It is debated among open theists whether propositions about the contingent future should be regarded as straightforwardly true or false, as all false without exception, or as lacking truth-values. This article discusses some recent work on this topic and proposes a solution different than the one I have previously endorsed.

Recently, labor has acquired a re-emergent public relevance. In response, feminist theory urgently needs to reconsider the relationship between labor and gender. This book builds a theoretically-informed politics about changes in the gendered structure of labor by analyzing how the symbolic power of gender is put in the service of neoliberal practices. Goodman traces the cultural contextualization of 'women's work' from its Marxist roots to its current practices. From the income gap to the gendering of industries, Goodman explores and critiques (...) the rise of corporate power under neoliberalism and the ways and whys that femininity has become one of its principle commodities. (shrink)

In this work Paul Murray explores which style of rationality is most appropriate to Christian theology in the contemporary pluralist, postfoundationalist, ...

ABSTRACT When a philosopher and a dog play Frisbee, do they cognize the same Frisbee? Is Fido subject to the “myth of the given”? The questions are not silly, for as Marjorie Grene quipped, “Epistemology is a branch of ethology.” What follows accepts what is usually called a “correspondence” theory of truth and a “realist” account of human knowledge. Nothing new, but what will be distinctive is that it seeks to exploit an unusual naturalism deriving from the American philosophical tradition. (...) It will particularly address the epistemic relation of sensing to knowing. A currently widespread view among those who object to realism can be traced to Wilfrid Sellars's 1956 critique of the “myth of the given.” Sellars argued that the normative “order of reasons” in which beliefs are adjudicated is discontinuous with the causal order of sensation or perception, so the former cannot be grounded in the latter. My claim will be that Sellars was half wrong, and the wrong half can be addressed by contemporary cognitive science and anthropology. The permission to employ the latter is granted by a special version of naturalism, “ordinal naturalism,” formed from the American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Truth is a value in that sense that a belief is good (or successful, or correct) just in case it is true. But it does not follow that truth is a good-making property, nor does it follow that the nature of truth explains its value. Instead, this paper argues that the nature of belief explains its value.

ABSTRACT According to a prominent objection, deflationist theories of truth can’t account for the explanatory connection between true belief and successful action [Putnam 1978]. Canonical responses to the objection show how to reformulate truth-involving explanations of particular successful actions, so as to omit any mention of truth [Horwich 1998]. According to recent critics, though, the canonical strategy misses the point. The deflated paraphrases lack the generality or explanatory robustness of the original explanatory appeals to truth [Kitcher 2002; Lynch 2009; Gamester (...) 2018]. This article diagnoses the canonical response’s failure and shows how deflationists can make sense of appeals to truth in explaining practical success, in all of their generality and robustness, without construing truth as a substantial property. (shrink)

In the paper we investigate typed axiomatizations of the truth predicate in which the axioms of truth come with a built-in, minimal and self-sufficient machinery to talk about syntactic aspects of an arbitrary base theory. Expanding previous works of the author and building on recent works of Albert Visser and Richard Heck, we give a precise characterization of these systems by investigating the strict relationships occurring between them, arithmetized model constructions in weak arithmetical systems and suitable set existence axioms. The (...) framework considered will give rise to some methodological remarks on the construction of truth theories and provide us with a privileged point of view to analyze the notion of truth arising from compositional principles in a typed setting. (shrink)

Saltman and Goodman show how corporate-produced curricula, films, and corporate-promoted books often use depictions of family love, childhood innocence, and compassion in order to sell the public on policies that ironically put the profit of multinational corporations over the well-being of people. In doing so, the authors reveal the extent to which globalization depends upon education and also show how battles over culture, language, and the control of information are matters of life, death, and democracy.

One way to study and understand the notion of truth is to examine principles that we are willing to associate with truth, often because they conform to a pre-theoretical or to a semi-formal characterization of this concept. In comparing different collections of such principles, one requires formally precise notions of inter-theoretic reduction that are also adequate to compare these conceptual aspects. In this work I study possible ways to make precise the relation of conceptual equivalence between notions of truth associated (...) with collections of principles of truth. In doing so, I will consider refinements and strengthenings of the notion of relative truth-definability proposed by Fujimoto (2010): in particular I employ suitable variants of notions of equivalence of theories considered in Visser (2006) and Friedman & Visser (2014) to show that there are better candidates than mutual truth-definability for the role of sufficient condition for conceptual equivalence between the semantic notions associated with the theories. In the concluding part of the paper, I extend the techniques introduced in the first and show that there is a precise sense in which ramified truth (either disquotational or compositional) does not correspond to iterations of comprehension. (shrink)

T-biconditionals have often been regarded as insufficient as axioms for truth. This verdict is based on Tarski’s observation that the typed T-sentences suffer from deductive weakness. As indicated by McGee, the situation might change radically if we consider type-free disquotational theories of truth. However, finding a well-motivated set of untyped T-biconditionals that is consistent and recursively enumerable has proven to be very difficult. Moreover, some authors ) have argued that any solution to the semantic paradoxes necessarily involves ‘inflationary’ means, thus (...) spelling doom to deflationist and minimalist truth theories in particular. The situation is indeed worrisome as formal theories of minimalist truth are missing so far. This makes it very hard to properly evaluate the tenets of minimalism. In the present article, we will show how to find safe instances of the T-schema just by relying on syntactic features of the sentences of our language—in particular, we will explore Quine’s idea of stratification. Based on that, we will introduce some disquotational truth theories that are deductively very strong. (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient (...) Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to _Discipline and Punish_, _Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling_ will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought. (shrink)

In “Deception and the Clinical Ethicist,” Christopher Meyers defends that view that deception practiced by clinical ethicists is legitimate if it satisfies a series of justifying conditions (Meyers...