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Attention to the conversational role of alethic terms seems to dominate, and even sometimes exhaust, many contemporary analyses of the nature of truth. Yet, because truth plays a role in judgment and assertion regardless of whether alethic terms are expressly used, such analyses cannot be comprehensive or fully adequate. A more general analysis of the nature of truth is therefore required---one which continues to explain the significance of truth independently of the role alethic terms play in discourse. We undertake such an analysis in this paper; in particular, we start with certain elements from Kant and Frege, and develop a construct of truth as a normative modality of cognitive acts (e.g., thought, judgment, assertion). Using the various biconditional T-schemas to sanction the general passage from assertions to (equivalent) assertions of truth, we then suggest that an illocutionary analysis of truth can contribute to its locutionary analysis as well, including the analysis of diverse constructions involving alethic terms that have been largely overlooked in the philosophical literature. Finally, we briefly indicate the importance of distinguishing between alethic and epistemic modalities.
2019 •
Post-truth theories claim that there is something wrong with how people deal with truth. In this paper, I claim that there is something wrong with how philosophers deal with truth. What is wrong is not what one or another truth theorist says, but the way in which the proposed theory is produced and evaluated. Some specific aspects of the current management of philosophy are anti-alethic in principle: they resist against the possibility of getting a satisfactory image of what truth is and why such a concept is (or is held to be) important for human life. In the first section I give a rapid overview of the main truth theories, in the second section I point out three meta-theoretical attitudes or practical postulates variously active nowadays, showing that they are truth resistant. In the conclusion, I say something about how philosophers could hope to solve their own ‘post-truth problem’.
Alethic pluralism is the view that truth requires different treatment in different domains of discourse. The basic idea is that different properties play important roles in the analysis of truth in different domains of discourse, such as discourse about the material world, moral discourse, and mathematical discourse, to take three examples. Alethic disjunctivism is a kind of alethic pluralism, and is the view that truth is to be identified with the disjunctive property that is formed using each of the domain-specific properties as disjuncts (i.e. in the view’s simplest form, truth is the property of either having domain-specific property 1, or domain-specific property 2, and so on). This paper evaluates the prospects for alethic disjunctivism. In particular, it outlines the proper formulation of the view, and assesses some concerns that the disjunctive property lacks the pedigree necessary to be considered a truth property. I begin by briefly outlining the motivations for alethic pluralism, before noting four general constraints on formulations of the view. I then consider a ‘simple’ formulation of alethic disjunctivism, and recommend an amendment. I then demonstrate that the candidate truth property specified by this new formulation is able to meet the central constraints required for it to be considered a viable formulation of alethic pluralism. The final part of this demonstration involves making some distinctions between different kinds of disjunctive properties, and arguing that disjunctive properties are not necessarily highly abundant properties: some are sparser than others.
2016 •
In The nature of truth: An updated approach to the meaning of truth ascriptions (2012), M. J. Frápolli presents a novel approach to the meaning of truth ascriptions, defending that these expressions should play an essential role in our understanding of truth. A crucial part of that account is the detailed taxonomy of the different types of truth ascriptions, as well as the different pragmatic roles truth ascriptions can perform. In this critical notice I will show that the proposed framework has several flaws concerning the two central points: the taxonomy and the pragmatic roles of truth ascriptions.
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.
In N. J. L. L. Pedersen and C. D. Wright (eds.), Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates . New York: Oxford University Press
Pluralism about truth as alethic disjunctivism1975 •
Two aspects of truth constitute the subject of investigation in this thesis. These two aspects arise in the dependence of truth on language and fact. A statement is true or false, as the case may be, jointly in virtue of what it means and of how things are. This double dependence . of truth on meaning and reality establishes prima facie interconnections between these notions, which I am here concerned to analyse. Consideration of these interconnections with respect to individual sentences suggests that truth is dependent on meaning. After all, we cannot begin to assess a statement as to its veracity unless we first understand it, that is to say, grasp its meaning. This claim is unexceptionable, but only from a vantage point which precludes a general understanding of the concepts involved. It quite leaves out of account the evident consideration that it is only in the context of a language that a collocation of symbols or sounds is endowed with sense- While it must be that, to dete...
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