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How Truth Behaves When There’s No Vicious Reference

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Abstract

In The Revision Theory of Truth (MIT Press), Gupta and Belnap (1993) claim as an advantage of their approach to truth “its consequence that truth behaves like an ordinary classical concept under certain conditions—conditions that can roughly be characterized as those in which there is no vicious reference in the language.” To clarify this remark, they define Thomason models, nonpathological models in which truth behaves like a classical concept, and investigate conditions under which a model is Thomason: they argue that a model is Thomason when there is no vicious reference in it. We extend their investigation, considering notions of nonpathologicality and senses of “no vicious reference” generated both by revision theories of truth and by fixed-point theories of truth. We show that some of the fixed-point theories have an advantage analogous to that which Gupta and Belnap claim for their approach, and that at least one revision theory does not. This calls into question the claim that the revision theories have a distinctive advantage in this regard.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8, Canada

    Philip Kremer

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  1. Philip Kremer
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Correspondence to Philip Kremer.

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Kremer, P. How Truth Behaves When There’s No Vicious Reference. J Philos Logic 39, 345–367 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-010-9136-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-010-9136-4

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