.

Has anyone discussed this sort of theory and/or criticized it? I'm more interested in the analytic tradition. I know you could probably find related stuff among the scholastics or from Leibniz or Berkeley, but I'm looking for later stuff that doesn't have religious overtones, and specifically doesn't require an actual omniscient being, but only a virtual one.

ADDENDUM in response to comments:

1. What is the problem with just saying that a proposition is true if it corresponds with a fact? A lot of philosophers have a problem with the existence of facts, but that's not my problem with it. My problem is in characterizing a fact in such a way that it possible for it to "correspond" with a proposition. If you say that a fact is an object that is part of the world and not a mental object, then what would it mean for it to correspond with a proposition, which is a concept, a mental object? In what sense would a concept correspond to a part of the world? If you say that a fact is a mental object (as an idealist might do), then you have to deal will all sorts of problems of dealing with facts (such as what the inside of a neutron star is like) that don't seem accessible to perception or any direct human verification, but where it still makes sense to ask whether propositions corresponding to those facts are true or not.

2. I recognize that there is a flavor of circularity here, but I think the cycle can be broken by appeals to observable facts. When I say that the omniscient being doesn't lie, I mean something like this: the set of propositions that it agrees to are all consistent with each other at a particular time, and any proposition that it agrees to will never prove to oppose what humans can or could observe given any theoretical powers of observation. Basically the idea is to reduce facts to something like Kantian intuitions, but with a mechanism to deal with unobservable facts.

Answer 1

There are coherence theories of truth operating under such an assumption:

Coherentists generally agree that the specified set consists of propositions believed or held to be true. They differ on the questions of who believes the propositions and when. At one extreme, coherence theorists can hold that the specified set of propositions is the largest consistent set of propositions currently believed by actual people. For such a version of the theory, see Young (1995). According to a moderate position, the specified set consists of those propositions which will be believed when people like us (with finite cognitive capacities) have reached some limit of inquiry. For such a coherence theory, see Putnam (1981). At the other extreme, coherence theorists can maintain that the specified set contains the propositions which would be believed by an omniscient being. Some idealists seem to accept this account of the specified set. ... Coherentists who do not believe that the specified set is the set of propositions believed by an omniscient being are committed to rejection of the principle of bivalence since it is not the case that for every proposition either it or a contrary proposition coheres with the specified set. They reject the principle of transcendence since, if a proposition coheres with a set of beliefs, it can be known to cohere with the set. [emphasis added]

As you are asking for a virtual version of this theory, I should like to cite C. S. Peirce's essay about a "neglected argument for God" which is caught up with his sense of truth vs. an ideal limit of inquiry:

Assured as I am from my own personal experience that every man capable of so controlling his attention as to perform a little exact thinking will, if he examines Zeno's argument about Achilles and the tortoise, come to think, as I do, that it is nothing but a contemptible catch, I do not think that I either am or ought to be less assured, from what I know of the effects of Musement on myself and others, that any normal man who considers the three Universes in the light of the hypothesis of God's Reality, and pursues that line of reflection in scientific singleness of heart, will come to be stirred to the depths of his nature by the beauty of the idea and by its august practicality, even to the point of earnestly loving and adoring his strictly hypothetical God, and to that of desiring above all things to shape the whole conduct of life and all the springs of action into conformity with that hypothesis. Now to be deliberately and thoroughly prepared to shape one's conduct into conformity with a proposition is neither more nor less than the state of mind called Believing that proposition, however long the conscious classification of it under that head be postponed.

There is my poor sketch of the Neglected Argument, greatly cut down to bring it within the limits assigned to this article.

But then one need not characterize a (hypothetical) theistic alethology as coherentistic. A hypothetical apex inquirer would fit to a pragmaticist image of the truth (as with Peirce, apparently), and the pragmatic theory of truth is not necessarily coherentistic.

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So far, I have not clearly found criticisms of your concept, in the literature (perhaps Manning[95] counts, though, but reading it requires institutional access so I can't be sure). A favorable gloss of the idea is seemingly to be found in Ochs[86]:

I suggest that, for a type of scripturally grounded Jewish philosophy, truth names the end of a process of inquiry that passes through several stages of trusting, reexamining, yearning, witnessing, critically testing, and re-sourcing. I suggest that this process bears analogy to Charles Peirce's pragmatic account of the stages of problem solving.

Answer 2

I'll bite and make gs's circularity objection into an answer, especially after you said that you are also interested in ad-hoc criticism.

1. The circularity argument is more of a transfer argument: We don't know what is true, so we offload the — still impossible! — task of discerning true from false to a fictitious being; nothing is gained.

   There is also a more "procedural" transfer: Everybody agrees that "the connection between cognition and the world", the problem you try to evade, is not trivial; but it applies of course to any interaction with G as well.

2. The transfer argument becomes even more striking if we imagine the fictitious omniscient being G as ourselves with perfect knowledge. Then, "a proposition P is true iff G would agree with the proposition" devolves into "a proposition P is true iff, assuming we knew if it was true, we would agree with the proposition" which is not more than saying "if only we knew" ;-).

3. If G could only answer "yes" or "no" it would almost certainly answer "no" to any and all theoretical scientific questions because our theories are almost certainly incomplete. For example, it would have said "No" to Newtonian physics laws (which assume instant interaction between distant objects and hence are very fundamentally untrue). Relativity theory likely shares their fate from a more advanced standpoint; it would be preposterous to assume they are the last thing to say about the topic.

   If G can say more than yes or no, it would say "hmmmm, well — within the border conditions you can produce it is true, if you exceed them it becomes false." But we knew that.

4. Because G does not exist and we have no means of simulating it this truth theory is not productive. It has no use.

5. Last not least, reality itself is the only place that contains all the information there is; any simulation of it (which would have to run in G's reasoning facilities so that it can discern facts existing in reality from non-facts) is necessarily a simplification and hence incomplete. A truly omniscient G can logically not exist, even if we ignore problems of recursiveness (does it simulate itself? Can it answer questions about itself, or about how reality changes because of its answers?) that likely lead to issues like solving the halting problem, undecidable propositions (Gödel) and antinomies (Russell).

   Another way to phrase this is to say "G is the universe; if the universe says it's true it's true". Popper would certainly subscribe to that.

Answer 3

Let G be an omniscient being who never lever lies. The sort of theory I have in mind is:

A proposition P is true iff G would agree with the proposition.

This seems like a Theory of Truth based on Expert Opinions and their value as indicators of the truth. The omniscient being in your example represents the "perfect state", but expert opinions can have reliability ranges so simple propositions now have probabilities attached to them.

Answer 4

Your post does not deal with the question how to define truth. Instead you ask for a universal method, how to verify general propositions as being true propositions.

1. Since the turn of falsificationism due to Karl Popper such an enterprise seems a bit backwards-looking, like reestablishing the outdated search for final justification in epistemology.

   Popper was a philosopher who criticized the search for such a theory.

2. From Popper's viewpoint it seems exotic to search for an omniscient being “G”.

   If the virtual classical theistic being “G” did not achieve what you want, why do you think that a virtual non-theistic being “G” has a better change to satisfy the requirement?

Answer 5

You say:

I think a correct theory of truth would have to involve a correspondence of some kind between the world and the proposition

and

I'm trying to define what it means to say of a proposition that it is true.

While you're free to interpret theories of truth as right and wrong, many notable philosophers such as Pierce, Dewey, James, Sellars, McDowell, Rorty, Van Fraassen, and a great number of others gravitate towards adequacy. That's because truth-conditional semantics is highly influential in secular philosophy and that carries with it Tarski's semantic theory of truth. As such, T-sentences allow a judgement of truth between a correspondence between the proposition and the subject of the proposition to be left to those wielding the metalanguage which is frequently free to be interpreted in accordance with the intent of the creator of the model. This is because Tarski used incompleteness in the same was as Gödel to argue "that a truth-predicate satisfying Convention T for the sentences of a given language cannot be defined within that language". Thus, we have to bridge from within the language to without, which is the goal of metaphysical grounding.

In simpler language, the truth of a proposition is relative to the nature of the metaphysical grounding (SEP). If one wants to ground propositions in empirical facts derived from the physical world, then one has the correspondence theory of truth (SEP). If one wants to ground propositions in the consistency with other propositions, then one has the coherence theory of truth (SEP). According to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry "Truth", besides the semantic, correspondence, and coherence theories, there are also the identity and disquotational/deflationary accounts of truth which appeal to other strategies besides empirical evidence and rational coherence.

As to appealing to an omniscient being, that was advocated by Augustine and Aquinas (Academia.edu), and today is still a strategy preached by some theologians. For instance, R.C. Sproul was a notable supporter of such a claim. He argues that point in his writings here. The idea that truth originates God is a distinctly theological thesis that has little currency with modern epistemologists who are predominantly secular naturalists. If you're looking for a modern take, it would seem your investigations should start with him.

This is part and parcel of the evolution of what is demarcated as "philosophy" according to Maria Sassi in her The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece. Thales and Anaximander began reforming thinking by moving cosmogony towards apeiron and away from the narratives of Homer and Hesiod. Thus, philosophers have always been more preoccupied by 'Is there a God?' more than 'What does God think?'. Philosophers who are religious fundamentalists, pietists, and fideists of all stripes quickly move from the first question to the second, but most mainstream professional secular philosophers are comfortable with the range of theories of truth that don't involve divine beings.

Looking at the index of A Companion to Epistemology also produces some additional theories of truth (consensual, redundancy, minimal, etc.) none of which meet the criteria of corresponding with the thinking of a divine being. While the guide doesn't specifically explain why a theory isn't named and included, one might reasonably infer the difficulty lies in the practicality of such a method to ascertain the truth. Even if one fully embraces a divine being, and certainly many professional philosophers are theists of some stripe, knowing what God's truth is is not obvious or simple. If it were, there would be no need for faith, scripture, or divine revelation.