The Tip and the Bottom What makes an Estimate true

Forthcoming in: Giuffrida, S., Trovato, M.R., Fattinanzi, E., Rosato, P., Oppio, A. (eds.), Valuation Science. Natural Structures, Technological Infrastructures, Cultural Superstructures, Springer, 2021 The Tip and the Bottom What makes an Estimate true? Abstract In this chapter some basic notions and recent developments in the theories of judgement and truth will be applied, as a case study, to real estate estimates in order to answer the following questions: are they descriptive or evaluative judgements? Is their truth absolute or relative to some parameter? Is their truth a matter of correspondence with objective, mind-independent facts or is it a matter of coherence with some mind- dependent standards (in a broad sense of “mind-dependent” which includes cultural and social standards)? The answers to these questions will show that real estate estimates are an interesting borderline case between descriptive and evaluative judgements, absolute and relative truth, correspondence with an objective reality and coherence with mind-dependent standards. 1. The varieties of judgement Since a long time philosophers have distinguished several kinds of judgements depending on their content: a fundamental divide here is between descriptive judgements concerning mindindependent features of the world, such as 1) The Earth orbits the Sun and evaluative judgements, that is to say those by which we express our positive or negative assessment of things, actions and events using words such as “right”, “wrong”, “good”, “bad”, “beautiful”, “ugly”; these are judgements like 2) Causing pain just for pleasure is wrong 3) Mona Lisa is a beautiful painting 4) Lemon ice cream tastes good. 1.1. Descriptive judgements Descriptive judgements can be true or false: they are true when things are as they say they are and false otherwise; that is to say they have, with some exceptions, the feature called “truthaptness”1. Moreover their truth seems to be absolute and eternal; this means that if a descriptive judgement is true, it is true full stop and not true just relatively to a perspective, a standard of evaluation, a theory (and maybe not true relatively to a different one); moreover if a descriptive judgement is true (false) at a given time it remains true (false) at any other time. Consider again sentence (1): the only sense in which it seems to be correct to say that (1) is true relatively to Newtonian rational mechanics but it was not true relatively to, say, Aristotelian cosmology is that, the negation of (1) was a consequence of some theoretical assumptions of the latter theory and that people accepting this theory were rationally justified, given these assumptions and the available evidence, in believing the negation of (1), whereas we are rationally justified, given our acceptance of Newtonian rational mechanics and evidence available to us, in believing (1). Therefore when, in cases like this, we ascribe relative-truth to a sentence, what we are actually doing is ascribing 1 There are however exceptions to the truth-aptness of descriptive sentences: for instance it has been claimed that sentences in which so-called “vague” predicates (e.g. “bald”, “rich”) are applied to borderline cases, such as “Carlo is bald” (with Carlo being an individual with just some hairs on his head) are neither true nor false; similarly it has been claimed (since Aristotle) that sentences concerning future contingent events, such as “By June 2021 a vaccine against Covid-19 will be available” are neither true nor false before the time they point to has come. relativity to justified belief: a belief can be rationally justified at a time and not at a later time when new evidence has been gathered and our knowledge of the world has improved2. So while justification may be relative to theoretical standards and available evidence, truth is absolute. Moreover, if it is true that the Earth orbits the Sun, this has always been true, even when Aristotelian physics was the best available scientific theory (provided that the Earth had not a different orbit at those times) and will always be true (unless the Earth will undertake a long journey outside the Solar System…). So, differently from justification, truth is eternal. A feature of descriptive judgements that will be useful, as we will see in due course, for distinguishing them from evaluative judgements, is what C. Wright (1992) has called “cognitive command”. A given discourse exerts cognitive command when, in Wright’s words, It is a priori that differences of opinion formulated within (that) discourse […] will involve something which may properly be regarded as a cognitive shortcoming (Wright 1992, p. 55). In fact two people disagreeing on the truth of a descriptive sentence like (1) can resort, as Wright (2006) would say, to a court of appeal in order to settle their dispute, namely to a mindindependent reality that is cognitively accessible to both the disputants; this court of appeal will show that one of the two disputants was at fault (he believed something false) and his being at fault will be traceable back to ignorance of some relevant fact or to some mistake in reasoning, namely to a cognitive shortcoming. Cognitive command shows that the truth of descriptive sentences can be reasonably characterized in terms of correspondence to facts: true descriptive sentences mirror portions of reality, ways the world is, and these ways are what philosophers call facts (or obtaining states of affairs)3. 1.2. Evaluative judgments Things get complicated when the truth-aptness of evaluative judgements is at stake. On the one side the sentences by which we express these judgements appear to have some distinctive features of truth-aptness, on the other side there are reasons to doubt that they are truth-evaluable. Let’s consider first some features of evaluative sentences which are typical of truth-apt sentences. First of all, we use sentences like (2), (3) and (4) to make assertions and assertion is conceptually linked to truth by so called tarskian biconditionals, which many philosophers, since the seminal work of Alfred Tarski (1935), consider conceptual and necessary truths about truth itself. Tarskian biconditionals are all the non-paradoxical sentences which are instances of the following schema It is true that p iff p where “p” is a placeholder for declarative sentences of English. Tarskian biconditionals are conceptual truths about truth because whoever understands the meaning of the world “true” should be disposed to assert “It is true that p” whenever she assert “p” and vice versa: in other words, asserting a proposition is conceptually equivalent to assert that it is true. So, since we assert things such as “Causing pain just for pleasure is wrong” or “Mona Lisa is a beautiful painting”, we must 2 In a still weaker sense we sometimes use locutions such as “This is true for me but not for you” to mean “I believe that this is true and you don’t” 3 The correspondence theory of truth origins in the work of Aristotle (Metaphysics, IX, 1051b 1-5) and was explicitly formulated for the first time by Thomas Aquinas who defined truth as “Adaequatio intellectus et rei” (Summa contra Gentiles, I, 59). The versions of the theory which introduce facts as the entities to which true propositions correspond are due, at the beginning of the XX century, to G.E. More (1953), B. Russell (1918-19) and L. Wittgenstein (1921). be disposed to assert also “It is true that causing pain just for pleasure is wrong” and “It is true that Mona Lisa is a beautiful painting”. Secondly we not only assert things of this kind but we also argue in defence of our moral or aesthetic views. An essential feature of sound arguments is however validity: an argument is valid when it preserves truth from the premises to the conclusion, that is to say it is impossible that the conclusion is false in case the premises are true. Therefore, since evaluative sentences figure as premises and conclusions of valid arguments it seems the they must be truth-apt. Consider the following valid argument: A) If causing pain just for pleasure is wrong then putting a cigarette out over someone’s skin just for pleasure is wrong. B) Causing pain just for pleasure is wrong. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------C) Putting a cigarette out over someone’s skin just for pleasure is wrong Since the argument is valid it cannot be the case that its premises are true and its conclusion is false; so, although its premises can be actually false, if they would had been true also the conclusion would have been such. So both its premises and conclusion could at least be true, they are therefore truth-apt. But premise (B) and the conclusion (C) are simple declarative sentences by which we express moral judgements, so these sentences must be truth-apt. A closely related argument for the truth-aptness of evaluative sentences points to the fact that they can be embedded in compound declarative truth-functional sentences such as 5) If causing pain just for pleasure is wrong then putting a cigarette out over someone’s skin just for pleasure is wrong. (5) seems to be true; but a sentence of the form “If p than q” is a truth-function of its constituent sentences, that is to say it is false whenever “p” is true and “q” is false and it is true otherwise. Therefore both the constituent sentences of (1) must be truth-apt, they can be true or false; but the constituents of (1) are moral sentences, so moral sentences are truth-apt4. Let’s now consider some features of evaluative sentences that could lead to the denial of their truthaptness. The first I want to point to is what Kölbel (2004) has called “Faultless disagreement”; in Kölbel’s words, A faultless disagreement is a situation where there is a thinker A, a thinker B, and a proposition (content of judgment) p, such that: (a) A believes (judges) that p and B believes (judges) that not-p; (b) Neither A nor B has made a mistake (is at fault) (Kölbel 2004, pp. 53-54). When in fact a moral dispute, for instance, is going on it seems that two people which hold radically opposite views have no chance to resort to the court of appeal of an objective and cognitively accessible reality, in order to settle their dispute. To put it in another way it seems that, in disputes of this kind, there is no fact of the matter that could eventually settle the dispute, allowing people to decide which is the true opinion. This fact, together with metaphysical considerations concerning the “queer” (in J. Mackie’s (1977) words) status of the supposed corresponding facts (e.g. moral facts)5, has driven many philosophers to uphold a non-factualist 4 This is the core idea of the so called Frege-Geach argument against moral expressivism (cf. Geach 1965), the philosophical view, to which I will shortly return, according to which moral sentences are not truth-apt, since they serve only to express emotive reactions or prescriptions and have therefore no descriptive content. 5 The queerness of, say, moral facts consists in that they should have as constituents moral properties, such as the property of being right/good, which many (although not all) philosophers have considered irreducible to natural properties. stance toward moral discourse, a stance according to which there are no facts in the world making moral sentences true. But a standard form of non-factualism about moral discourse is so-called expressivism, according to which sentences belonging to it must not be taken at their face value, i.e. as descriptive sentences aiming at stating facts, but, on the contrary, should be considered as mere expressions of subjective feelings and emotions (as for instance in the so-called “Booh-Hurra!”Theory advocated by philosophers such as C.L. Stevenson (1944) and A.J. Ayer (1952)); so they are not evaluable as true or false (exactly as an interjection like “Booh for causing pain just for pleasure!”). It is worth noticing that the flourishing of an expressivist stance toward moral, and more generally evaluative discourse during the first half of the XX century, mainly across English speaking philosophy, was deeply connected with other central philosophical issues, notably the theory of meaning and the theory of truth. Many expressivists were in fact strongly influenced by the philosophical movement known as Logical Empiricism and by the verificationist conceptions of meaning and truth advocated by many of its leading exponents. The neo empiricists’ theory of meaning according to which “The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification” (Schlick 1936, p. 341) left in fact little room for ascribing a descriptive meaning, and therefore the status of truth-evaluable sentences, to evaluative sentences. Moreover the idea, shared by many logical empiricists, that the only way for dispelling the metaphysical obscurities surrounding the concept of truth was to conceive it in terms of notions such as empirical verification and confirmation converged on the same outcome: no truth-aptenss without verifiability! Also truth-conditional theories of meaning in the vein of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921) were not so hospitable to evaluative discourse. In fact if the meaning of a declarative sentence is conceived as a state of affairs represented by the sentence and if one is suspicious towards the existence of moral or aesthetic objective state of affairs, then sentences in evaluative discourses will be considered, at least as far as their deep structure is concerned, non declarative sentences or, alternatively, massively false declarative sentences. 2. Some Conceptions of Truth Deflationary conceptions of truth, rooted in the seminal work of F.P. Ramsey (1927), which are one of the main focuses of the contemporary philosophical discussion on truth6, changed a lot the terms of the discussion on these matters. Deflationism can be identified by two claims. The first one is that the aforementioned tarskian biconditionals are definitional of the concept of truth; this means that the infinite list of them says all that has to be said concerning truth, constitutes an exhaustive theory of truth. The second one maintains that the unique role of the truth-predicate consists in allowing us to endorse/assert infinite sets of sentences, as it happens when we say things like “All the theorems of arithmetic are true” or “Everything the Pope says is true”. It is important to stress that each tarskian biconditional provides a different condition for a given sentence/proposition to be true, so the theory of truth including all and only these sentences does not uncover any essence which is common to all and only the things which are true. This is why the deflationists’ slogan is that truth has no nature, it is a thin, unsubstantial property. But if truth is such an insubstantial property which supervenes on our practice of making and endorsing assertions, many of the old suspicions concerning the truthaptness of evaluative sentences seem to vanish. Many of such suspicions were in fact, as we have just seen, connected to more substantial theories of truth, such as correspondence and verificationist theories and to truth-conditional/representational theories of meaning. But if a deflationist stance toward truth is endorsed, it seems that all that is needed in order for sentences of a given domain of discourse to be truth-apt is that they have the grammatical surface-structure of declarative sentences and that speakers use them in a practice showing the features of assertoric talk (cfr. Horwich 1990, 2006, Soames 1997, Boghossian 1990). 6 Starting from the Seventies onward so called Deflationism gained the centre of the philosophical stage thanks to the works of philosophers such as Quine (1970), Grover, Kamp and. Belnap (1975), Field (1986, 1994), Horwich (1990). Deflationism has however a problem with evaluative discourse which is the opposite of those met by more traditional and substantial theories of truth: the more in fact truth is conceived as a thinlogical property, the more it will be difficult to make some difference between truths in different realms of discourse. The deflationist seems in fact to be forced to admit that sentences in evaluative and descriptive domains, once one grants them the status of declarative sentences, can all be true, in the same weak sense of “true”, loosing in this way some important differences between them, for instance the fact that the former may give rise to cases of faultless disagreement whereas the latter exert cognitive command. Although leading exponents of Deflationism were aware of such a problem and tried to overcome it (cf. Field 1994), other philosophers claimed that, in order to account for the differences subsisting among truths in different domains of discourse, it was mandatory to tell about truth something more than was licensed by tarskian biconditionals, without in the meantime embracing one of the classical conceptions of truth (the correspondence theory or various kind of epistemic-verificationist theories) whose shortcoming where acknowledged. An outstanding example thereof was C. Wright’s Truth and Objectivity (1992) which, starting from a critical discussion of Deflationism, opened the door to two central focuses of the current debate on truth: truth-pluralism (advocated for the first time by Wright himself) and truth-relativism. According to alethic-pluralists (such as Wright (1992, 2001) and, in a different way, Lynch (2009))– although there is a unique concept of truth, which is characterizable through a set of socalled platitudes about truth (that is to say common-sense truths about truth), among which are tarskian biconditionals – this concept applies to sentences in different domains of discourse in virtue of their having different properties, each of which can be identified with truth in a specific domain of discourse7. So, for instance, although when we say that “The Earth orbits the Sun” and “Torture is wrong” are both true, we mean by “true” the same thing (what we mean being identified by our acceptance of the same platitudes concerning truth), the predicate “is true” applies to the two sentences in virtue of two different properties they have: in the first case in virtue of the sentence’s representing/corresponding to a mind-independent fact, in the second case, maybe, in virtue of its coherence with other moral sentences we accept (or in virtue of some other epistemic properties, such as warrented assertability, depending on the theory of moral discourse we endorse). Differently from truth-pluralism, truth-relativism (revived in the last two decades by the works of M.Kölbel (2002) and J. MacFarlane (2005)) maintains that truth is one but claims that it must be relativized to standards of evaluation/perspectives, so that one and the same truth-evaluable content may be true relative to one of such standards and not true relative to a different one. There are two main reasons usually advanced by truth-relativists in order to defend their (highly disputed) conception: the first one is that the relativization of truth is the best way to account for the phenomenon of faultless disagreement without giving up the idea that evaluative sentences (and others concerning which a non factualist stance can be taken) are truth-apt; the second one is that the relativization of truth to some index is widely accepted in formal semantics when sentences of certain kinds are at stake. Among them are, for instance, tensed sentences such as “It’s raining”, which are true relatively to some time and place and not true relatively to some others. And what about objective/absolute truth? It is defined by some truth-relativists (cf. Kölbel 2002) in terms of relative truth in the following way: a given proposition is objectively true iff it is true relatively to all perspectives/standards (so that, in some sense, objectivity is reduced to intersubjectivity)8. Both truth-pluralism and truth-relativism have been subjected to many severe criticisms and it is not in the scope of this contribution to asses them. What I will do in what follows is just to take them as living, open options in the theory truth (as they actually are) for recognizing truth-aptness to evaluative sentences and in the meantime do not miss their differences in respect of descriptive ones. So I will work under the hypothesis that it makes sense to say first that evaluative sentences, such as moral or aesthetic ones, are true in virtue of possessing a truth-property that is different 7 8 For an overview of Alethic Pluralism see Pedersen, Wright (2012, 2013). For an overview of the debate on truth-relativism see Garcìa-Carpintero Kölbel (2008). from correspondence to facts (which is the truth-property of descriptive sentence), for instance coherence or warranted assertability and, second, that evaluative sentences are true relatively to some standard of evaluation/perspectives and not true relatively to others. Under this working hypothesis I will try to answer, in the second part of this contribution, the following questions concerning real estate estimates: do they exert cognitive command or are they subject to faultless disagreement? Is their truth absolute or relative to some parameter? Is it a matter of coherence with some mind- dependent standards (in a broad sense of “mind-dependent” which includes cultural and social standards) or is it a matter of correspondence with objective, mind-independent facts? 3. Real Estate Estimates. Consider a sentence of the form 6) This apartment is worth $9 by which an estimate of a real estate is expressed and suppose this sentence is true. Let’s now ask: what makes such a sentence true? That is to say: in virtue of what it is true (and not false)?10 Any estate agent would say that a sentence of this kind is made true first of all by some features of the apartment (such as its size, functionality, proximity to the city centre, lightness) that make it preferable; and second by the condition of the estate market at a given time/place determined by the demand/supply game. In a nutshell the price of the apartment is a monetary measure, shaped in the matching of demand and supply, of how much the aforementioned features are important for a potential buyer. In order to calculate such a monetary measure several algorithms, based on statistical methods, have been elaborated11. Once highlighted what sort of facts make a real estate estimate true we are in the position to answer the questions we put forward at the end of §2. 3.1. Arthur’s Version Imagine a situation in which someone, call him Arthur, having in mind to sell his apartment asks an estate agent to estimate it; when the agent tell him that he estimates the apartment, for instance, 150.000 €, Arthur, disappointed, replies “You are clearly wrong, my apartment is worth at least 200.000 €!” and he remains firm on his opinion notwithstanding the agent try to show him how, standing all the facts which are relevant for the determination of the price of an apartment, he is overestimating its value. I think that what would be correct to say in this case is that Arthur is wrong in his appraisal whereas the agent says the truth. Moreover Arthur’s false belief concerning the value of his apartment depends on his inability to recognize the facts that determine the price, an inability which is probably due to his being emotively biased toward his flat: Arthur’s mistake is therefore due to some cognitive shortcoming. So we are in presence of a kind of discourse which exerts cognitive command. Moreover sentences in this region of discourse are absolutely true or false: it is not the case that the agent’s estimate of the flat is true just relatively to his standards and false relatively to Arthur’s ones, unless we understand “true relative to s” (where “s” refers to a person with her standards of evaluation) as “believed to be true by s”12; the agent is right and Arthur is wrong, so the estimate of the former is true, full stop, and that of the latter false, full stop. Finally the truth of the agent’s estimate seems to consists in its correctly mirroring some objective/mind independent facts: the fact that the price of the apartment is $ and all the price-determining facts on which it 9 “$” is a placeholder for a specific monetary value. Truth-makers theory, which took its start by the seminal works of Mulligan, Simons, Smith (1984) is an important brand of contemporary metaphysics and theory of truth. 11 For an overview see Appraisal Institute (2020). I’m grateful to Salvatore Giuffrida for having kindly and patiently taught me some basic notions of Real Estate Estimate. 12 See footnote 2. 10 supervenes13. Therefore the truth of real estate estimates seems to consist in their correspondence to facts. But things are perhaps more complicated than that. 3.2. The Sentimentalists’ Society Imagine a society where everybody believes in the existence of ancestral spirits: it is a common belief among people in this society (call them the sentimentalists) that if an apartment has been inhabited by an happy family its ancestral spirits will continue to live there ensuring good times to all new inhabitants of the apartment (in case it is sold). Being inhabited by such benevolent spirits is, in this society, a feature that makes an apartment highly preferable; features such as its size, functionality, proximity to the city centre, lightness are also appreciated by the sentimentalists but they are at a lower level in their rank of preferences: they prefer, for instance, to live in a small and suburban apartment which is yet inhabited by benevolent ancestral spirits than in a large and central apartment devoid of such spirits. Consider now again the discussion between Arthur and the real estate agent we presented in the last paragraph and imagine this discussion were to take place in the sentimentalists’s society; Arthur’s and the agent’s estimates of the apartment are exactly the same as before but, this time, Arthur knows that the apartment is inhabited by the benevolent spirits whereas the agent fails to know this fact, so the latter tends to underestimate the correct value of the flat. In this case our verdict concerning who is right and who is wrong would be different: Arthur is right and the agent is wrong. Moreover the agent is affected by some cognitive shortcoming, since he is unable to recognize some price-constituting fact. As in the former case there is no faultless disagreement here and the estimate appears to be a descriptive judgment which is absolutely true and true in virtue of its correspondence to facts. Therefore nothing substantial seems to be changed concerning the nature of estimate judgments in passing from our society to the sentimentalists’ one; what is changed is just the distribution of truth-values: what is true in a society is false in the other and vice versa. This happens because different price-constituting facts obtain in the two societies: in our society the fact that to be inhabited by benevolent spirits is better than to be located in the centre city does not obtain, whereas in the sentimentalists society it obtains. 4. Conclusion: estimates from inside and from outside. What have been said so far shows that although estimates are on the side of descriptive, objectively and absolutely (not relatively) true judgements whose truth consists in their correspondence to facts, the facts making them true are socially construed, that is to say their existence depends on the evaluative standards which are accepted in a given society and which are variable across societies. When estimates are at stake, objective, absolute, correspondence truth is therefore the tip of an iceberg whose under water bottom is made of society-dependent facts which obtain in virtue of an intricate net of evaluative judgments and preferences. The society-dependence of these evaluative judgments, and therefore of the price-determining facts, is of notable import for our questions concerning estimate judgments. In fact, since the facts to which true estimate judgments correspond exist in virtue of the background acceptance of some evaluative standards among members of a given society, these judgments exert cognitive command, are absolutely true and true in virtue of their correspondence to some facts, just when they are evaluated from inside a given society. But imagine that Arthur, from inside the sentimentalists society, and the real estate agent, from inside our society, start arguing about the monetary value of an apartment situated in a no man’s land outside the borders of the respective communities and that 13 Here the mind-independence and objectivity of such facts must be understood not as the property of existing independently of the existence of any mind (clearly no minds no prices) but as the property of obtaining or not obtaining independently of the beliefs and desires of people making judgments on the matter: no matter what Arthur desires concerning the price of his flat, this price is what it is given the relevant price-determining facts. they have opposite views concerning this monetary value. I think that, in this case, it would be correct to classify their disagreement as a faultless one, since each of them estimates the apartment assuming the standards which are in place in his community and here there seems to be no fact of the matter making one of the two standards the right one for estimating the apartment. This means that if we try to assess the truth of an estimate, so to say, from outside any social world we are forced to ascribe relative truth to it, where the parameter to which truth is relativized is precisely a social world. In the same way that a sentence like “It’s raining” is true just relatively to a place and a time but, once this time and place are fixed, it becomes absolutely true/false, a sentence like “This apartment is worth $” is true relatively to a given social world (and maybe false relatively to another one) but it becomes absolutely true (or false) once a given social world is fixed. 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