https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3651-5458
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ABSTRACT
In this commentary, I draw parallels between the sophists’ and the Socratic account of meaning that McCabe reconstructs from the Euthydemus and views on logic and language found in the works of classical authors of analytic philosophy. I argue that the ingredients of the sophist’s account of truth, which McCabe describes as ‘chopped logos’, correspond to widely held philosophical theses concerning meaning. It shares three of its four ingredients with the direct reference theory of the meanings of proper names. The sophists need a notion of meaning applicable to sayings, not names: they require a notion of truth. This is provided by the remaining ingredient, which is a version of the principle that meanings are truth conditions. The Euthydemus demonstrates dramatically that the combination of the four ingredients is unpalatable. Building on McCabe's point that chopped logos does not get the conditions of failure of sayings right, I conclude that, as the sophists have no notion of falsity of sayings, they have neither a notion of truth nor of meaning.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Fiona Leigh for the invitation to comment and M.M. McCabe for her paper and for many enlightening philosophical discussions
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 He is not quite so neatly introduced in White’s translation, where Theodorus presents him as ‘this man who is visiting us’.
2 Plato says next to nothing about who Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are. Are they such surreal characters that no real person could suffer any affinity with them? Are they worse than Heraclitus and Protagoras, agreeing, as they appear to do, that their father is a dog and a boar, their siblings sea urchins, gudgeons, puppies and piglets? [Euthydemus 298c8–d6, following Kent Sprague’s translation].
3 Denyer [Citation1991: ch 2] draws a similar conclusion from the Euthydemus.
4 See Anscombe [Citation1971: first chapters]. Anscombe [Citationibid.: 13] quotes Theaetetus 189a6–189b2.
5 Strangely Dummett has no convincing answer to the problem of falsity. His account of meaning allows for the possibility that all sentences of a language are true. See Kürbis [Citation2015].
6 Prior, who discusses the problem of falsehood in relation to the correspondence theory of truth, also concludes that ‘naming is one thing, saying or stating another’ [Citation1967: 228].
7 Compare also Davidson’s [Citation2001b] slingshot argument.
8 For discussion of the deflationary theory and problems it faces with the liar paradox, see Marques [Citation2018].
9 Frege accepted that ‘p’ and ‘It is true that p’ have the same content, so he may have been sympathetic to some aspects of the redundancy theory. But obviously he did not hold a redundancy theory of the True. According to Frege, nothing is added to a thought by ascribing truth to it, just like, one might observe, according to Kant nothing is added to an object by ascribing existence to it. Frege expresses doubts that truth is a property. It is sui generis: ‘the content of word “true” is very peculiar and undefinable’ [Frege Citation1918a: 60f].
10 For another intermediate position, inspired by Dummett, see Weiss [Citation2007].
11 McCabe’s [2021a: 133] translation.
12 An observation I owe to McCabe.
13 For much of the dialogue it seems irrelevant whether Euthydemus or Dionysodorus speaks, or whether there are one or two sophists. In this episode, it is not. Euthydemus tells Dionysodorus off for letting Socrates destroy the argument by asking back. ‘And Dionysodorus blushed’ [297a7–8, tr. Kent Sprague]. We see them as persons when they get cross with Socrates and each other.
14 McCabe’s [2020a: 133] translation.
15 Ctesippus final exclamation when debate breaks down, ‘Bravo, Heracles, what a fine argument!’, elicits the oddest question of them all, ‘And Dionysodorus said, Is Heracles a bravo, or is a bravo Heracles?’ [303a6–8]. The different functions of expressions, that previously even the sophists respected to some degree, are finally overthrown.
16 Geach [Citation1962: 31ff] uses this observation to prove that no name is a predicate.
17 If we accept Frege’s context principle, the sophists do not even have a notion of naming: ‘It is necessary to ask for the meaning of words in the context of a sentence, not in isolation’ [Frege Citation1884: XXII].
18 Aristotle makes a similar move with respect to the apparent deniers of the law of non-contradiction. ‘The many writers on nature’ may use contradictory language, but they cannot believe what they say: ‘it is impossible for a man to believe the same thing to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus says; for what a man says he does not necessarily believe’ [Metaphysics 1005b23–26]. Maybe for the Heracliteans of the Theaetetus the best we can achieve is a momentary naming, as an event pops up and disappears again in the constant flux. It is a common interpretation—triggered by images such as the divided line [Republic 509d6 ff]—that Plato agreed with Heraclitus in that there can be no knowledge, but only belief or opinion, about the physical world. McCabe’s account suggests that either Plato did not think this or that he changed his mind. We must draw a stronger conclusion from the Euthydemus: there can be neither knowledge nor opinion about a Heraclitean world. See also McCabe [Citation2000: ch 4].