Your question is answered in the paragraph before the one you quoted. 6.3.1.4 says “Although K&R permitted negative floating values to truncate away from zero, no C89 Committee member knew of an implementation that functioned in such a manner.” I.e., every known C implementation truncated floating-point values toward zero, so that was made the standard (since it ensures future uniformity).
K&R first edition says, on page 42, “… float
to int
causes truncation of any fractional part,” and, on page 184 “… Conversions of floating values to integral type tend to be rather machine-dependent; in particular the direction of truncation of negative numbers varies from machine to machine…”</p>
So there you have it. K&R provided for “truncation” either toward zero or, effectively, toward −∞. The C committee found nobody doing the latter, so they adopted the former. If you want to know more, you will have to ask Brian Kernighan or look for it in their writings.