I. Introduction: Is Pluto a planet?
In February 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a young assistant at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, compared two photographic plates of the same patch of sky taken six nights apart and found a faint point of light that had moved. The object was announced that March and named Pluto, and for seventy-six years it was the ninth planet of the Solar System, memorized by schoolchildren and printed on classroom charts. In 2005 astronomers announced the discovery of Eris, a body beyond Neptune of roughly comparable size, and the question of what should count as a planet could no longer be postponed. On 24 August 2006, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague adopted a definition according to which a planet in the Solar System is a celestial body that "(a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit." A companion resolution declared that Pluto "is a dwarf planet by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects" (International Astronomical Union 2006). The decision did not end the scientific argument. Planetary scientists have continued to defend geophysical definitions that would count any sufficiently massive, round body as a planet regardless of its orbit, Pluto included (Runyon et al. 2017).
What exactly changed in 2006? Pluto's orbit, mass, composition and gravitational relations remained as they had been. What changed was an established symbolic framework within which those properties were organized. Yet the dispute was more than a quarrel about words, since it concerned which properties deserved to count as definitive, what scientific purposes the classification should serve, and whose disciplinary standards should prevail. Several questions were in play at once. Was the classification consistent with the adopted definition? Did the definition identify actual properties of bodies in space? Was the chosen classification scientifically useful? Was it appropriate for a particular astronomer to affirm or challenge it on a particular occasion? And why did the decision matter so much to people who would never encounter Pluto except as a word? These questions are not equivalent, because they concern different relations between symbols and what symbols are about.
Compare an apparently similar question: was Socrates a teacher? This question also asks whether something belongs to a class. Its referent, however, is of a different kind. Socrates took part in living relationships, and what counted as teaching depended partly on how those relationships unfolded. Unlike Pluto, Socrates could recognize, reject, reinterpret or transform his relationship to the classification, and in Plato's account he did exactly that. The deeper issue is that the realities to which classifications refer can stand in fundamentally different relations to symbolic activity, which is a stronger claim than the observation that different categories have different definitions.
This article develops a Living Value Theory of truth from that observation. Instead of beginning with propositions and asking how they correspond to the world, it begins with living coordination and asks how symbolic articulations arise within it, how they become stabilized, and what forms of answerability they establish. The central question becomes what we are actually doing when we say that something is true, and how the answer changes when the symbolic claim concerns cosmic reality, another symbolization, or living coordination itself. Answering it requires beginning before truth, before propositions, and even before articulated questions.
II. Before truth: the world is not made of propositions
Living beings coordinate with their worlds long before they represent them symbolically. It seems fair to argue that “truth” only entered the world when humans started to develop ordinary language and used it without immediate mesocosomic coordination pressures.
A living being can feel cold, hungry, fatigued or threatened before any of these conditions are symbolically articulated. Two people can sense a difficulty in their relationship before either can say what is wrong. A dwelling can become inhospitable before anyone formulates a proposition about it. Living Value Theory describes this coordination as proceeding through five irreducible mediations: multisensorial embodiment, multispecies being-with, multiversal dwelling, multimateriality and multisymbolization. The first three are zoetic mediations, shared in some form by all living beings. Multimateriality and multisymbolization are poietic mediations, later achievements that in their developed forms are distinctively human. All five participate in human living coordination, and none can be reduced to another.
Multisymbolization is one mediation among five. It is neither external to living coordination nor equivalent to the coordination as a whole. A word, a classification, an equation or a written proposition can stabilize selected distinctions and make them available for later uptake, in other places and at other times. The symbol itself is a nonrecursive deposit: it does not respond to the world, revise itself or notice that it has been misunderstood. Living beings must encounter, interpret, employ, challenge or revise it. The symbolic deposit is consequently distinct from the living coordination from which it emerged and to which it may later refer, and much philosophical trouble begins when deposits acquire the appearance of independently existing grounds.
Symbols are also radically selective. A person may at one moment experience pressure in the stomach, muscular fatigue, a vague anticipation, unease about someone in the room, the temperature of the air and the orientation of her body on a chair, together with countless further differentiations that will never be noticed. A linguistic articulation selects something from this densely coordinated experience. "I am uncomfortable" preserves very little of it. "I am anxious" gives it a more specific recognizable form and brings an established classification into play. A clinical diagnosis can then stabilize selected aspects into a category that travels through records, prescriptions and institutions. At each stage symbolic availability increases in some respects while other dimensions of the original coordination remain unarticulated. Symbolic compression of this kind is far from an error, since it is what makes sharing, memory, comparison and institutional coordination possible at all. The error begins when the classification is treated as an exhaustive description of what it articulates.
Symbols also do different kinds of work. A symbol can coordinate directly within the situation it belongs to, as a shout of warning or a gesture of greeting does. It can refer to something absent, as a name refers to a person who has left the room. And it can re-present an absent or imagined world, making it available again for attention, as a story, a map or a theory does. These three modes explain why the work of a symbol cannot be reduced to carrying a proposition with a truth value. A warning, a promise, a mathematical formula and a description of pain can all be symbolically accomplished without doing the same thing, and only some of them invite the question whether they are true.
The principal proposition of this section follows. Truth belongs to articulated claims that can be assessed for correctness, and living coordination itself has no truth value. This must not be confused with denying that true propositions can be made about living coordination. A person may truly have a broken leg, and a radiograph can confirm it. But the person's life, the pain, the practical disruption and the slow work of recovery are not themselves true or false. If symbolic articulations always select from wider coordination, the next question concerns the symbolic medium in which most philosophical propositions are formulated, and what is peculiar about it.
III. The peculiarity of ordinary language: one medium, several levels of recursivity
Ordinary language has an underappreciated feature. The same medium can articulate a particular occurrence, establish a reusable classification, and reflect on the classification itself. Consider four statements. "There is something moving across the sky." "That is a planet." "What exactly makes something a planet?" "Why should this definition of planet be preferred?" These statements exemplify different recursive operations as well as containing different information. The first makes a particular distinction available. The second applies an established classification. The third makes the classification itself an object of inquiry. The fourth examines the grounds and significance of choosing one classification over another.
Living Value Theory distinguishes five levels of recursivity. At L1 coordination proceeds without explicit attention. At L2 something is felt as misaligned, a snag that registers before it can be named. At L3 what has become salient or questionable is articulated. At L4 distinctions are stabilized into portable classifications, rules, theories and other grounds for further coordination. At L5 these stabilizations themselves become available for explicit examination. The four statements about the sky move from L3 through L4 to L5 without leaving the medium in which they began. A familiar word can be used to describe something, to classify it, to dispute the classification, and to theorize the conditions under which the classification is possible, and no change of language is required at any point.
Specialized symbolic systems behave differently. Mathematics can express relations that ordinary language cannot represent adequately; its symbols preserve exact formal distinctions and support deductions of extraordinary precision. But when mathematicians discuss what a notation is for, which conventions are being adopted, or why a particular problem matters, they move back into ordinary language. The symbol ℕ designates the natural numbers within a formal context, and whether a given convention includes zero can be stated with complete precision; the explanation of why one convention is preferable in a given field generally draws on a wider discourse about mathematical practice, its history and its purposes. Formal systems possess their own methods of metamathematical analysis, and nothing here denies them. The claim is comparative: ordinary language has an unusually general capacity to coordinate explicit movements between different recursive operations and between different symbolic systems, so that it serves as the medium in which other media are explained, compared and contested.
The same flexibility lets ordinary language mediate between specialized systems and everyday coordination. A weather forecast states a seventy per cent probability of rain, a figure produced by numerical models whose workings few listeners could reconstruct. The listener then asks, in ordinary words, whether to take an umbrella, whether the football match will be cancelled, and whether the washing should stay out. The probability is translated into L3 articulations of particular situations, and those articulations can in turn be challenged at L5 by someone who asks what a seventy per cent chance actually means. No other medium moves so freely between the deposit of a model, the question of a household and the reflection of a sceptic, which is why so many disputes about truth turn out to be disputes about which of these operations a sentence was performing.
Ordinary language is able to articulate recursivity levels 3-5 with ease, but this flexibility has a price. If the same word can function across several recursivity levels, nothing in the word alone tells us what it is doing on a particular occasion. The recursivity level of a symbolic articulation becomes identifiable only through its use within coordination, a fact that exposes a limitation in philosophical approaches that begin with sentences as though their relevant operation were already given.
IV. Socrates is a human being: why recursivity levels cannot be read off words
Begin with the elementary proposition "Socrates is a human being." Its grammatical simplicity conceals a classificatory achievement. The word human draws on a highly stabilized category, making Socrates comparable to every other entity so classified, and in that sense the sentence applies an L4 classification through a particular utterance. Whether the utterance is primarily operating as an L3 articulation, a routine application of an L4 category, or part of an L5 investigation cannot be determined from its grammatical form. In an ordinary conversation it may be unremarkable, a reminder that Socrates was mortal. In a logic textbook it may serve as an example of categorical inclusion in a syllogism. In philosophical anthropology it may become the starting point for asking what constitutes a human being at all. The same words participate in several recursive operations, and the operation is fixed by the coordination in which they are used.
Now consider "Socrates is a teacher." The classificatory work becomes much more visible. Does a teacher require students, formal authority, an intention to instruct, the transmission of knowledge, institutional recognition, or evidence that learning occurred? Socrates complicates every criterion. In Plato's Apology he tells the jury that he has never been anyone's teacher, and denies that he can be held responsible for what his companions became (Plato, Apology 33a–b). Yet generations have treated him as the teacher of Western philosophy. The difficulty goes deeper than the vagueness of the word teacher. The activity being classified is a living coordination among responsive participants. Teaching can change as teacher and student respond to one another, and what counts as instructive, transformative or valuable may become apparent only through the continuation of the relationship, sometimes years after it ended. A fixed classification selects some aspects of this process and leaves others available for further differentiation.
The contrast between the two sentences is one of visibility. Human being is an essentially uncontested classification, a stabilization so familiar that it ordinarily appears as a direct description of what Socrates is, with no act of classification noticeable in it. Teacher is also familiar, but its application becomes contested more readily, because the coordination it classifies is still visibly open. This distinction is essential, because the degree of contestability is independent of the recursivity level. A concept can be an L4 stabilization whether it is contested or uncontested, and L5 reflection can reopen either kind. Contestability concerns the visibility of a classification as a classification.
The contrast between "football is a game" and "football is war" shows the same thing. The first is conventionally unmarked and passes as description; the second announces itself as a comparison, and a listener immediately asks in which respects football resembles war and whether the resemblance illuminates anything. Both selectively establish comparability, and the familiarity of the first conceals that it does so. The L4 status of a classification is therefore rarely its most significant property. What needs investigating is how the classification operates within living coordination, what it makes comparable, what differences it suppresses, and whether the similarities it selects are relevant.
The principal proposition of this section is that recursivity levels cannot be reliably reconstructed from symbolic form alone. They must be reconstructed from the recursive operations in which symbols participate. A theory of truth concerned only with the logical form of propositions begins after much of the relevant work has already been done, which explains why statements of identical grammatical form may require fundamentally different assessments of fit.
V. Three kinds of fit: why correspondence is not one problem
Philosophy often speaks of a proposition corresponding to reality as though correspondence named a single relationship. A symbolic articulation may in fact be answerable to several distinct things, and Living Value Theory distinguishes three relations of symbolic fit.
Cosmic fit concerns the relation between a symbolic articulation and realities that do not depend on how any particular human mesocosm organizes them. It extends well beyond distant galaxies and subatomic particles: the measurable length of a sofa, the mineral composition of a rock and the gravitational relations of Pluto are all matters of cosmic fit, since none of them changes because someone describes it differently. Mesocosmic fit concerns the relation between a symbolic articulation and the recursively inhabitable world of living coordination across the five mediations. It asks how adequately the articulation discloses and helps to coordinate what is occurring, including differences that were never available as explicit propositions. Intersymbolic fit concerns relations among symbolic articulations themselves. A mathematical proof, a scientific theory, a legal classification or a historical reconstruction depends on establishing coherence among previously deposited symbolic distinctions.
The three relations are partially independent of one another. An equation can be mathematically impeccable and fail to describe any physical process. An accurate physical measurement can be irrelevant to the practical difficulty confronting a household: knowing the exact dimensions of a staircase to the millimetre does nothing to resolve a quarrel about who should carry the shopping up it. A compelling interpretation of a painting of the Last Judgement can achieve excellent intersymbolic fit with scripture, theology and iconographic tradition while establishing nothing about whether the events depicted will occur. The three kinds of fit can coincide, as they do in a well-confirmed scientific result that is also practically useful, and they can come apart in every direction.
A familiar object shows all three relations at once. The diagram of the London Underground, first designed by Harry Beck in the early 1930s, straightened the lines, equalized the distances between stations and enlarged the crowded centre at the expense of the suburbs. Its intersymbolic fit is excellent, since every line, interchange and station name is consistent with every other. Its cosmic fit is fairly poor, since a passenger who tried to walk from one station to the next by the diagram's proportions would be badly misled. Its mesocosmic fit for the coordination it serves, finding one's way through an underground network where the surface cannot be seen, is so good that the diagram has been imitated across the world. A geographically accurate map of the same network would be truer in one respect and much less useful in the coordination that matters to passengers, and no single notion of correspondence can say which of the two is the better representation.
The distinction between intersymbolic validity and cosmic truth is especially important for what follows. A proposition can follow from agreed axioms without asserting anything about the physical cosmos. The inference may be valid and its result true within the specified formal interpretation, but its application to physical reality requires a further relationship of fit, which has to be established separately and may fail. Conversely, a scientific proposition may track cosmic reality through a long chain of measurement and intersymbolic inference while remaining entirely counterintuitive at the scale of everyday life. That the Earth moves at roughly thirty kilometres per second around the Sun has excellent cosmic fit and almost no mesocosmic intuition to support it.
The three kinds of fit do more than supply alternative tests of a single homogeneous kind of truth. They allow us to identify what a symbolic claim is answerable to, and to distinguish that answerability from the mesocosmic conditions under which articulating the claim becomes appropriate, consequential or contested. The truth of a claim and the felicity of asserting it cannot be understood through a single relationship between a sentence and the world. Pluto allows these relations to be disentangled with unusual clarity.
VI. Pluto, the classification and the astronomers
Take the proposition "Pluto is a planet." For most of the twentieth century it was an entirely ordinary, institutionally authorized astronomical statement. After August 2006 it became incorrect under the adopted definition of a planet in the Solar System. What made it incorrect? Pluto did not change. Astronomers established a new ordinary language L4 classification called “planet” using criteria that Pluto does not satisfy. The criteria refer to real cosmic properties, orbit, hydrostatic equilibrium and dominance over an orbital neighbourhood, and Pluto's failure to clear its neighbourhood of comparable bodies in the Kuiper belt is a fact about the Solar System and owes nothing to anyone's preferences. Yet the decision to select these particular properties as the criteria of planetary membership belongs to symbolic classification.
Three operations need to be distinguished. Astronomers investigate physical phenomena through instruments, measurements and theoretical models. They stabilize particular distinctions within an astronomical classification. And they evaluate celestial bodies against those distinctions. The classification belongs to multisymbolization. Its application requires cosmic fit, since a body either has or lacks the specified properties. Its coherence with the rest of astronomical knowledge requires intersymbolic fit, since the definition must sit consistently with theories of planetary formation, orbital dynamics and the classification of other bodies.
The distinction becomes vivid because scientifically motivated definitions can select different physical properties. The 2006 definition emphasizes dynamical relations, above all orbital dominance. The geophysical alternative emphasizes intrinsic properties, chiefly whether a body has enough mass to have pulled itself into a round shape, and on that definition Pluto is a planet, together with Eris, Ceres and a number of large moons (Runyon et al. 2017). Neither position requires Pluto to alter its behaviour, and neither denies any measurement the other accepts. History offers a precedent. Ceres was hailed as a planet after its discovery in 1801, was reclassified as one of many asteroids once dozens of similar bodies had been found, and in 2006 became a dwarf planet. Ceres went on orbiting as before through all three reclassifications.
This is Goodman's problem of similarity appearing inside astronomy. Pluto resembles other bodies in many respects: it is round like Mars, icy like Triton, and shares its orbital region with thousands of Kuiper belt objects. Which similarities should matter for the classification? The answer depends on the scientific purposes the classification is meant to serve, whether those concern the dynamical history of the Solar System or the geology of individual worlds. Those purposes are not written into Pluto. Neither does this mean that the physical similarities are invented. The distinction between the choice of classificatory criteria and the cosmic reality of the selected properties is the crucial one, and both relativism and naive realism about classification arise from collapsing it.
A further question now arises. When an astronomer says "Pluto is a planet" today, is the statement appropriate in her situation? Does she know the current convention? Is she challenging the 2006 definition, or mistakenly assuming that an older convention remains authoritative? Is the claim part of a legitimate scientific disagreement? Will colleagues hear it as an error, a provocation, an alternative classification, or an invitation to revise established terminology? All of these are questions about living coordination. The astronomer is coordinating with other astronomers, with institutions, with accumulated symbolic deposits and with the expectations of her discipline, and her assertion has consequences for recognition, reputation, credibility, disagreement and the future course of inquiry. These are its mesocosmic felicity conditions, and Pluto does not participate in them as a responsive counterpart. The cosmic properties of Pluto can make a classification applicable or inapplicable. Only living coordination can make the act of asserting that classification felicitous or infelicitous.
The two can diverge. An astronomer might be entirely correct about Pluto's physical characteristics while using a classification that is inappropriate to the conversation she is in, as when a planetary geologist calls Pluto a planet in a lecture to first-year students without explaining that the term is contested. Conversely, an astronomer may appropriately report the 2006 definition to a journalist while believing it to be a poor scientific classification. The articulation succeeds or fails along different dimensions at once.
The case also separates the three kinds of recursive counterparts with unusual clarity. Pluto is a nonrecursive counterpart: it does not respond to the classification in any way. The astronomer coordinates selfrecursively with her own developing understanding, revising her judgements in relation to what she has already concluded. The scientific controversy involves interrecursive coordination among participants who respond to one another's responses, in conference halls, journals and votes. Instruments, publications and the text of the resolution provide further nonrecursive anchors within that coordination. None of this suggests that cosmic reality is inaccessible or that scientific knowledge is merely institutional agreement. The point is the opposite: independent cosmic answerability can be maintained precisely by distinguishing it from the mesocosmic activity through which claims are investigated, accepted, challenged and communicated. Pluto's classification has cosmic and intersymbolic conditions of correctness, the act of classifying Pluto has mesocosmic conditions of felicity, and philosophical trouble begins when the two are confused.
VII. Wittgenstein's games: why living coordination resists definitive classification
In sections 65 to 71 of the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein asks his reader to consider "the proceedings that we call 'games'", board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and to resist the assumption that something must be common to all of them. Looking closely, we find no single shared feature, only "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing", which he calls family resemblances (Wittgenstein 1953, §§66–67). The argument is directed against the philosophical expectation that a common concept must rest on a fixed essence, and it succeeds. The concept of a game has blurred edges and works perfectly well with them.
What Wittgenstein leaves insufficiently examined is why the particular similarities stabilized in ordinary language should be treated as relevant to understanding the activities grouped together. Football and chess are both classified as games, and their living coordinations differ profoundly. Football involves bodies running across a pitch, the continuous mutual adjustment of twenty-two players, the weather, the ball, the turf, and a collective anticipation that has to be achieved in fractions of a second. Chess coordinates bodies, opponents, pieces, rules and anticipations in very different ways: two people sitting still for hours, the visual field of the board, the clock, the memory of thousands of earlier games. Their common classification reproduces neither coordination and does not establish which similarities matter for any particular investigation.
Living Value Theory suggests an explanation for why family resemblance is so prominent in classifications of living activities. A game is more than a set of fixed features. It is an ongoing coordination whose organization emerges through the recursive responses of participating beings. The rules may remain stable while the activity changes: players improvise, cooperate, resist, misunderstand, transform conventions and discover possibilities that the authors of the rules never anticipated. Football's offside rule has been rewritten many times because the game kept producing situations the existing rule did not fit. The classification game preserves selected similarities, and the coordinations it classifies keep generating further differences. A structural asymmetry follows. A classification must retain some invariance if it is to remain recognizable and portable. Living coordination remains open to developments that no fixed classification can specify exhaustively.
This offers an ontological interpretation of family resemblance. The absence of a single definitive essence in a category of living activities need not be understood solely as a property of how words are used; it can also reflect the fact that the activities themselves are recursively constituted across several irreducible mediations. Family resemblance can be a consequence of attempting to stabilize similarities among coordinations whose own organization remains recursively open. This is an extension of Wittgenstein that he did not himself propose, but his own emphasis on use and forms of life remains compatible with it.
The extension needs a careful scope. Some classifications of living activities possess highly precise institutional criteria. A chess tournament can determine exactly which moves are legal, and a football referee can determine exactly whether a ball crossed the line. Living Value Theory does not deny such criteria; it asks what their precision depends on and whether they exhaust the coordinations in which they operate. The legality of a move says nothing about whether it was brilliant, desperate or a bluff. Nor do all family-resemblance phenomena arise from recursive openness, since some arise from the history of symbolic classifications themselves, from extensions by analogy and accidents of usage. The ontological explanation concerns a significant class of cases, especially those involving living practices and relationships, and the strongest form of the claim concerns the impossibility of exhaustive symbolic specification of living coordination, which leaves precise criteria for selected purposes entirely possible. Wittgenstein shows that a shared word does not require a shared essence. Goodman shows that shared similarities do not establish which comparisons are relevant.
VIII. Goodman: why a true comparison may explain nothing
Nelson Goodman's "Seven Strictures on Similarity" challenges the philosophical habit of treating similarity as a primitive explanatory relation. "Similarity, ever ready to solve philosophical problems and overcome obstacles," Goodman wrote, "is a pretender, an impostor, a quack." Counted without restriction, "any two things have exactly as many properties in common as any other two", so the bare possession of shared characteristics cannot establish that two things are significantly alike (Goodman 1972). Judgements of similarity require a selection and weighting of properties, and importance, in Goodman's phrase, "is a highly volatile matter, varying with every shift of context and interest."
The consequences for a theory of truth are direct. Two activities may share a property, and the proposition identifying that property may be true, while neither fact establishes that the comparison is important. Eating dinner and listening to music can both be classified as consumption, and the classification may be entirely correct within a particular analytical vocabulary. It does not follow that their most consequential processes are alike. Eating involves digestion, bodily maintenance, nourishment and metabolic remediation. Listening to a favourite song may involve auditory attention, memory, attachment to a person or a period of life, anticipation, movement and symbolic evocation. Both are co-mediated by all five mediations, but the operations through which each mediation becomes consequential differ, and calling both consumption may be symbolically legitimate while offering little explanatory purchase on either. The truth of a classification cannot establish the relevance of the similarities it selects.
Goodman's account of exemplification adds a second lesson. A tailor's swatch exemplifies some of its properties, its colour, weave and texture, and does not exemplify others, such as its size, shape or the date on which it was cut (Goodman 1968). Goodman told the story of a woman who ordered enough material to upholster her furniture "exactly like the sample" and was dismayed to receive hundreds of small pieces with zigzag edges (Goodman 1978). The joke works because “everyone knows” which properties a swatch is meant to exemplify, and nobody could list in advance the conditions that make this knowledge possible. Goodman located the selection in an established “good practice.” Living Value Theory adds the distributed mesocosmic coordination that makes the selection intelligible. The customer and the upholsterer share embodied familiarity with fabrics and furniture, expectations about how sofas are used, material knowledge of how cloth wears, linguistic conventions, and an anticipated future object in a particular room. The meaning of the swatch becomes clear through this coordination, and the sample alone could never produce it.
The example also shows why establishing a relevant comparison differs from proving a correspondence between a symbol and an object. What the customer wants is a sofa that fits her home and her life. A technically exact reproduction of every specified property of the fabric can still result in a sofa that is uncomfortable, wrong for the light in the room, or impossible to carry through the front door. The symbolic specification may be entirely correct while the realized coordination fails, because the specification was answerable to the fabric and the coordination was answerable to living.
Goodman supplies a devastating critique of unrestricted similarity, and he says comparatively little about where practical relevance comes from beyond the shifting interests of those who compare. Living Value Theory locates its source in living coordination. The question then changes from whether two things are alike to which similarities matter within the coordination being investigated, and why. Goodman shows that correctness cannot establish relevance. J. L. Austin exposes a second problem: an utterance may have consequences that cannot be assessed through truth conditions at all.
IX. Austin: felicity is entirely mesocosmic
In the lectures published as How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin challenged the tendency to evaluate utterances exclusively by whether they describe something truly or falsely. Saying "I promise", "I name this ship", "I bet you" or "I do" in the right circumstances accomplishes an action instead of describing one, and such utterances succeed or fail according to conditions that have little to do with descriptive truth. Austin called the study of what can go wrong "the doctrine of the Infelicities", distinguishing misfires, in which the act is not achieved at all, from abuses, in which it is achieved but hollowly, as in an insincere promise (Austin 1962). As the lectures proceed, his initial distinction between performatives and constatives gives way. Statements too can misfire, and Austin develops a general account of the locutionary act of saying something meaningful, the illocutionary act performed in saying it, and the perlocutionary effects produced by saying it.
Austin's mature position goes further, and it is here that Living Value Theory must part company with him. Asked whether "France is hexagonal" is true, Austin answered that it is "a rough description", good enough for a top-ranking general and not for a geographer. He concluded that "'true' and 'false', like 'free' and 'unfree', do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions" (Austin 1962). Austin saw clearly that the assessment of statements is many-dimensional. By folding truth into rightness of saying, however, he dissolved exactly the distinction that a theory of truth needs. Living Value Theory separates what Austin merged. The shape of France's borders is a matter of cosmic fit, and a geographer's map can be more or less accurate about it whoever is listening. Whether hexagonal is precise enough depends on the purposes of the coordination in which the description is used, which is a question of mesocosmic fit and relevance. And whether saying it to this audience at this moment is the right thing to do is a question of felicity. Austin's general and geographer differ over relevance, and neither of them changes the coastline.
The Living Value Theory contribution begins by asking what makes felicity possible at all. The answer is living coordination: an utterance can be felicitous only because its production and its reception take place within the ongoing coordination of living beings. Consider three examples. A promise, "I will come tomorrow", creates an interrecursive commitment between the person who makes it and the person who receives it; whether the promised visit occurs is distinguishable from whether the promise was appropriately made, and a promise kept can have been made insincerely while a promise broken can have been made in good faith. A diagnosis, "You have depression", may correctly apply a clinical classification, and its utterance also changes what becomes available to patient, clinician and institutions, from treatment and recognition to expectation, eligibility for leave, and possible stigma. And a scientific assertion, "Pluto is not a planet", may correctly state the current astronomical classification, while its felicity depends on why it is said, by whom, to whom, and within what scientific or educational coordination.
The third example deserves emphasis because it invites an objection. Surely, one might say, a proposition about cosmic reality must have its felicity bound up with cosmic fit. Living Value Theory answers that its correctness may involve cosmic fit, while its felicity concerns an act within living coordination. Pluto does not recognize the utterance, respond to it, accept it, dispute it, or alter its behaviour because of it. The scientists do. The proposition's cosmic target and the utterance's mesocosmic felicity must therefore be kept analytically distinct. Felicity belongs entirely to the mesocosm, even when the content of the utterance concerns cosmic reality or formal relations among symbols.
This does not reduce felicity to social approval. An utterance may succeed in accomplishing its intended act while producing serious misalignment elsewhere. A deception can succeed as deception. A declaration can be institutionally valid while damaging the lives it reorganizes, as when a classification legally redefines a family. Felicity must therefore be distinguished from mesocosmic fit in its broader sense. Felicity concerns the successful or unsuccessful performance of a particular symbolic act within living coordination. Mesocosmic fit concerns the wider adequacy of symbolic articulations to the coordinations they enter, describe or reorganize. Felicity is a specifically mesocosmic phenomenon, and it does not exhaust the mesocosmic consequences of symbols.
Four possibilities follow. A proposition can be true and infelicitously asserted, as when a correct diagnosis is delivered in a corridor. A proposition can be false and felicitously used, as when a teacher in 1990 told a class that Pluto was the ninth planet and the lesson went exactly as it should. A proposition can be both true and felicitous and still fail to disclose what is important about the wider coordination, as when an accurate satisfaction score is reported correctly in a meeting where nobody asks what the patients were going through. And a proposition can be correct according to an intersymbolic classification while possessing inadequate cosmic or mesocosmic fit. The philosophy of language has often tried to understand what happens when words are used by beginning with meanings and propositions. Living Value Theory begins with living coordination and understands symbolic utterances as one kind of mediational activity within it, so that truth and felicity become distinguishable without being detached from the circumstances in which living beings articulate and encounter symbols.
X. Truth does not rule life: mesocosmic stakes and the limits of propositional knowledge
Living coordination succeeds, fails, persists, transforms, becomes misaligned, repairs itself or ceases. Propositions about living coordination can be true or false, but the coordination itself is no proposition. A relationship cannot be understood exhaustively by determining which statements about it are true. An illness is not adequately understood once the correct diagnostic category has been assigned. A university is not adequately understood through the accuracy of its performance metrics. Each involves what Living Value Theory calls mesocosmic stakes, the conditions that matter to the continuation, disruption or remediation of living coordination.
Consider a physician telling a patient the truth about a serious diagnosis. The factual correctness of the diagnosis matters enormously, and a physician who misinformed the patient would fail her badly. But correctness does not determine when the information should be given, how it should be articulated, whether the patient can take it in, what support she will need, or how the diagnosis will enter the rest of her life and the lives of those around her. Those questions are mesocosmic, the truth of the diagnosis does not settle them, and truthfulness alone cannot guarantee that communicating the diagnosis achieves good mesocosmic fit.
Scientific inquiry might seem to contradict this. A scientist may devote an entire career to establishing a single true proposition about cosmic reality, at great personal cost. This confirms the argument, because scientific inquiry is itself a particular living coordination in which truth has become extraordinarily relevant. Its priority is established and sustained through the commitments, institutions, instruments, practices and relationships of scientific life, and truth can become the overriding practical objective of such an activity. Far from making truth ontologically prior to living coordination, this shows that living coordination can organize itself around the pursuit of truth.
This resolves a potentially misleading opposition. Instead of claiming that life is more important than truth, as though the two were rival values awaiting comparison, Living Value Theory makes a more fundamental claim: truth is one of the achievements that becomes possible within multisymbolization, while the relevance and consequences of that achievement remain matters of living coordination. The position has nothing to do with relativism. Cosmic reality does not change because the consequences of stating something true are inconvenient, and the mesocosmic priority of vital stakes provides no warrant for treating whatever helps people coordinate as true. Truth and felicity are distinct precisely because they can diverge, and a theory that let either absorb the other would lose the ability to see when they do. Nor is this an ethical injunction to subordinate truth to convenience or immediate utility. Living coordination can make truthfulness absolutely central to its own continuation, as any long friendship shows. The error Living Value Theory opposes is the assumption that establishing the truth of a proposition is sufficient to establish its relevance, its adequacy or its significance for life.
XI. Conclusion: Pluto didn’t not care.
Under the 2006 definition, Pluto is a dwarf planet and not one of the eight planets of the Solar System. The physical properties relevant to that classification remain independent of astronomers' preferences. The definition, its institutional adoption, its theoretical justification and the significance attached to it all belong to human symbolic and mesocosmic coordination. Far from an anomaly requiring philosophical explanation, the case is an unusually clear illustration of the difference between cosmic fit, intersymbolic fit and mesocosmic felicity.
The distinction becomes more complicated when the proposition concerns living coordination itself. "Football is a game." "Socrates is a teacher." "She is my friend." These statements classify coordinations in which symbols can themselves become consequential, since a friend who hears herself described as one may come to be one more fully, or less. Their correctness cannot be assumed to establish the relevance of the classifications they apply, or their adequacy to the coordination they describe.
Wittgenstein demonstrated that meaning cannot be understood through fixed essences and must be investigated through use. Goodman demonstrated that similarity does not justify its own relevance and that symbols select particular properties for exemplification. Austin demonstrated that utterances do things, and that their success cannot be reduced to truth conditions. Living Value Theory brings these insights together within an account of five irreducible mediations, five levels of recursivity and three kinds of symbolic fit, and in doing so explains why symbolic truth, classificatory adequacy and felicity are distinguishable achievements. Truth, neither what living coordination ultimately consists of nor what it must invariably serve, is something living beings can achieve through multisymbolization, and its possibilities are extraordinary precisely because symbols can become answerable to realities independent of their makers. What becomes of those truths, why they matter, and how they enter the continuation or disruption of life are questions that only mesocosmic coordination can answer. Pluto does not care whether it is a planet. Understanding why we do requires more than a theory of truth.
References
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