A division between functional belief, on the one hand, and judgmental belief, on the other, is central to Sosa’s two-tier virtue epistemology. For Sosa, mere functional belief is constituted by a first-order affirmation. In contrast, a judgmental belief is an intentional affirmation; a performance which is partially constituted by the believer’s endeavor to affirm truthfully, and reliably enough. If, qua performance, judgmental belief is like the hunter’s shot or the baseball player’s swing, mere (...) functional belief is much more like a heartbeat. This paper explores whether we should accept Sosa’s distinction between mere functional belief and judgmental belief, and, if we should, how recognizing this distinction ought to shape our epistemological theorizing. Accordingly, the first aim of this paper is expository. It is to further clarify Sosa’s contrasting categories of functional belief and judgmental belief and to attempt to characterize explicitly the role that the division between functional belief and judgmental belief plays in Sosa’s two-tier virtue epistemology. The second aim of this paper is more critical. It is to articulate and begin to evaluate a series of concerns regarding whether Sosa’s division between functional belief and judgmental belief is well-founded, and so to explore whether a virtue-theoretic performance epistemology ought to embrace the sort of two-tiered account of cognitive performance that Sosa favors. (shrink)

Belief revision (BR) and truthlikeness (TL) emerged independently as two research programmes in formal methodology in the 1970s. A natural way of connecting BR and TL is to ask under what conditions the revision of a belief system by new input information leads the system towards the truth. It turns out that, for the AGM model of belief revision, the only safe case is the expansion of true beliefs by true input, but this is not very (...) interesting or realistic as a model of theory change in science. The new accounts of non-prioritized belief revision do not seem more promising in this respect, and the alternative BR account of updating by imaging leads to other problems. Still, positive results about increasing truthlikeness by belief revision may be sought by restricting attention to special kinds of theories. Another approach is to link truthlikeness to epistemic matters by an estimation function which calculates expected degrees of truthlikeness relative to evidence. Then we can study how the expected truthlikeness of a theory changes when probabilities are revised by conditionalization or imaging. Again, we can ask under what conditions such changes lead our best theories towards the truth. (shrink)

Quine argues that if sentences that are set theoretically equivalent are interchangeable salva veritate, then all transparent operators are truth-functional. Criticisms of this argument fail to take into account the conditional character of the conclusion. Quine also argues that, for any person P with minimal logical acuity, if ‘belief’ has a sense in which it is a transparent operator, then, in that sense of the word, P believes everything if P believes anything. The suggestion is made that (...) he intends that result to show us that ‘believes’ has no transparent sense. Criticisms of this argument are either based on unwarranted assertions or on definitions of key terms that depart from Quine’s usage of those terms. (shrink)

Beliefs serve at least two broad functions. First, they help us navigate the world. Second, they serve as signals to manipulate others. Philosophers and psychologists have focused on the first function while largely overlooking the second. This article advances a conception of signals and makes a prima facie case for a social signaling function for at least some beliefs. Truth and rational support are often irrelevant to the signaling function. If some beliefs evolved for a signaling function, then we (...) should expect various biases that aid in the manipulation of others. (shrink)

It is a platitude that belief is subject to a standard of correctness: a belief is correct if and only if it is true. But not all standards of correctness are authoritative or binding. Some standards of correctness may be arbitrary, unjustified or outrightly wrong. Given this, one challenge to proponents of the truth norm of belief, is to answer what Korsgaard (1996) calls ‘the normative question’. Is the truth norm of belief authoritative or (...) binding regarding what one ought to or may believe? If so, what grounds its authority? The aim of this paper is to offer a novel answer to the grounding challenge on a reason-based normative framework. I develop and defend a practice-based account of the truth norm, according to which, the authority of the truth norm of belief is grounded in what I call the T-practice, a justified social practice that functions to facilitate knowledge production, maintenance, and social cooperation. (shrink)

Logical reasoning is not only a component of religious faith (cf., for instance, the "Golden rule"), but, in addition, the religious faith itself can be conceived as a logical pragmatic function applied to sentences and their meanings. Pragmatic role of religious faith is shown on the examples of the analogy of seed and spoken word (e.g., Mt 13:3-23) and on the degrees of faith described in the episode about Nicodemus (John 3). Pragmatics adds (different grades of) perseverance to the correctness (...) of reasoning and to the truth-preservation of the consequence relation. Correspondingly, religious faith is described by formally defined model and satisfaction relation, which are applied to and examined on the text of John 3. (shrink)

This dissertation explores several accounts of the intuitions speakers have concerning the truth values of utterances of sentences containing vague nouns and adjectives. While some semanticists have attempted to account for these intuitions with multi-valued logics and supervaluation theories of truth, I focus on how utterances of vague sentences affect hearers' beliefs. ;Following a critique of the major semantical accounts of vagueness, I propose a formal theory of how beliefs are revised following utterances of sentences of the form (...) X is A, X is A and B, and X is A and not A, where A and B are vague scalar adjectives. Formally, a hearer's beliefs are represented as a set of weighted sentences, and the information conveyed by a speaker's utterance is represented as a set of weighted conditionals. When a speaker utters a sentence, a function on these sets yields the hearer's revised beliefs. I derive from this theory a criterion for proper assertability: a sentence is properly assertable in a given context if the maximum information loss that could obtain between competent discourse participants is less than some threshold. I argue that this criterion often predicts the truth-value judgements competent speakers make which violate the basic rules of logic. I extend these theories to utterances of sentences containing vague non-scalar nouns. ;In the second half of the dissertation, I propose two semantic accounts of vagueness. One incorporates the assertability criterion into its definition of truth. The other is independent of it. The former accounts for a large set of intuitions concerning the truth values of utterances of vague sentences. The latter accounts for only a subset of those intuitions, leaving the rest to be explained independently by the theory of proper assertability. ;I conclude with brief discussions of the Sorites Paradox and the experimental data obtained by Tversky and Kahneman which purport to demonstrate people's poor intuitions concerning the probabilities of conjunctions. (shrink)

Belief and credence are often characterized in three different ways—they ought to govern our actions, they ought to be governed by our evidence, and they ought to aim at the truth. If one of these roles is to be central, we need to explain why the others should be features of the same mental state rather than separate ones. If multiple roles are equally central, then this may cause problems for some traditional arguments about what belief and (...) credence must be like. I read the history of formal and traditional epistemology through the lens of these functional roles, and suggest that considerations from one literature might have a role in the other. The similarities and differences between these literatures may suggest some more general ideas about the nature of epistemology in abstraction from the details of credence and belief in particular. (shrink)

We explore the possibility of characterizing belief wholly in terms of its first-order functional role, its input (evidence) and output (further beliefs and actions), by addressing some common challenges to the view. One challenge concerns the fact that not all belief is evidence-sensitive. In response to this, normativists and teleo-functionalists have concluded that something over and above functional role is needed, a norm or a telos. We argue that both allow for implausibly much divergence between (...) class='Hi'>belief and evidence. Others have suggested that belief should be saved as the evidence-sensitive attitude, by making it share its motivational role with an unrecognized state: alief. We argue that the appeal to alief faces a dilemma: Either explanation of intentional action by means of alief is a species of intentional explanation, in which case it becomes hard to distinguish alief from (irrational) belief, or alief is sufficiently different from belief, but then neither the explanation nor the explanandum (action) are recognizably intentional any longer. We conclude that the most promising way forward is an account of belief that makes use of the full functional role of belief, including its role in theoretical reasoning. (shrink)

What is truth? Michael Lynch defends a bold new answer to this question. Traditional theories of truth hold that truth has only a single uniform nature. All truths are true in the same way. More recent deflationary theories claim that truth has no nature at all; the concept of truth is of no real philosophical importance. In this concise and clearly written book, Lynch argues that we should reject both these extremes and hold that (...) class='Hi'>truth is a functional property. To understand truth we must understand what it does, its function in our cognitive economy. Once we understand that, we'll see that this function can be performed in more than one way. And that in turn opens the door to an appealing pluralism: beliefs about the concrete physical world needn't be true in the same way as our thoughts about matters -- like morality -- where the human stain is deepest. (shrink)

Different formal tools are useful for different purposes. For example, when it comes to modelling degrees of belief, probability theory is a better tool than classical logic; when it comes to modelling the truth of mathematical claims, classical logic is a better tool than probability theory. In this paper I focus on a widely used formal tool and argue that it does not provide a good model of a phenomenon of which many think it does provide a good (...) model: I shall argue that while supervaluationism may provide a model of probability of truth, or of assertability, it cannot provide a good model of truth -- supertruth cannot be truth. The core of the argument is that an adequate model of truth must render certain connectives truth-functional (at least in certain circumstances) -- and supervaluationism does not do so (in those circumstances). (shrink)

It is impossible to hold patently contradictory beliefs in mind together at once. Why? Because we know that it is impossible for both to be true. This impossibility is a species of rational necessity, a phenomenon that uniquely characterizes the relation between one person's beliefs. Here, Eric Marcus argues that the unity of the rational mind--what makes it one mind--is what explains why, given what we already believe, we can't believe certain things and must believe certain others in this special (...) sense. What explains this is that beliefs, and the inferences by which we acquire them, are constituted by a particular kind of endorsement of those very states and acts. This, in turn, entails that belief and inference are essentially self-conscious: to hold a belief or to make an inference is at the same time to know that one does. An examination of the nature of belief and inference, in light of the phenomenon of rational necessity, reveals how the unity of the rational mind is a function of our knowledge of ourselves as bound to believe the true. Rational self-consciousness is the form of mental togetherness. (shrink)

McCarthy thinks truth more important than I do. Specifically, he thinks that “ ‘truth’ … functions as an ‘idea of reason’ with respect to which we can criticize not only particular claims within our language but the very standards of truth we have inherited” . By contrast, I think that what enables us to make such criticism is concrete alternative suggestions—suggestions about how to redescribe what we are talking about. Some examples are Galileo’s suggestions about how to (...) redescribe the Aristotelian universe, Marx’s suggestions about how to redescribe the nineteenth century, Heidegger’s suggestions about how to redescribe the West as a whole, Dickens’s suggestions about how to redescribe chancery law, Rabelais’s suggestions about how to redescriibe monasteries, and Virginia Woolf’s suggestions about how to redescribe women writing.Such fresh descriptions, such new suggestions of things to say, sentences to consider, vocabularies to employ, are what do the work. All that the idea of truth does is to say, “Bethink yourself that you might be mistaken; remember that your beliefs may be justified by your other belies in the area, but that the whole kit and caboodle might be misguided, and in particular that you might be using the wrong words for your purpose.” But this admonition is empty and powerless without some concrete suggestion of an alternative set of beliefs, or of words. Moreover, if you have such a suggestion, you do not need the admonition. The only cash value of this regulative idea is to commend fallibilism, to remind us that lots of people have been as certain of, and as justified in believing, things that turned out to be false as we are certain of, and justified in holding, our present views. It is not, as McCarthy says, a “moment of unconditionality that opens us up to criticism from other points of view” . It is the particular attractions of those other points of view.Richard Rorty is University Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. (shrink)

For F. P. Ramsey, “there is no separate problem of truth,” but, rather, substantive problems about the nature of belief and judgment and the place and function of truth in these propositional attitudes. In this paper, I expound and defend an important but largely overlooked aspect of Ramsey’s view of belief and inquiry: his thesis that truth does not intervene at all in one’s ordinary beliefs, nor in one’s ordinarily inquiring into—in the sense of wondering, (...) or reflecting on—whether or not something obtains. More specifically, I show that this thesis can solve a particularly perplexing problem that Davidson helped to bring into focus: that of explaining how it is possible for one to inquire into any empirical issue, and to form any empirical beliefs, if one takes truth to be objective. (shrink)

I give a biological account of epistemic normativity. My account explains the sense in which it is true that belief is subject to a standard of correctness, and reduces epistemic norms to there being doxastic strategies which guide how best to meet that standard. Additionally, I give an explanation of the mistakes we make in our epistemic discourse, understood as either taking epistemic properties and norms to be sui generis and irreducible, and/or as failing to recognize the reductive base (...) of epistemic normativity. This explanation will appeal to the claim that the beliefs which constitute our epistemic discourse are false but adaptive, and are the outcome of a non-truth tracking process. The opponents of my position are philosophers who take epistemic normativity not to be reducible in this way, and to involve sui generis properties and norms governing belief. The aim of the paper is to show that epistemic normativity can be explained by appeal to the biological functions of our mechanisms of belief-production. (shrink)

A proper function of an entity is a beneficial effect that helps explain the persistence of the entity. Proper functions thereby arise through feedback mechanisms with beneficial effects as inputs and persistence as outputs. We continue to make assertions because they benefit speakers by benefiting speakers. Hearers benefit from true information. Speakers benefit by influencing hearer belief. If hearers do not benefit, they will not form beliefs in response to assertions. Speakers can then only maintain influence by providing true (...) information, often enough. The function of assertion is then inducing true hearer belief. When interests conflict, however, some mechanism must ensure that speakers provide true information often enough, instead of deceiving, or providing information regardless of quality. In humans, a core mechanism stabilizing true assertion involves social norms for truth telling. We tell the truth partly because we prescribe and enforce telling the truth. (shrink)

In Part I, I consider the normal contexts of assertions of belief and declarations of intentions, arguing that many action-guiding beliefs are accepted uncritically and even pre-consciously. I analyze the function of avowals as expressions of attempts at self-transformation. It is because assertions of beliefs are used to perform a wide range of speech acts besides that of speaking the truth, and because there is a large area of indeterminacy in such assertions, that self-deception is possible. In Part (...) II, I analyze the conditions of self-deception, and discuss the grounds on which it is regarded as irrational, even when particular instances may be beneficial. I consider some of the classical analyses of the motives for self-deception, and attempt to give an account of the occasions in which it is likely to occur. In the final section, I discuss the complex organization of the self that is presupposed by the phenomena of self-deception. (shrink)

This Tractatus’s engagement with the issue of the nature of truth and falsity emerged from engagement with Russell. This engagement reverberated through the Vienna Circle and in particular affected Gödel. The Tractatus’s “elementary sentences” must be seen against the backdrop of Russell’s “multiple relation theory of judgment”, his theory of truth in Principia Mathematica, which Wittgenstein discussed at length with Russell in 1912–1913 and Gödel studied in 1929–1932. Russell’s approach was directed against both Idealism and William James’s pragmatist (...) view of truth. It aimed at a direct treatment of the distinction between truth and falsity in terms of particular, logically simple beliefs (judgments lacking in truth-functional and quantification complexity). Schlick rejected Russell’s view in favor of his more holistic correspondence theory, one which, however, tipped easily into pragmatism, conventionalism and verificationism. The Tractatus begins, rather, with Russell’s bottom-up approach truth, and then draws in two further ideas: (1) The need for a medium of representation and (2) The importance of modality (possibility and necessity) to logic. This approach was developed further in his later work, i.e., Philosophical Investigations.Aware of the Tractatus and Russell’s engagement with Wittgenstein on truth, Gödel continued to engage with Russell’s multiple relation theory of truth and Principia philosophically up through 1944. The parallel yet distinct engagements of Gödel and Wittgenstein with Russell on truth (and Vienna positivism) show that each regarded Russell’s view as requiring amendment. However, their philosophical differences with one another are not merely to be understood in terms of the dichotomy between conventionalism (the usual view of Wittgenstein) and Platonism (the usual view of Gödel). They must rather be seen to emerge from the original approach to truth we find in Russell. (shrink)

The book introduces Ramsey's main doctrines and assesses their contemporary significance. In particular, Jérôme Dokic and Pascal Engel are interested in Ramsey's thoughts on truth and belief, and his pragmatic thesis that the truth of one's beliefs guarantees the success of one's actions. From this, it is a short step to what may be called "Ramsey's principle": the content of a belief is constituted by the success of one's actions. This principle finds its current expression in (...) the work of philosophers who offer evolutionary conceptions of mental states, according to which the success conditions of a belief are constituted by its biological functions. (publisher, edited). (shrink)

Epistemic conditionals have often been thought to satisfy the Ramsey test : If A, then B is acceptable in a belief state G if and only if B should be accepted upon revising G with A. But as Peter Gärdenfors has shown, RT conflicts with the intuitively plausible condition of Preservation on belief revision. We investigate what happens if RT is retained while Preservation is weakened, or vice versa. We also generalize Gärdenfors' approach by treating belief revision (...) as a relation rather than as a function.In our semantic approach, the same relation is used to model belief revision and to give truth-conditions for conditionals. The approach validates a weak version of the Ramsey Test — essentially, a restriction of RT to maximally consistent belief states. (shrink)

Some philosophers (including Urmson, Humberstone, Shah, and Velleman) hold that believing that p distinctively involves applying a norm according to which the truth of p is a criterion for the success or correctness of the attitude. On this view, imagining and assuming differ from believing in that no such norm is applied. I argue against this view with counterexamples showing that applying the norm of truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for distinguishing believing from imagining and assuming. Then (...) I argue that the different functional properties of these mental states are enough to distinguish them, and that norm-application doesn't help us draw the functional distinctions. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss conditionals as illocutionary speech acts whose interpretation depends upon the whole of the social context in which they are uttered and whose purpose is to affect the opinions and actions of others. I argue for a suppositional approach to conditional statements based in what philosophers call the Ramsey test and developing the psychological theory that conditionals elicit a process of hypothetical thinking in their listeners. By reference to the experimental psychological literature on conditionals, I show (...) that in general conditionals, even ones that are basic or abstract in nature, are not treated as truth-functional or material by ordinary people. Drawing upon the suppositional nature of conditionals and the influence of pragmatic implicature, I discuss uses of conditionals as advice, inducement, persuasions and dissuasion, arguing that speakers use conditionals to try to influence the beliefs and actions of their listeners by shaping their hypothetical thought about possibilities. (shrink)

We look at the problem of revising fuzzy belief bases, i.e., belief base revision in which both formulas in the base as well as revision-input formulas can come attached with varying degrees. Working within a very general framework for fuzzy logic which is able to capture certain types of uncertainty calculi as well as truth-functional fuzzy logics, we show how the idea of rational change from “crisp” base revision, as embodied by the idea of partial meet (...) (base) revision, can be faithfully extended to revising fuzzy belief bases. We present and axiomatise an operation of partial meet fuzzy base revision and illustrate how the operation works in several important special instances of the framework. We also axiomatise the related operation of partial meet fuzzy base contraction. (shrink)

Two naturalistic explications of propositional attitudes and their contents are distinguished: the language of thought based theory, on which beliefs are relations to sentences in the language of thought; and the propositional attitude based theory, on which beliefs are functional states of a functional system that does not imply a language of thought, although consistent with it. The latter theory depends on interpersonally ascribable conceptual roles; if these are not available, the language of thought theory has the advantage. (...) But the propositional attitude based theory explains intentionality and conceptual structure as well as the language of thought based theory, and it has two further advantages. First, it does not make the existence of beliefs and desires depend on the language of thought hypothesis. Secondly, its employment of interpersonally ascribable conceptual roles permits a theory of truth conditions to meet certain desiderata, such as a social basis for truth conditions, and a realist conception of truth. (shrink)

Two naturalistic explications of propositional attitudes and their contents are distinguished: the language of thought based theory, on which beliefs are relations to sentences in the language of thought; and the propositional attitude based theory, on which beliefs are functional states of a functional system that does not imply a language of thought, although consistent with it. The latter theory depends on interpersonally ascribable conceptual roles; if these are not available, the language of thought theory has the advantage. (...) But the propositional attitude based theory explains intentionality and conceptual structure as well as the language of thought based theory, and it has two further advantages. First, it does not make the existence of beliefs and desires depend on the language of thought hypothesis. Secondly, its employment of interpersonally ascribable conceptual roles permits a theory of truth conditions to meet certain desiderata, such as a social basis for truth conditions, and a realist conception of truth. (shrink)

Concepts, not the beliefs employing them, have uses or roles in thought. Most conceptual roles cannot be specified solipsistically, and do not have inner aspects that can be specified solipsistically. (To think otherwise is to confuse function with misfunction.) A theory of truth conditions plays no useful part in any adequate account of conceptual role. Ordinary views about beliefs assign them conceptual structures which figure in explanations of functional relations. Which conceptual structures beliefs have may be relative to (...) an arbitrary choice of "analytical hypothesis" but that does not mean that there is an adequate nonrelative account that dispenses with a system of concepts or language of thought. (shrink)

Stoics and Sceptics distinguish belief (doxa) from a representationally and functionally similar but sub-doxastic state: passive yielding to appearance. Belief requires active assent to appearances, that is, affirmation of the appearances as true. I trace the roots of this view to Plato's accounts of doxa in the Republic and Theaetetus. In the Republic, eikasia and pistis (imaging and conviction) are distinguished by their objects, appearances versus ordinary objects; in the Theaetetus, perception and doxa are distinguished by their objects, (...) proper perceptibles versus ‘commons’, including being. But underlying these ontological distinctions is a psychological one: the lower mental states are confined to their lower objects because they are passive; the higher mental states have access to higher objects because they result from questioning appearances and making active affirmations about how things are. This doctrine of doxa anticipates both the Hellenistic one and modern accounts of belief as ‘aiming at truth’; it also shows Plato's views of doxa to have more in their favour philosophically and to cohere better with one another than generally thought. (shrink)

The moral belief problem is that of reconciling expressivism in ethics with both minimalism in the philosophy of language and the syntactic discipline of moral sentences. It is argued that the problem can be solved by distinguishing minimal and robust senses of belief, where a minimal belief is any state of mind expressed by sincere assertoric use of a syntactically disciplined sentence and a robust belief is a minimal belief with some additional property R. Two (...) attempts to specify R are discussed, both based on the thought that beliefs are states that aim at truth. According to the first, robust beliefs are criticisable to the extent that their content fails to match the state of the world. This sense fails to distinguish robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. According to the second, robust beliefs function to have their content match the state of the world. This sense succeeds in distinguishing robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. The conclusion is that the debate concerning the cognitive status of moral convictions needs to address the issue of the function of moral convictions. Evolutionary theorising may be relevant, but will not be decisive, in answering this question. (shrink)

In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth (...) predicate and asserts that “it is true” is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the “nature of truth” as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. (shrink)

This paper develops an individualistic, belief-based account for a limited class of epistemic possibility statements. Section I establishes the need for such an account by reviewing a recent version of the majority view and contesting two key assumptions. I argue that some epistemic possibilities are belief-based-contra the assumption that all are knowledge-based. Against the assumption that all epistemic possibility statements are analyzable in terms of the speaker's "relevant community," I contend that the truth value of some statements (...) is a function of the speaker's epistemic states alone. Section II develops an alternative account designed to capture those internal, individual statements. Modeling belief sets as "belief worlds," I explain our epistemic processes in terms of an ability to shift attention among our various belief worlds. (shrink)

Propositions are generally thought to have a truth-value only relative to some parameter or sequence of parameters. Many apparently straightforward notions, like what it is to disagree or retain a belief, become harder to explain once propositional truth is thus relativized. An account of disagreement within a framework involving such ‘stoic’ propositions is here presented. Some resources developed in that account are then used to respond to the eternalist charge that temporalist propositions can't function as belief (...) contents because they don't allow us to make adequate sense of what belief retention amounts to. (shrink)

This paper considers the relationship between evidence and self-fulfilling beliefs. Following Grice (1971), many philosophers hold that adopting a self-fulfilling belief would involve an impermissible form of bootstrapping. I argue that such objections gets their force from a popular but problematic model of theoretical deliberation which pictures deliberation as a function, treating the deliberation’s inputs as given, fixed prior to and independently from the deliberation. Though such a picture may seem plausible, attending to the case of self-fulfilling beliefs can (...) help us see how such a function-model is inadequate for a general understanding of theoretical deliberation. Because it is unable to accommodate the possibility that the outcomes of our deliberation can sometimes be evidence for the proposition we are deliberating about, the function model is unable to account for cases where what we believe affects the truth of what is believed. (shrink)

The main argument of this article is that the concept of truth is as much internally linked to the concept of knowledge as to the concept of reality. As a consequence it is affirmed that all attempts to explain its structure which are either exclusively biased in an epistemic point of view or in a purely realist metaphysics are bound to fail. Instead this article proposes the adoption of a pragmatic standpoint which would permit to reconstruct the fallibilistic role (...) displayed by the concept of truth in the epistemic practices of belief-revision, which must in turn be reconstructed precisely taking in account the connection of truth and reality. In that way both intuitions as to the concept of truth, the epistemic and the realist one, can be reconciled. Moreover this strategy provides as such, if correct, a strong argument in favor of an essential function of the concept of truth against contemporary deflationist tendencies. (shrink)

“Post-truth” is a misleading label: there is no new concept of truth, nor is there a change in what is true. However, there is something new, and bad, happening in our dealings with truth: the lack of trust in institutions dedicated to produce knowledge. In this chapter, I try to explain why this happens. I also address the effects of this lack of trust in the election of a far-right president in Brazil. The changes in our epistemic (...) landscape result from deep-rooted features in human culture, the conflict between epistemic values, as embodied in our cooperative efforts to produce knowledge, and coordination values, that make the identitary function of beliefs very salient. Moreover, in the unstructured information landscape of the Internet, it is very difficult to read cues for reliable sources. There is another structural factor that plays an important role, the increasing inequalities, creating an environment in which status and identitary anxieties also increase, making identitary claims very powerful. These anxieties are exploited by the far-right, against our moral and epistemic common ground. The equilibrium between the coordination game and the epistemic game is fragile. The victim is our epistemic common ground. (shrink)

For the purposes of this paper I shall assume that some definite singular terms for individual particulars are sometimes used purely referentially or, as I shall say, with the function of direct reference; and that they sometimes occur, so used, in the belief-specifying clauses of belief-attributing sentences. Direct reference can be characterised semantically, or in terms of truth-conditions, as follows: When a direct reference is made, by some term, to a particular individual, in an utterance in which (...) that term is coupled with a predicate, then there is uttered a proposition which is true if that individual satisfies that predicate, false if it does not. A full account of the pragmatics of direct reference would be a much more complicated matter; I shall refer briefly to just one aspect of the matter towards the end of the paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth Will Set You Free, or How a Troubled Philosophical Theory May Help to Understand How People Talk About Their AddictionPatricia A. Ross (bio)Keywordsveridicality of narrative, contingency of theories, belief-behavior, causal connectionConsider the following proposition: If one were to recognize the unsatisfactory implications of maintaining a certain theoretical position, one would thereby be motivated to accept a more adequate theory, which would alter one's beliefs and, (...) in turn, alter the behaviors that are based upon those beliefs. Faith in this proposition is what motivates many of us to teach. But, alas...Allison Mitchell's argument for rethinking addiction intervention—in particular, rethinking twelve-step programs—is premised on this proposition. According to her argument, addicts function with an impoverished sense of self that is reflective of a grossly simplified form of philosophical materialism. By recognizing the limitations of this philosophically unconvincing view, and by, in effect, accepting a better, more complete materialism, addicts can come to modify their self-conception. This modification is instrumental to recovery.A careful consideration of the chain of events being proposed, and the problems with it, is helpful for understanding the limitations of her argument. There are four points that I consider in turn: (1) considering narratives can tell us something about the self-conception of addicts, (2) philosophical materialism can help us to understand and explain something about an addict's self-conception and how it is inadequate, (3) this sense of self is distinct from nonusers and the way in which it is distinct helps to understand the problem of addiction, and (4) a change in self-conception with respect to materialism helps recovery and, thus, our best intervention is one based on having addicts accept a full materialist theory of the self and not a pretheoretic one. [End Page 227]With respect to the first point, it should be noted that Mitchell's overall argument does not depend on whether or not it is true that narratives of addiction tell us something veridical about the self-conception of addicts. Such narratives may simply provide us with a potential theory—a possible worlds scenario—of how addicts conceive of themselves. Mitchell points this out herself. The narratives and the interpretation that she provides of these narrative, "are meant only to highlight a certain pattern of self-expression and conception that may in fact be common in persons who use mind-altering substances; the readings do not establish any empirical matters of fact or philosophical truths, nor do they prove any conclusions about how such persons (must) express themselves or conceive their nature" (Mitchell 2006, 214).Thus, what the argument is actually concerned with are the theoretical claims about the self-conception of addicts that are garnered from these narratives. Nevertheless, because the narratives provide the starting point for Mitchell's argument, it is worth thinking carefully about the epistemic status of this body of literature. In particular, could a consideration of such literature lead us astray in our endeavors to understand how addicts might misconceive of themselves and, if so, in what way? What sort of epistemic status does this information hold?Mitchell is motivated by Wittgensteinian analyses of the relationship between thought and language. The particular idea that she employs from Wittgenstein is that every act of self-expression, whether it is verbal or written narrative, reveals something about the conceptual framework with which the author is working. Thus, one can learn about the author of a narrative—one can acquire a sense of how that individual conceives of him- or herself—by looking at the language that is employed to talk about and describe him- or herself.Mitchell enumerates some problems with this approach. She mentions that the author may fail to make his or her intended sense clear to readers; that the reader's narrative expectations determine the interpretation given to the narrative; that literary narrative may be less direct, less ordinary than everyday uses of language; and that interpreting such narrative via philosophical framework may ascribe to people positions that are more precise and sophisticated than they actually intend (p. 213).Aside from these quite serious problems, it is necessary to recognize... (shrink)

I argue that explanations of doxastic transparency which go via an appeal to an aim or norm of belief are problematic. I offer a new explanation which appeals to a biological function of our mechanisms for belief production. I begin by characterizing the phenomenon, and then move to the teleological and normative accounts of belief, advertised by their proponents as able to give an explanation of it. I argue that, at the very least, both accounts face serious (...) difficulties in this endeavour. These difficulties are a function of seeking an explanation of transparency at the agential level, either with the subject aiming at truth, or being guided by a norm of truth. I adopt a motivational account of belief, one which severs the connection between belief and truth, and supplement this with an account of actual world beliefs. My alternative explanation is found at the sub-intentional, non-agential level, secured by biology. This explanation casts transparency not as related to the nature of deliberation over what to believe, but rather as contingently characterizing the beliefs of some believers, namely those with a particular biological history. My explanation thus parts company with what has come before along two dimensions: it moves away from transparency being something related to the agent’s aims or commitments, and it understands it as a contingent phenomenon. I close by considering an objection to my view—that transparency must not be understood as a contingent phenomenon—and a nearby alternative position which avoids this consequence. I respond to this objection and give reasons not to endorse the nearby alternative. I conclude that my explanation does not face the difficulties of those offered by teleologists and normativists, and, that by moving away from agential explanations, and casting transparency as contingent, we can provide a successful explanation of it. (shrink)

I challenge the assumption that the pragmatist-, coherence-, identity- and deflationary theories of truth are essentially incompatible and rival views to the correspondence theory, without endorsing pluralism. With the exception of some versions of the identity theory, the alternative theories only appear to genuinely contradict the correspondence theory, either when they are wedded to a rejection of an objective reality, or when it is assumed that a ‘theory of truth’ is a theory of the function of the (...) class='Hi'>truth-predicate. I argue that the correspondence theory should not be understood as a theory about the function of the truth-predicate, and that the core ideas of the alternative views, once separated from any anti-realist convictions, are best understood as complementary views about different aspects of a fairly complex phenomenon, notably of how our beliefs relate to their subject matter and how we reason and talk about that relation. (shrink)

Nietzsche often gives the impression that all human beliefs are false. Some scholars, like Maudemarie Clark, believe that such a “falsification thesis” is unacceptable and try to limit Nietzsche's commitment to it, claiming that he abandons it in his very last works. Others, like Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain, take it in ways that make it true and locate it in all. I argue that the view that is common to both approaches—that Nietzsche held that thesis in the first place—is (...) unjustified. To that end, I interpret the texts where these scholars claim to find the thesis in a way that shows that they do not commit Nietzsche to it, and I offer some reasons for thinking that this is a more fruitful way of interpreting his views on the importance of truth—and falsehood—and their function in the economy of human life. (shrink)

Truth is one of the main concepts of Philosophy, some even consider it the most important of all (W. Künne). This concept is also a foundation for other philosophical concepts. Some of them even depend intrinsically on it, such as the concepts of belief (to believe in something is to believe this something is true), knowledge (if you know something then that something is true), fact (facts are what make our statements true), existence (true reality is the external (...) world that exists) and modality (there are propositions that can be true in all possible worlds), among many others. Truth is also a crucial concept for other domains. Science is said to be the search for the truth of the Natural World and the good life is said to be the pursuit of the good (Aristotle). If one considers that the good and the just are objects of knowledge (R. Campbell), then, there could be no good or justice without truth, insofar as knowledge needs truth. Also, our confidence in the robustness of western political and social institutions has always rested on truth. Unfortunately, this basis, which is the foundation of trust and, therefore, of the robustness of our institutions, is being eroded by external forces, deniers and nihilists, by undermining the concept of Truth, endangering in that way the democratic model (H. Frankfurt). The troubled events we have recently experienced – the raise of populisms, conspiracy theories, pandemic skepticism, the conflict in Ukraine not only in the battleground but also in the info space – could, to some extent, make us question whether, in fact, there is still any theoretical interest in “truth”. As several authors have noted, it seems that today we live in a society of “post-truth” (A. Szakolczai) or “veritophobia” (A. Goldman), where lies are tolerated and facts ignored. Also, for this reason, understanding what truth is by reflecting on its nature and function, from the most sophisticated conceptual schemes to its most everyday uses, seems to be a philosophical task of the utmost importance. This is why the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia has decided to dedicate this special issue to the subject of truth. (shrink)

The main question of our article is: What is the logical form of statements containing expressions such as “… is true” and “it is true that …”? We claim that these expressions are generally not used in order to assign a certain property to sentences. We indicate that a predicative interpretation of these expressions was rejected by Frege and adherents to the prosentential conception of truth. We treat these expressions as operators. The main advantage of our operational reading is (...) the fact that it adequately represents how the words, “true” and “truth,” function in everyday speech. Our approach confirms the intuition that so-called T-equivalences are not contingent truths, and explains why they seem to be—in some sense—necessary sentences. Moreover, our operational readingof truth expressions dissolves problems arising from the belief that there is some specific property—truth. The fact that we reject that truth is a certain property does not mean that we deny that the concept of truth plays a very important role in our language, and hence in our life. We indicate that the concept of truth is inseparable from the concept of sentence and vice versa—it is impossible to explicate one of these concepts without appeal to the other. (shrink)

A new criterion is introduced for judging the suitability of various fuzzy logics for practical uncertain reasoning in a probabilistic world and the relationship of this criterion to several established criteria, and its consequences for truth functional belief, are investigated.

Extending Alvin Plantinga’s model of warranted belief to the beliefs of groups as a whole, I argue that if the dogmatic beliefs of the Catholic Church are true, they are also warranted. Catholic dogmas are warranted because they meet the three conditions of my model: they are formed (1) by ministers functioning properly (2) in accordance with a design plan that is oriented towards truth and reliable (3) in a social environment sufficiently similar to that for which they (...) were designed. I show that according to Catholic doctrine the authoritative spokespersons of the Church—ecumenical councils and popes—meet these conditions when defining dogmas. I also respond to the objection that the warrant of Catholic dogmas is defeated by the plurality of non-Catholic Christian sects that deny Catholic dogmas. (shrink)

It is now forty years since the publication of one of the defining papers on early-medieval art, Ernst Kitzinger's “The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm.” This article remains a deeply influential study on early-medieval attitudes toward visual culture, arguing, as it does, that the political crises of the later sixth century helped produce a turn toward a new function for religious imagery as belief in the political and military strength of the Byzantine Empire crumbled. The implications (...) of the subsequent rise in the cult of images have been exhaustively discussed in numerous further papers. In a footnote to his paper Kitzinger introduces the interesting question of a turn to iconoclastic activities at this period by the Jews of Palestine. He suggests that this physical action, including the deliberate destruction of some images, might be linked to a Jewish reaction against the growth in the use of images by Christianity, a reaction attested in a form of Christian-Jewish polemic that developed in the middle years of the seventh century. Kitzinger's central concern in this essay is the cult of images in the Byzantine Empire, and he does not develop this hypothesis. Taking his footnote as my starting point, I will directly address some possible causes of Jewish iconoclasm. In so doing, I will examine how attitudes toward religious imagery played a role in the construction of cultural identity at this period. Images and their cults are not simply a matter for Byzantine Christianity, for the points drawn from a discussion of Jewish iconoclasm carry wider implications for the analysis of the place of images in early-medieval society. (shrink)

No fruitful discussion of the logic of religious belief can afford to ignore George Mavrodes' classification of propositional concepts, i.e. concepts predicable of propositions singly or in sets , as an analytical tool for pinning down the ‘person-oriented’ and ‘content-oriented’ factors in such ‘epistemic activities’ as religious proving, experiencing, and verifying. Mavrodes shows in particular that the formal model of logical soundness, i.e. valid form and true premises, has but limited application to proving, experiencing, and verifying as ways of (...) giving good reasons for religious belief. In this essay, I will show how Mavrodes' analysis of the logic of religious belief can be extended by substituting a procedural model of logical soundness for the truth-functionally formal model that he adopts. I will show further why it is desirable and, in certain instances, vital to extend his analysis in this manner. Along the way, I will explain why the extension that I am advocating augments Mavrodes' original analysis without substantially altering it or sacrificing any of its original analytical virtues. (shrink)

It is a consequence of both Kennedy and McNally’s typology of the scale structures of gradable adjectives and Kennedy’s :1–45, 2007) economy principle that an object is clean just in case its degree of cleanness is maximal. So they jointly predict that the sentence ‘Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one’ :259–288, 2004) is a contradiction. Surely, one can account for the sentence’s assertability by saying that the first instance of ‘clean’ is used (...) loosely: since ‘clean’ pragmatically conveys the property of being close to maximally clean rather than the property of being maximally clean, the sentence as a whole conveys a consistent proposition. I challenge this semantics–pragmatics package by considering the sentence ‘Mary believes that both towels are clean but that the red one is cleaner than the blue one’. We can certainly use this sentence to attribute a coherent belief to Mary: One of its readings says that she believes that the towels are clean by a contextually salient standard ; the other says that she believes that the towels are clean by her own standard. I argue that Kennedy’s semantics–pragmatics package can’t deliver those readings, and propose that we drop the economy principle and account for those readings semantically by assigning to the belief sentence two distinct truth conditions. I consider two ways to deliver those truth-conditions. The first one posits world-variables in the sentence’s logical form and analyzes those truth-conditions as resulting from two binding possibilities of those variables. The second one proposes that the threshold function introduced by the phonologically null morpheme pos is shiftable in belief contexts. (shrink)

The goal of standard semantics is to provide truth conditions for the sentences of a given language. Probabilistic Semantics does not share this aim; it might be said instead, if rather cryptically, that Probabilistic Semantics aims to provide belief conditions.The central and guiding idea of Probabilistic Semantics is that each rational individual has ‘within’ him or her a personal subjective probability function. The output of the function when given a certain sentence as input represents the degree of likelihood (...) which the individual would assign to that sentence. One can characterize these functions via a set of axioms, and in the terms of this defined structure develop probabilistic analogues of all important semantical notions. Then, dealing with ‘being given probability 1’ instead of ‘truth,’ one can proceed to give a completely adequate semantics for the particular language under consideration. The axioms delimiting the class of probability functions are, in fact, chosen with this goal and language in mind. (shrink)

In this commentary, we offer an additional function of rationalization. Namely, in certain social contexts, the proximal and ultimate function of beliefs and desires is social inclusion. In such contexts, rationalization often facilitates distortion of rather than approximation to truth. Understanding the role of social identity is not only timely and important, but also critical to fully understand the function of rationalization.