by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: February 27, 2008   Last Updated: October 08, 2009

Reading recently in Quine's book on 'The Philosophy of Logic' I had moved on through a chapter on grammar on to one of truth. Quine's approach to the salient features of grammar is from the point of view of a logician and linguist rather than as a grammarian. The question of is there an absolute truth would probably be answered by Quine by a symbolic logic notation expressing what the grammatical constructions had predicated.

Quine viewed grammar as the rules of construction of a language's phonemes to form meaning. Some rules for putting together the limited number of phonemes or sound units would exist to let the articulation or writing of the twenty plus sound units have a comprehensible order in which meaning could be expressed. Quine investigated the location of meaning in word constructions; was it in morphemes, propositions or sentences, and determined that the meaning even of sentences was integrated within the entirety of the language usage and phenomenalized to provide an individual meaning.

Words differ from their referents entirely. The word 'ocean' is entirely different from the nameless body of water also called the Pacific Ocean for-itself. When using words to refer to other words and categories of words we are expressing ideas about fundamentally different kinds of referent. When we ask 'does absolute truth exist' we are not asking if some empirical object referent exists.

Does the Earth have absolute truth? Does the Universe have absolute truth? Truth seems to cohere within verbal agreement to a predicate rather than as a for itself in the empirical world of objects. Truth must in some way be associated with facts, and the fact of the existence of the Universe might deserve the conferring of the term 'truth' upon it, yet it would still be a sort of honorary conference of meaning, and meaning rather than naming or labeling are different ventures too. We would be a little vague inn our effort to call the Pacific Ocean 'truth'. It would best deserve the title if we had driven from Nebraska and the discovery of the Pacific was a reply to the proposition 'the pacific ocean exists beyond the left coast'.

Quine was an inventor of symbolic logic notations and use in the course of the evolution of that discipline. Symbolic logic notations allow the formal representation of grammatical kinds of construction. We may represent how sentences are set, and consider the structures of sentences comparatively. 'Does absolute truth exist' could be formed as 'does

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