Online research in philosophy

Theories of personal identity purport to specify truth conditions for sentences of the form 'x-at-ti is the same person as y-at-tj. Most philosophers nowadays agree that such truth conditions are to be stated in terms of psychological continuity. However; opinions vary as to how the notion of psychological continuity is to be understood. In a recent contribution to this journal, Slors offers an account in which psychological continuity is spelled out in terms of narrative connectedness between mental states.The present paper argues that Slors' theory either is no theory of personal identity at all or is too weak.Towards the end of the paper, it is indicated how the problem uncovered for Slors' theory may be avoided.

In Spandrels of Truth, Beall concisely presents and defends a modest, so-called dialetheic theory of transparent truth.

The paper is concerned with the idea that the world is the totality of facts, not of things – with what is involved in thinking of the world in that way, and why one might do so. It approaches this issue through a comparison between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the identity theory of truth proposed by Hornsby and McDowell.The paper’s positive conclusion is that there is a genuine affinity between these two. A negative contention is that the modern identity theory is vulnerable to a complaint of idealism that the Tractatus can deflect.

According to a classical correspondence theory of truth, a proposition is true iff it corresponds to a fact. The approach has its competitors. One of them, the identity theory of truth, pushes for a surprising simplification. It says that true propositions do not correspond to facts, they are facts. Some find this view too bizarre to be taken seriously. Some are attracted to it because they worry that the correspondence theory opens a gap between our thoughts and reality--a gap that, once opened, will turn out to be unbridgeable, thus making it impossible for our thoughts to come into contact with reality and for us to attain knowledge. They think the identity theory will avoid these nasty consequences because it does not open the gap to begin with. The no-gap theme will play a role in the background of the present paper. It will surface at times. But the paper is more concerned with a different theme, the collapse-charge. Opponents of the correspondence theory sometimes charge that the theory is unstable, that it must collapse into the identity theory, because there is not enough play between true propositions and facts to leave room for a genuine relation to hold between them. Those who regard the identity theory as absurd might see this a reductio of the correspondence theory. Others might see it as an argument for the identity theory. After some exploration of the identity theory, I will present one form of the collapse-charge, then I will discuss what a correspondence theorist has to offer by way of a response.

Book Information An Identity Theory of Truth. By Dodd Julian. Macmillan. Basingstoke. 2000. Pp. ix + 199. Hardback, £42.50.

This book argues that correspondence theories of truth fail because the relation that holds between a true thought and a fact is that of identity, not correspondence. Facts are not complexes of worldly entities which make thoughts true they are merely true thoughts. According to Julian Dodd, the resulting modest identity theory , while not defining truth, correctly diagnoses the failure of correspondence theories, and thereby prepares the ground for a defensible deflation of the concept of truth.

The identity theory of truth, according to which true thoughts are identical with facts, is very hard to formulate. It oscillates between substantive versions, which are implausible, and a merely truistic version, which is difficult to distinguish from deflationism about truth. This tension is present in the form of identity theory that one can attribute to McDowell from his views on perception, and in the conception defended by Hornsby under that name.

Most recent discussions of truth ignore the fact that a few philosophers, past and present, have flirted with and sometimes openly subscribed to an identity theory, according to which a proposition's being true consists in its identity with the reality it is supposedly about. This neglect is probably due to the theory's counter-intuitiveness: it faces obvious and fundamental objections. The aim of this paper is to consider these objections and decide if there is a version of the theory which can escape them, thereby becoming an at least initially plausible candidate for an account of truth. In this way the metaphysical price exacted by commitment to an identity theory can be assessed.

is true, there is a truth-maker (e.g., a fact) with which it is identical and the truth of the former consists in its identity with the latter. The theory is best understood as a reaction to the correspondence theory, according to which the relation of truth-bearer to truth-maker is correspondence. A correspondence theory is vulnerable to the nagging suspicion that if the best we can do is make statements that merely correspond to the truth, then we inevitably fail to capture the reality they are about and thus fall short of the truth we aim at. An identity theory is designed to overcome this suspicion.