The concept of truth and the semantics of the truth predicate

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (6):622-638 (2007)
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Abstract

We sketch an account according to which the semantic concepts themselves are not pathological and the pathologies that attend the semantic predicates arise because of the intention to impose on them a role they cannot fulfill, that of expressing semantic concepts for a language that includes them. We provide a simplified model of the account and argue in its light that (i) a consequence is that our meaning intentions are unsuccessful, and such semantic predicates fail to express any concept, and that (ii) in light of this it is incorrect to characterize the pathology simply as semantic inconsistency; a more nuanced view of the problem is needed. We also show that the defects of the semantic predicates need not undercut the use of a truth theory in a compositional semantics for a language containing them because the meaning theory per se need not involve commitment to the axioms of the truth theory it exploits.

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Author Profiles

Kirk Ludwig
Indiana University, Bloomington
Emil Badici
Texas A&M University - Kingsville

Citations of this work

From one to many: recent work on truth.Jeremy Wyatt & Michael Lynch - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4):323-340.
Conceptual Marxism and Truth: Inquiry Symposium on Kevin Scharp’s Replacing Truth.Patrick Greenough - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (4):403-421.
The cognitivist account of meaning and the liar paradox.Mark Pinder - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (5):1221-1242.

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References found in this work

In contradiction: a study of the transconsistent.Graham Priest - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Outline of a theory of truth.Saul Kripke - 1975 - Journal of Philosophy 72 (19):690-716.
The Liar: An Essay on Truth and Circularity.Jon Barwise & John Etchemendy - 1987 - Oxford, England and New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press USA. Edited by John Etchemendy.
Universality and the Liar: An Essay on Truth and the Diagonal Argument.Keith Simmons - 1993 - Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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