Online research in philosophy

In this paper a logic for reasoning disquotationally about truth is presented and shown to have a standard model. This work improves on Hartry Field's recent results establishing consistency and omega-consistency of truth-theories with strong conditional logics. A novel method utilising the Banach fixed point theorem for contracting functions on complete metric spaces is invoked, and the resulting logic is shown to validate a number of principles which existing revision theoretic methods have heretofore failed to provide.

The minimalist view of truth endorsed by Paul Horwich denies that truth has any underlying nature. According to minimalism, the truth predicate ‘exists solely for the sake of a certain logical need’; ‘the function of the truth predicate is to enable the explicit formulation of schematic generalizations’. Horwich proposes that all there really is to truth follows from the equivalence schema: The proposition that p is true iff p, or, using Horwich’s notation, ·pÒ is true ´ p. The (unproblematic) instances of the schema form ‘the minimal theory of truth’. Horwich claims that all the facts involving truth can be explained on the basis of the minimal theory. However, it has been pointed out, e.g. by Gupta (1993), that the minimal theory is too weak to entail any general facts about truth, e.g. the fact that..

The article suggests a reading of the term ‘epistemic account of truth’ which runs contrary to a widespread consensus with regard to what epistemic accounts are meant to provide, namely a definition of truth in epistemic terms. Section 1. introduces a variety of possible epistemic accounts that differ with regard to the strength of the epistemic constraints they impose on truth. Section 2. introduces the paradox of knowability and presents a slightly reconstructed version of a related argument brought forward by Wolfgang Künne. I accept the paradox and Künnes argument as sound objections to all the different epistemic accounts which are committed to one of the various constraints on truth introduced in section 1. Section 3. offers a modified epistemic constraint which, or so I argue, is immune to the paradox of knowability and plausible on independent grounds.

I define T-schema deflationism as the thesis that a theory of truth for our language can simply take the form of certain instances of Tarski's schema (T). I show that any effective enumeration of these instances will yield as a dividend an effective enumeration of all truths of our language. But that contradicts Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem. So the instances of (T) constituting the T-Schema deflationist's theory of truth are not effectively enumerable, which casts doubt on the idea that the T-schema deflationist in any sense has a theory of truth. (The argument in section 2 of "Semantics for Deflationists" supercedes this paper.).

A selective background -- Broadly classical approaches -- Paracompleteness -- More on paracomplete solutions -- Paraconsistent dialetheism.

This essay attempts to give substance to the claim that the liar''sparadox shows the truth predicate to be context sensitive. The aim ismodest: to provide an account of the truth predicate''s contextsensitivity (1) that derives from a more general understanding ofcontext sensitivity, (2) that does not depend upon a hierarchy ofpredicates and (3) that is able to address the liar''s paradox. Theconsequences of achieving this goal are not modest, though. Perhapssurprisingly, for reasons that will be discussed in the last section ofthis essay, a natural account of the truth predicate''s contextsensitivity appears to lead naturally to a version of the correspondencetheory of truth according to which the truth predicate can be understoodas a relation holding between a sentence and a salient set of contexts.The plan of this essay is as follows. Section 1 contains a generalaccount of context sensitivity. The purpose of this section is toisolate certain features of context sensitivity and formal methods oftreating them, which we will then apply to the truth predicate. Section 2then outlines two minimal conditions to be satisfied by a truthpredicate. In Section 3, I present a version of the liar paradoxthat results from these conditions and the assumption that the truthpredicate is not context sensitive in the sense described in sectionone. Finally, in section four, I provide what appear to be naturalconsequences of a truth predicate''s context sensitivity. Section 4 isadmittedly speculative and points in the direction for future research.

Postmodernists claim that there is no truth. However, the statement 'there is no truth' is self-contradictory. This essay shows the following: One cannot state the idea 'there is no truth' universally without creating a paradox. In contrast, the statement 'there is truth' does not produce such a paradox. Therefore, it is more logical that truth exists.

Hartry Field’s book, Saving Truth from Paradox, is without question among the best works on truth and the liar paradox in the analytic tradition—it should become the standard reference on the liar paradox for years to come. Field offers lucid, technically accurate, but accessible discussions of most of the approaches to the liar paradox that are currently being debated in the literature. He also defends his favored approach, which requires a change from classical to paracomplete logic. After a brief flirtation with dialetheism around the turn of the century, he now offers a novel, powerful, and technically dazzling way of dealing with the liar paradox to accompany his influential version of disquotationalism.2 Together they provide a unified view of the nature and logic of truth.3 Field’s solution to the liar together with his fair and charitable discussion of the alternatives make this book required reading by anyone remotely interested in issues associated with truth, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language. The book covers much the same ground as several of Field’s recent papers on the liar paradox4, but this is not a collection; instead, Field has written the book from scratch in a way that informs the..

A notion of truth as applicable to events of assertoric use ( utterances ) of a sentence token is arguably presupposed and required by our evaluative practices of the use of language. The truth of an utterance seems clearly to depend on what the utterance says . This fundamental dependence seems in turn to be captured by the schema that, if an utterance u says that P , then u is true iff P . Such a schema may thus be thought to constitute a suitable basis for an adequate theory of utterance truth, so much so that it seems straightforwardly to avoid the problems arising from context dependence and the semantic paradoxes which notoriously beset theories of utterance truth based on a simple disquotational schema. The paper argues that appearances are deceptive in both cases. On the one hand, the schema cannot allow for plausible if not uncontroversial non-indexical forms of context dependence, arising from the possibility that what an utterance says can be the case or not relative to different situations and that the truth of an utterance u of a sentence φ arguably depends on the truth of φ at the situation "associated" with u . On the other hand, a quantified utterance-truth variation on the liar paradox shows that the schema entails some consequence φ and at the same time the untruth of any utterance of φ; moreover, a resilient quantified propositional variation on the contingent liar paradox is offered, which only relies on resources usually employed by theories of utterance truth based on the schema.

The paper offers a solution to the semantic paradoxes, one in which (1) we keep the unrestricted truth schema True(A)A, and (2) the object language can include its own metalanguage. Because of the first feature, classical logic must be restricted, but full classical reasoning applies in ordinary contexts, including standard set theory. The more general logic that replaces classical logic includes a principle of substitutivity of equivalents, which with the truth schema leads to the general intersubstitutivity of True(A) with A within the language.The logic is also shown to have the resources required to represent the way in which sentences (like the Liar sentence and the Curry sentence) that lead to paradox in classical logic are defective. We can in fact define a hierarchy of defectiveness predicates within the language. Contrary to claims that any solution to the paradoxes just breeds further paradoxes (revenge problems) involving defectiveness predicates, there is a general consistency/conservativeness proof that shows that talk of truth and the various levels of defectiveness can all be made coherent together within a single object language.