Tobies Grimaltos

Content, Meaning and Truth

Anil Gupta’s book Empiricism and Experience (2006) is a rich and complex piece of work, whose main aim is to elucidate the rational contribution of experience to knowledge. A minimally complete account and assessment of this work would be too ambitious a task for us to undertake. In fact, our purpose in this contribution will be quite modest. We intend to comment, in a critical spirit, on a distinction that Gupta uses in this work and that he had already introduced in a previous article of his, “Meaning and Misconceptions” (1999), namely the distinction between the absolute and the effective content of an assertion. The distinction is meant to explain how some of our assertions can engage with the world and actually be true even if they involve a wrong, or even incoherent, conception of things. In the context of Empiricism and Experience, one role of the distinction is to help us understand how some assertions about sense-data (such as: “That orange sense-datum is oval”) can have an intelligible, even true, content even if sense-data theories of the given in experience lead to scepticism or to idealism and are quite probably false. The aforementioned distinction may dissipate this apparent conflict. However, we take this distinction to have rather unwelcome consequences and we think Gupta’s work would be better off without it. Let us argue for this contention. An example of Gupta’s may shed some additional light on the nature and role of the distinction we are considering. Suppose that an ancient, geocentric astronomer says, “The Sun is in the constellation Capricorn today.” Intuitively, we feel that there is