Lindsay asked:

I am trying to find a case where the notion of truth arguably cannot be eliminated (and hence it would
appear that there remains a "problem" of truth).

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I'm not clear on your question. What does "arguably cannot be eliminated" mean? You might look at
Kitcher's book The Advancement of Science, and also Bernard Williams' latest (and other) writings on
truth. Both believe that there is truth to be found, and both approach it somewhat differently. As far as
I'm concerned, when you try to fly by flapping your arms and cannot, or try to walk through a wall and
cannot, you have had an encounter with truth which arguably cannot be ignored, at any rate. Is that
what you mean? Also, what about mathematical truths? Given particular definitions of numbers and
operations on numbers, it is true that 2+2=4. Is that a problem? Why?

Steven Ravett Brown

Your question is about a view which goes back to Frank Ramsay's 'Redundancy Theory' of truth.
Truth is a 'redundant' concept, because when I say, 'It is true that it is raining', or '"It is raining" is true',
my statement is equivalent to 'It is raining'. In other words, the phrases, 'It is true that...' and '...is true'
can, in principle, be eliminatedfrom language without any loss of power to express factual content,
making it (apparently) unnecessary to ask the metaphysical question, 'What is truth?'. More recently,
C.J.F. Williams (in his book Truth) and Paul Horwich (in a more recent book also entitled Truth) have
argued for more sophisticated versions of Ramsay's view.

The eliminative strategy is no easy option. Suppose (I realize this is far fetched) you wanted to say all
of the things that GK says on this page are true. That requires a lot less words than reporting every
single thing that GK says on this page (assuming that one could agree on a way of countinghow
many separate statements GK has made) and then statingeach assertion as something you agree
with. E.g. GK said, 'The eliminative strategy is no easy option', and the eliminative strategy isno easy
option, GK said, '...' and... etc.

But that's only the beginning. You might not remember any particular thing GK said, but only that you
were convinced at the time. So you say, 'GK said something true'. You cannot remember a statement
to quote. So you have to say instead:

"There is a statement X that GK made, andX."

The technical term for this is 'propositional quantification'. This idea raises a number of difficult logical
issues, including the one I just mentioned of deciding on a way to count statements. Another problem
is that, unlike predicate calculus, which 'quantifies' over objects, the statements or 'propositions'
which form the class or domain of things quantified over include propositions which themselves
quantify over propositions. For example, remembering what you said about what GK said, a third
person might say:

"There is a statement Y that Lindsay made, andY."

Amongst the propositions which the variable Y ranges over, is the statement, 'There is a statement X
that GK made, and X.' A fourth person might want to report what the third person said, and so on,
leading to a potentially infinite hierarchy of more and more complex statements/ propositions. This is
a state of affairs ripe for generating logical paradoxes.

Is there any clear example where truth cannot be eliminated by propositional quantification? Consider
the statement, 'England will win the football match with Slovenia tomorrow.' There are just two
possibilities: Either England will win, or England will not win (i.e. Slovenia wins, or the match is a
draw, or the match is cancelled or etc.). The Fatalistis not happy, however, with merely stating the
obvious, 'Either England will win or not.' In terms of propositional quantification:

"There is a proposition Z such that Z='England will win' or Z='England will not win', andZ."

The fatalist wants to say more. We are not merely describing different possible futures. One of these
two alternatives is actually true.Here, arguably, is a case where 'truth' is used in a metaphysical
sense which cannot be reduced to a mere logical/ grammatical convenience. (The proponent of the
redundancy theory will, of course, say that this shows what is wrong with fatalism, and other similar
metaphysical views about truth.)

Geoffrey Klempner