(Ellenbogen 2003; Vision 2005). We might ask whether or not a proposition does correspond to a state of affairs and we would need some criterion for saying whether or not it did. A coherence account of truth would broadly claim that a proposition is true if it coheres with or perhaps is consistent with other propositions taken to be true, or better, if it belongs to a set which provides mutual explanatory support (Young 2018). While coherence accounts attempt to provide a sufficient account of what it is for a proposition to be true, this can only be the case if it is possible to advance satisfactory criteria for coherence and there is often substantial disagreement about what these are.
Pragmatism in its simplest form holds that truth (with some qualifications) is determined by utility (James 1907).2 , 3 This claim has obvious drawbacks and it is much more common for pragmatists to think of ascriptions of truth in relation to whole systems of belief and in particular to those fundamental propositions on which the truth conditions of less fundamental ones depend, but which are themselves subject to revision when our practical concerns appear to require it. Quine is sometimes thought to be a pragmatist in this sense (Quine 1951, see p. 43; Godfrey-Smith 2014). These are difficult to themselves justify empirically, as few or no propositions could count against them (Locke 1689), but which can in principle be overturned. Such propositions are, in principle, defeasible; however unlikely it may be, they can be trumped by experience (Quine 1951; Hacker 1996). Such propositions, however, differ from Wittgenstein’s hinge or axis propositions which have a normative or quasi-normative status (Hacker 1996) in that they are, even if only in a somewhat extended sense, provisional in any given conceptual scheme. At the margins they may be discarded and the conceptual scheme modified, they have no special status except one of degree of defeasibility. Ultimately their status as truths rests upon the value that they have in upholding our more mundane truth-preserving practices.
The difference between this way of looking at truth and the criterial conception defended here is that truth criteria cannot be defeasible. It is a characteristic of criteria that they are decisive in determining whether a proposition or statement is true or false. If they were not, then we would need some other way of determining truth (Ellenbogen 2003). Criteria are objective in the sense that they hold independently of whether any group, authoritative or not, make judgements that are not in accord with them. But they do need to have general acceptance within a practice for that practice to be viable. The criteria for determining the truth of propositions may well vary from practice to practice. The criterion for determining the truth of whether or not a school building is of a certain age will differ from the criterion for determining whether or not a particular assessment practice is worth retaining, for example. So in practice both educational practices and research into those practices will depend on different criteria, a reflection of a broader diversity in criteria within assertoric practices more generally. In particular, it is the responsibility of educational researchers to adopt criteria which can deal with the largest possible range of possible defeaters of judgements. They also have a responsibility to take seriously and to try to understand the criteria for truth adopted by those whom they are researching.
Although truth criteria are objective because they are independent of the judgement of individuals and groups and are indefeasible, it is also the case that they are in principle and practice revisable. New criteria can be adopted and old ones abandoned as science and systematic enquiry progresses. The history of science is testament enough to the adoption of new and the abandonment of old truth criteria, as different techniques of measurement and their underlying rationale establish themselves. As Ellenbogen puts it, investigation can reveal that our criteria for what is true and for what is real may come apart at times. ‘We should revise our picture of the meaning of “is true” as being independent of our current knowledge; this is a use which we should reserve for “is real”’ (p. 116). Our picture of the meaning of ‘is true’ is a philosophical picture in which ‘is true’ and ‘is real’ tend to get conflated. Acknowledging this does not damage the objectivity of judgements made according to established criteria. All it does is to withdraw the implicit claim made by some philosophers that ‘is true’ is a contraction of ‘is true for all time and in all circumstances’ or the claim that ‘is true’ is equivalent to ‘corresponds with reality’. If this expansion of ‘is true’ is accepted then little that we hold to be true would in fact count as such and the concept would have little use for us. What we rightly count as true now may not be counted as true later when judged according to different criteria. But we don’t make the commitment that it should be, when we make an assertion. We make the assertion against the background of criteria that we take to be valid at the time.
One line of argument from a pragmatist perspective might be to substitute the concept of warranted assertibility for that of truth (Dewey 1941). We thus escape the seeming paradox that arises from the rejection of the timelessness of truth. However, this is not really a solution. Someone who asserts a proposition or makes a statement usually sincerely believes it to be the case, in other words, to believe that it is true. Propositions are those linguistic items that are taken to be true or false. ‘Warranted assertibility’ seems to move away from being a truth claim, but this is only appearance; we cannot dispense with the concept of truth in our understanding of the world so easily. Thus to put p forward is already to acknowledge that it is capable of being true or false (Stoutland 1998).
But there is another reason for suspicion concerning substantive theories of truth that claim to provide an explanation of what truth is. This is best seen in relation to the correspondence theory, which seems to underlie the difficulties that many educational researchers have in accepting a single reality. To say that p is true is to say that p corresponds with some aspect of reality, say a state of affairs (Wittgenstein 1921). This is an explanation of what ‘p is true’ means, that is, it is supposed to increase our understanding of what it is for p to be true. But is this a real explanation? Consider the following argument:
1 For all p, p is true if and only if (iff) p corresponds to some S.
2 p is true iff p corresponds to S.
3 Call p corresponds to S: q.
4 q is true iff q corresponds to T.
5 Call q corresponds to T: r.
6 r is true iff r corresponds to U .
As an explanation of correspondence this leads to a vicious regress in which ‘corresponds to’ cannot be eliminated from the explanation. The idea, therefore, that EER is an attempt to reach correspondence with reality should be rejected. In fact, the argument is stronger than that. It holds for any substantive theory of truth, be it coherence, pragmatism or the Fregean naming theory. Consider E as the explanans (explainer) of what makes any proposition true.
1 p is true iff pE.
2 pE is true iff (pE)E.
3 (pE)E is true iff ((pE)E)E.
And so on. Clearly E has to be invoked both as explanandum (thing to be explained) and explanans (explainer) in the expansion of the explanation of what it means to say that p is true. Thus any attempt to provide explanations of what it means to say that a claim about an educational practice is true, be it from a correspondence, coherence, pragmatist or Fregean perspective will not work. We need to approach the question of educational truth in a different way.
On the face of it, a criterial account of truth would fail on the general argument. A criterial account holds that
p is true iff the relevant criteria for p’s being true actually hold.
However, this is not an explanation like the other examples, because it is transparently circular. It is not an explanation of what ‘p is true’ actually means and could not be because it mentions truth in the explanans. Rather, it is better seen as an invitation to look
