Online research in philosophy

Truth values are, properly understood, merely proxies for the various relations that can hold between language and the world. Once truth values are understood in this way, consideration of the Liar paradox and the revenge problem shows that our language is indefinitely extensible, as is the class of truth values that statements of our language can take – in short, there is a proper class of such truth values. As a result, important and unexpected connections emerge between the semantic paradoxes and the set-theoretic paradoxes.

Habermas's recent work in epistemology has been marked by a decisive rejection of his earlier epistemic conception of truth in which he understood truth as 'what may be accepted as rational under ideal conditions'. Arguing that no 'idealization of justificatory conditions' can do justice to both human fallibility and the unconditional nature of truth, he has attempted to develop a realistic conception of truth that severs any conceptual link between truth and justification while respecting the epistemic relevance of justification for ascertaining the truth. But realizing this second goal has proved elusive for Habermas because he veers too close to a form of metaphysical realism in his epistemology. By contrast, Hilary Putnam's recent turn to what he calls 'natural realism' is more successful in articulating a form of realism that, in taking its leave of an epistemic conception of truth, still manages to keep its distance from metaphysical realism.

This review essay is an in-depth evaluation of Michael P. Lynch's book Truth in Context. Lynch argues that metaphysical pluralism-- the idea that truth propositions and facts concerning the nature of reality are relative to conceptual schemes or worldviews-- is compatible with realism about truth. It is argued that Lynch is correct that there are consistent, interesting, and nontrivial forms of pluralism. However, much needs to be done to think that pluralism is the correct theory of truth.

Tarski avoids the liar paradox by relativizing truth and falsehood to particular languages and forbidding the predication to sentences in a language of truth or falsehood by any sentences belonging to the same language. The Tarski truth-schemata stratify an object-language and indefinitely ascending hierarchy of meta-languages in which the truth or falsehood of sentences in a language can only be asserted or denied in a higher-order meta-language. However, Tarski’s statement of the truth-schemata themselves involve general truth functions, and in particular the biconditional, defined in terms of truth conditions involving truth values standardly displayed in a truth table. Consistently with his semantic program, all such truth values should also be relativized to particular languages for Tarski. The objection thus points toward the more interesting problem of Tarski’s concept of the exact status of truth predications in a general logic of sentential connectives. Tarski’s three-part solution to the circularity objection which he anticipates is discussed and refuted in detail.

Deflationists share a core negative claim, that truth is not a genuine, substantive property. Deflationism can be seen in part as a form of eliminativism: we can eliminate the property of truth from our ontological inventory. This is the distinctive claim of what we will call metaphysical deflationism. But anyone who accepts metaphysical deflationism must still make sense of our pervasive truth talk. What is it we are doing when we call something true, if we are not ascribing a genuine property? What is the meaning of the word "true"? What are its main uses or functions? And how should we understand the concept of truth and the role it plays in both ordinary and philosophical discourse? An acceptable deflationism must supplement the negative metaphysical claim with an account of the word "true" as well as an account of our concept of truth.

The realism debate concerns the relationship of our beliefs, thoughts and language to the world or universe, and hence involves a number of fundamental questions ranging from metaphysics through epistemology to semantics and philosophy of language. While a few philosophers take it as an inevitable feature of the debate and try to advance it by coping simultaneously with all those questions, a number of others insists that the approach of this kind leads merely to confusions and misunderstandings. They usually suggest that the metaphysical or ontological aspects of it should be kept separate from such epistemological and semantic issues as the possibility of absolute knowledge, the correspondence theory of truth, or the truth-conditional theory of meaning. In other words, there is such a thing as pure or simple metaphysical realism that may be endorsed and defended, or undermined and rejected. The aim of the paper is to raise some doubts about that metaphilosophical strategy, and to argue that the comprehensive approach to the realism debate, in which the metaphysical issues are combined with - at least - some epistemological matters, is not so much caused by confusions and misunderstandings, but forced, as it were, by its subject matter and the philosophical nature of the debate.

Everything about Derrida suggests that he is for a radical reform or transformation of language, whilst Wittgenstein seems to vindicate a fidelity to ordinary language and to want to 'expunge' from language the 'metaphysical use' of words. But just how opposed are they? My contention in this paper is that Wittgenstein does not 'deconstruct', as some critics have rather loosely suggested, because, as we shall see, the expunging of metaphysical use favoured by Wittgenstein does not amount to the deconstruction of metaphysical appurtenance practised by Derrida. However, there are interesting parallels to be drawn between the two philosophers which I shall try to articulate in the course of this paper. The first part provides the background, in Wittgenstein's writings, to his concept of 'metaphysi cal use'; the second is an exposition of what Derrida refers to as 'metaphysical appurtenance' and attendant notions such as those of binary oppositions and of the labouring of concepts; and the third is a summing up and a defence of the thesis that Wittgenstein does not, in any full-bodied sense of the term, 'deconstruct'. Key Words: Derrida • language • meaning • metaphysics • Wittgenstein.

The prospects and limitations of defining truth in a finite model in the same language whose truth one is considering are thoroughly examined. It is shown that in contradistinction to Tarskirs undefinability theorem for arithmetic, it is in a definite sense possible in this case to define truth in the very language whose truth is in question.

Two questions are raised about Quine's view of truth. He has recently said that ontology is relative to a translation manual: is this the same as relativizing it to a language? The same question may be asked about truth. Should we think there is one concept of truth which is relative to a language, or is there a separate concept for each language (or speaker)? The second question concerns Quine's repeated endorsements of the ?disquotational? account of truth. Does he think this account limits a truth predicate to application to a single language, or can translation (or Tarski's methods) allow us to apply a truth predicate in one language to sentences in other languages? If the latter, can Quine still contend that the disquotational account is a ?full? account of the concept of truth? The answer would tell us whether Quine can be counted among those who would deflate the concept of truth.

Schleiermacher rarely features in the now widespread discussion of the relevance of the German Idealist and Romantic traditions for contemporary philosophy because he has mainly been regarded as a theologian and theorist of textual interpretation. This essay shows that his most important philosophical work, the Dialectic, involves many ideas concerning truth and language which are generally regarded as belonging to what Habermas terms 'post-metaphysical thinking'. Schleiermacher's views of truth and language are contrasted with those of Habermas and Rorty, and are seen as being of more than merely historical interest. His reflections on self-consciousness are shown to raise important questions for contemporary accounts of the relationship of the subject to language.