Search Results

This chapter reconsiders the intuitive conception of truth which any account of ‘qualified judgements’ and ‘suitable subjects’ will have to subserve. There are many alternative conceptions of truth; philosophers have characterised it variously in terms of correspondence, coherence, conventional warrant, and idealised assertibility. A minimalist conception of truth is not committed to any constitutive account of the truth-predicate as it applies to any and every discourse, but is rather satisfied to assign minimal content to the idea of ‘truth-in-general’. At least two approaches to this minimalist conception may be distinguished. The first denies that truth is, strictly speaking, a property at all, while the second — known as a ‘minimalist’ approach — allows that any predicate which coincides in normative force with warranted assertibility while yet being potentially divergent from it in extension deserves the title of a truth-predicate.

This chapter deals with the formalization of anaphorically unrestricted pronouns. The result is a family of logical systems very close in their metalogical properties to those of the first-order predicate calculus. Two approaches are offered to anaphorically unrestricted quantifiers. The first imitates standard approaches to truth. The ability of the transcendent truth predicate of ordinary language to blindly endorse foreign sentences can be captured by AU-quantification. The second approach, AU-quantification, provides a slight generalization of the first which may be useful in certain circumstances. Just as Tarskian satisfaction drafts variables as temporary names of objects, so too, the AU approach allows a variable in a sentential context to act sentence like.

Considers criteria of adequacy for a theory of truth. The semantics of the truth predicate is explicated, together with accounts of what the proximate and ultimate truth conditions of logically complex sentences are.

This chapter focuses on the debate over deflationism versus inflationism regarding the question “What do the different truths about different topics all have in common, to make them all truths?” Deflationists are typically committed to three theses about the phrase “is true,” usually called the natural language truth predicate. First, applying the truth predicate to something is equivalent to just saying it. Second, the equivalence principle is a sufficient account of the meaning of the truth predicate. Third, an account of the meaning of “true” is a sufficient account of the nature of truth. The chapter first considers Frank P. Ramsey's redundancy theory before discussing other radical and moderate theories, the disquotationalism of W. V. Quine, slogans associated with deflationism, and the alethic notion of reference.

This chapter presents what is called ’deflated truth pluralism.’ The aim is not to argue for a particular version of deflated truth pluralism, but rather only to illustrate the sort of view involved. This sort of truth pluralism is deflated in at least two senses: it essentially revolves around a deflationary conception of truth; and it acknowledges only deflationarily respectable truth-predicates in the plurality. After presenting the view and motivation for it, the chapter closes by briefly responding to a few objections and/or questions about deflated truth pluralism.

This chapter offers a simplified account of the most basic features of Alfred Tarski's model theory. Tarski foresaw important applications for a notion of truth in mathematics, but also saw that mathematicians were suspicious of that notion, and rightly so given the state of understanding of it circa 1930. In a series of papers in Polish, German, French, and English from the 1930s onward, Tarski attempted to rehabilitate the notion for use in mathematics, and his efforts had by the 1950s resulted in the creation of a branch of mathematical logic known as model theory. The chapter first considers Tarski's notion of truth, which he calls “semantic” truth, before discussing his views on object language and metalanguage, recursive versus direct definition of the truth predicate, and self-reference.

Insofar as the use of natural language to introduce, discuss, and argue about features of a formal system is metatheoretic, there can be no doubt: Frege has a metatheory. But what kind of metatheory? Although the model theoretic semantics with which we are familiar today is a post-Fregean development, most believe that Frege offers a proto-soundness proof for his logic that intrinsically exploits a truth predicate and metalinguistic variables. In this chapter it is argued that he neither uses, nor has any need to use, a truth predicate or metalinguistic variables in justifications of his basic laws and rules. The purpose of the discussions that are typically understood as constituting Frege’s metatheory is, rather, elucidatory. And once we see what the aim of these particular elucidations is, we can explain Frege’s otherwise puzzling eschewal of the truth predicate in his discussions of the justification of the laws and rules of inference.

The paradoxes are a problem for pluralists about truth. While alethic pluralists have generally set discussion of the paradoxes aside, this chapter argues that paradox issues have direct implications for their view. More specifically, alethic pluralism has bifurcated into two main types: strong and weak. Both accept multiple truth predicates, T₁, …, T_n, but weak theories also accept a truth predicate that applies to every true sentence (a universal truth-predicate), which strong theories reject. This chapter shows that both types of theories suffer from paradox-generated inconsistency given certain plausible assumptions. It then outlines a new, consistent way to be a strong alethic pluralist. The trick to avoiding paradox is rejecting infinitary disjunction, something there are already pluralism-independent, paradox-motivated reasons to reject. This chapter concludes by comparing this theory with a Tarskian hierarchical view, and then discuss some directions for future research.

This chapter endeavors to investigate and test how much Tarski’s compositional theory of truth can be consistently extended. In earlier chapters, it has been shown that Tarski’s compositional and disquotational theories fail to validate certain unproblematic sentences containing iterations of the truth predicate, despite the fact that Tarski himself proposed languages that contain a hierarchy of truth predicates. This chapter further shows that untyped theories of truth abandon Tarski’s strictures on truth iteration. It has been argued that self-referential paradoxes are related to particular iterations of the truth predicate, so a careful distinction must be made between sentences that contain problematic iterations of the truth predicate and those that do not.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between philosophy and the concept of truth. Philosophers naturally seek a theory of truth for the entire language; however, an adequate definition of truth can only be given for the fragment of our language that does not contain the truth predicate. A model can never encompass the whole of the domain of discourse of our language. An axiomatic approach is used in formulating natural, philosophically sound theories that are as truth-theoretically complete as possible since the axiomatic approach does not suffer from the deficiencies stated above. It has been shown that there are sound theories of truth that are significantly stronger than the classified compositional theory of truth. This chapter determines what becomes of deflationism in light of the existence of proof-theoretically strong truth theories. Also, the extent to which some of the stronger theories of truth play an essential role in philosophical discussions is hypothesized.

This chapter shows that Classical NEG Raising (NR) is sensitive to syntactic islands and considers a range of cases where it is blocked by island constraints, such as those involving clausal complements of nouns. At issue are examples invoking the Complex NP Constraint, clause-internal topics, truth predicates, wh-islands, clause-internal clefts, pseudoclefts, and Negative Inversion. The clear generalization is that Classical NR is never possible from an island. Such a generalization is especially striking for cases where all known semantic conditions on Classical NR are met (for example, for truth predicates), but Classical NR is still not possible. Because syntactic raising phenomena are subject to island constraints, it is possible to account naturally for the above generalization under the assumption that classical NR is a syntactic raising phenomenon. The chapter also examines island types that block strict negative polarity items (NPIs) but not nonstrict NPIs.

This chapter explores the ways in which a context of assessment can provide a value for the perspective parameter relative to which denotations are assigned. Just as it would be oversimple to regard the referent of a first-person pronoun as fixed completely automatically to the person pronouncing it, or the referent of a present tense morpheme as fixed completely automatically to the time when it is pronounced, it would also be oversimple to regard the perspective parameter as fixed completely automatically to the person performing the truth assessment. Rather, that person must adopt a stance: normally an autocentric stance, in which one assesses relative to oneself; but sometimes instead an exocentric stance, in which one assesses “as though” by another person. Exocentric stances must be carefully distinguished from indexical interpretation. Assessment involves application of a truth predicate which is itself relativistic, but theoretically eliminable.

This chapter considers whether internal categoricity can be used to leverage any claims about mathematical truth. We begin by noting that internal categoricity allows us to introduce a truth-operator which gives an object-language expression to the supervaluationist semantics. In this way, the univocity discussed in previous chapters might seem to secure an object-language expression of determinacy of truth-value; but this hope falls short, because such truth-operators must be carefully distinguished from truth-predicates. To introduce these truth-predicates, we outline an internalist attitude towards model theory itself. We then use this to illuminate the cryptic conclusions of Putnam's justly-famous paper ‘Models and Reality’. We close this chapter by presenting Tarski’s famous result that truth for lower-order languages can be defined in higher-order languages.

This chapter deals with the phenomenon known as Never Raising and shows that it represents a syntactic raising phenomenon. It first considers problems in a potential nonsyntactic account of Never Raising similar to the nonsyntactic account associated with Classical NEG Raising (NR). It then examines the paraphrase relations between putative Never Raising cases and otherwise parallel clauses in which the never is in the complement, along with evidence for the syntactic character of the phenomenon from adverbial modification. It also presents sentences that illustrate Never Raising from the complement of a truth predicate, from a clause with a cleft construction, and from a pseudocleft construction. Finally, it discusses parallels between Never Raising and Classical NR.

This chapter examines the notion of relative truth as it relates to the theory of speech acts, especially assertion. At a basic level, assertion involves portraying content as true; we consider which of our various truth predicates is the one used in this characterization, concluding it is the relativistic but theoretically eliminable truth predicate. The discourse role of assertion is explained in terms of updates to a common ground, taken to be a set of world–perspective pairs. It is argued that assertions of relativistic contents serve the practical purpose of building a social advantage for one’s own tastes. The chapter concludes with a consideration of questions, which are treated as invitations to assert. Because assertions typically involve assessment from an autocentric stance, questions typically invite responses based on the tastes of the addressee, not the speaker.