Truth as a Relational Property

In this essay, I pesent a new argument for the imposszbility of definmg truth by speafyzng the underlyzng structural property ali and only true proposttions have in common The set of consulerations I use to support this clazm take as thar inspiration Alston's recent argument that tt is trn possible to define truth epistemically-in terms of justification or warrant Accordmg to what Alston calls the "mtensional argument", epistenuc def =tons are inconststent with the Tschema or the principie that tt is true that p if, and only tf, p Smce the T-schema has great intuitive appeal, tias is a powerful zndictment of episterruc theones But the basic argument that Alston employs, and the constellatian of considerations whzch pros ecute that argument, work agamst a much broader range of views than he considers Whtle this implies that a traditional conceptual analysts of truth rnay be impossible, it opens the door to a piurahst approach to truth

2022

Kirkham’s book is not a plain attempt of asking the questions like “What is truth?” since it would, according to him, be one more mistake followed by confusion. The components of this four-dimensional confusion (vagueness, ambiguity, several ways of describing the same project, and one answer for two distinctly different questions about truth) find its original explanation in Kirkham’s book. Having stated that all of the previous theories of truth were just irrelevant to the question of “What is truth” because when asking different questions about truth, he draws his non-trivial approach of assigning each theorist to the particular question (or “project”) he or she was trying to answer with his or her theory of truth. So, the main merit of Kirkham’s work is the clarification of this most urgent philosophical problem of truth on the way of metaphysics.

Exploring the Philosophical Terrain, 2013

This article surveys different philosophical theories about the nature of truth. We give much importance to truth; some demand to know it, some fear it, and others would even die for it. But what exactly is truth? What is its nature? Does it even have a nature in the first place? When do we say that some truth-bearers are true? Philosophers offer varying answers to these questions. In this article, some of these answers are explored and some of the problems raised against them are presented.

2020

The concept of truth has many aims but only one source. The article describes the primary concept of truth, here called the synthetic concept of truth, according to which truth is the objective result of the synthesis of us and nature in the process of rational cognition. It is shown how various aspects of the concept of truth logical, scientic, and mathematical aspect arise from the synthetic concept of truth. Related to these aspects, i) the regression of truth is analysed and it is shown how the distinction between assertion and valuation resolves the regression, (ii) Tarski's denition of truth is analysed and its role in the concept of truth is identied, and (iii) the truth predicate is analysed and it is shown why paradoxes of truth arise. keywords: truth, the regression of truth, Tarski's denition of truth, the truth predicate, paradoxes of truth

Metaphilosophy, 2013

This article, after briefly discussing Alfred Tarski's influential theory of truth, turns to a more recent theory of truth, a deflationary, or minimalist, theory. One of the chief elements of a deflationary, or minimalist, theory of truth is that it replaces the question of what truth is with the question of what "true" does. After setting out the central features of the minimalist theory of truth, the article explains the motivation for opting for such a position. In addition, it provides some reasons for thinking that such a theory of truth is "minimal" or "deflationary" in the way that contemporary truth theorists have claimed it to be.

This dissertation is a philosophical analysis of the concept of truth. It is a development and defense of the “stratified” or “language-level” conception of truth, first advanced in Alfred Tarski’s 1933 monograph The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Although Tarski’s paper had seminal influence both in philosophy and in more technical disciplines, its central philosophical claim has not been generally accepted. This work has two central goals: (a) to give a detailed and analytic presentation of Tarski’s theory and the problems it faces; (b) to offer a solution to these problems and assess the philosophical significance of this solution. The essay is divided in two parts. Part One contains a detailed and analytic presentation and interpretation of the stratified conception of truth. The analysis contains several steps: (a) Crucial basic assumptions, such as the limitation to formalized languages and the requirement of explicit definitions, are stated explicitly, motivated, and their philosophical significance discussed. (b) The main negative result of the stratified conception, the impossibility of semantic closure and of a universal language, is given in detail and interpreted. (c) Tarski’s criterion for adequate truth definitions, known as Convention T, is stated and motivated. (d) The deep structure of Tarski-style truth definitions and the necessary conditions for their availability are analyzed. In particular, the philosophical significance of Tarski’s notion of “essential richness” is discussed. (e) Finally, several problems are raised for the stratified conception, chief among them the unity objection, according to which the stratified conception is not a viable analysis of the concept of truth, since (by (a) above) an analysis should take the form of a definition, and on the stratified conception different languages have different definitions. There is therefore no one analysis of the concept. Part Two is a development of answers to the problems raised at the end of Part One. The crux of the answer to the unity objection is that Convention T, the adequacy criterion, connects the many definitions of truth into a single concept. However, in order to fulfill that role Convention T must apply universally, and a universal language was shown to be impossible ((c) above). The task of Part Two is therefore to develop a mode of expression that allows the universal applicability of Convention T without commitment to a universal metalanguage. The procedure is as follows. (a) Convention T is formalized in order to isolate the place in which universal applicability is required. (b) A new expressive resource of “abstract generality” is developed. To this purpose a digression into the semantics of natural language indexicals is undertaken. David Kaplan’s thesis of the direct reference of indexicals is analyzed and a new formal system is proposed that embodies it. It is shown that this formal system expresses abstract generality. (c) The notion of abstract generality is adapted to languages without indexicals and it isviii shown that Convention T can be expressed without assuming a universal language. (d) A reconstrual of the task of concept analysis is proposed, which is a generalization of the answer to the unity objection. It is often complained against Tarski’s stratified conception of truth that it is of limited philosophical significance. In this work I show that, on the contrary, the problems it faces and the solutions that can be advanced to answer these problems have substantive philosophical consequences. The notion of abstract generality gives rise to a distinction between two fundamentally different modes of discourse: a universal but merely abstract methodological discourse on the one hand, and a concrete but inevitably restricted theoretical discourse on the other. This distinction has many important implications for our understanding of the concepts of truth, meaning and language.

One of the many ways that ‘deflationary’ and ‘inflationary’ theories of truth are said to differ is in their attitude towards truth qua property. This difference used to be very easy to delineate, with deflationists denying, and inflationists asserting, that truth is a property, but more recently the debate has become a lot more complicated, due primarily to the fact that many contemporary deflationists often do allow for truth to be considered a property. Anxious to avoid inflation, however, these deflationists are at pains to point out that the truth property, on their view, is not a property of any significant interest. Correspondingly, inflationists have seen this as an opportunity to refine what kind of property they think truth is, which – according to them – moves their views beyond deflationism. The upshot of this is that there are number of different accounts in the literature of what distinguishes an inflationary truth property from a deflationary one, or – as it is sometimes put - what distinguishes a ‘substantive’ property from an ‘insubstantive’ one. This has made it hard to pin down exactly what is at issue at the metaphysical level between deflationists and inflationists, which makes it increasingly hard to see how debates between them are properly phrased. Given that these positions represent the two central attitudes towards truth in contemporary debates, this makes for a serious obstacle for the project of discerning the correct theory of truth. The aim of this paper is to discern the best way to distinguish between substantive and insubstantive properties, and thus to restore some focus to these debates. I argue that the three central distinctions in the literature fail, and offer what I take to be a more promising distinction in terms of a graded distinction between abundant and sparse properties.

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common " pluralizing tendency " with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here.

The Review of Symbolic Logic, 2014

There are two perspectives from which formal theories can be viewed. On the one hand, one can take a theory to be about some privileged models. On the other hand, one can take all models of a theory to be on a par. In contrast with what is usually done in philosophical debates, we adopt the latter viewpoint. Suppose that from this perspective we want to add an adequate truth predicate to a background theory. Then on the one hand the truth theory ought to be semantically conservative over the background theory. At the same time, it is generally recognised that the central function of a truth predicate is an expressive one. A truth predicate ought to allow us to express propositions that we could not express before. In this article we argue that there are indeed natural truth theories which satisfy both the demand of semantical conservativeness and the demand of adequately extending the expressive power of our language.