Although it’s sometimes thought that pluralism about truth is unstable—or, worse, just a non-starter—it’s surprisingly difficult to locate collapsing arguments that conclusively demonstrate either its instability or its inability to get started. This paper exemplifies the point by examining three recent arguments to that effect. However, it ends with a cautionary tale; for pluralism may not be any better off than other traditional theories that face various technical objections, and may be worse off in facing them all.

In this paper, I discuss the currently most popular argument for alethic pluralism, maintaining that the so-called scope problem provides no compelling reason for abandoning the traditional view that truth is one and the same (substantive) property across the various regions of thought or discourse in which it is ascribed or denied to the things we think or say. I disarm the argument by showing that the scope problem does not arise for a number of non-deflationary, monistic views of truth (...) that meet certain semantic and metaphysical constraints, for one can accept any of these views and provide a plausible account of the fact that mental and linguistic tokenings belonging to different regions of discourse involve radically different ways of engaging with reality? from detecting pre-existing facts to constituting them. (shrink)

Some alethic pluralists maintain that there are two kinds of truths operant in our alethic discourse: a realist kind and an anti-realist kind. In this paper, we argue that such a binary conception cannot accommodate certain social truths, specifically truths about race. Most alethic pluralists surprisingly overlook the status of racial truths. Douglas Edwards is, however, an exception. In his version of alethic pluralism—Determination Pluralism—racial truths are superassertible (anti-realist) true rather than correspondence (realist) true. We argue that racial truths exhibit (...) features of both superassertibility (anti-realism) and correspondence (realism). This suggests a fuzzy boundary between realist and anti-realist kinds of truth. There may be a continuum rather than a dichotomy of truths. We conclude by sketching one way for alethic pluralists to accommodate such a notion. (shrink)

Douglas Edwards is arguably the most prominent contemporary advocate of moderate alethic pluralism. Significantly influenced by Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch, his work on the nature of truth has become widely discussed in the topical literature. Edwards labels his version of moderate alethic pluralism determination pluralism. At first blush, determination pluralism appears philosophically promising. The position deserves thoughtful consideration, particularly because of its capacity to accommodate the scope problem. I argue, however, that upon analysis the view is better understood as (...) a form of metaphysical dualism or what I will call meta-dualism. Furthermore, determination pluralists face a dilemma; there appears to be an instability at the core of their dualistic model. On the one horn of the dilemma, they need a clear metaphysical demarcation at the interface of their two necessary domains. On the other horn, they seem to need to a metaphysically vague boundary at the interface of their two necessary domains. Determination pluralism needs substantial revision. (shrink)

This paper examines a difficulty for various forms of truth pluralism, known in the literature as the problem of ‘mixed atomics’. It is argued that two prominent attempts to respond to the difficulty—those of Jeremy Wyatt and Gila Sher—fail. In their place, an alternative is offered based on parts of Crispin Wright’s Truth and Objectivity programme. It is argued that the Wrightian approach works because it substitutes traditional conceptions of truth-relevant properties, for example correspondence and coherence, for criteria of objectivity (...) pertaining to discursive practices. This allows us to give expression to the nuanced way in which the pluralist wants to treat mixed atomics. (shrink)

In this paper, I both propose and discuss a novel account of truthmaking. I begin by showing what truthmaking is not: it is not grounding and it is not correspondence. I then show what truthmaking is by offering an account that appeals both to grounding and what I call ‘deep correspondence’. After I present the account and show that it is an account that unifies, I put it to work by showing how it can overcome an objection to truthmaking, how (...) we can get truthmaking from correspondence, what it says about truthmaker necessitation, and how it can explain a connection between truthmaker maximalism and pluralism about truth. (shrink)

Methodological deflationism is a policy about how we should conduct ourselves when it comes to theories of truth: in particular, a deflationary theory of truth should be taken as one’s starting point, and the notion of truth should be inflated only as necessary. This policy is motivated, in part, by the need to balance the theoretical virtue of parsimony with that of explanatory sufficiency. In this article, the case is made that the methodological deflationist is in no position to properly (...) balance those virtues—a point made evident by tracing the relationship between semantic theories and the explanatory needs of theories of truth. Furthermore, methodological deflationism threatens to unduly influence semantic theorizing and, in doing so, displays an inappropriate bias towards deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a pluralistic framework for disagreement and I develop a strategy to account for the varieties of disagreement on the basis of the varieties of the truth across different domains of discourse. Truth-pluralism is thus sufficient for delivering pluralism about disagreement—that is, diaphonic pluralism.

Truth pluralists say that the nature of truth varies between domains of discourse: while ordinary descriptive claims or those of the hard sciences might be true in virtue of corresponding to reality, those concerning ethics, mathematics, institutions might be true in some non-representational or “anti-realist” sense. Despite pluralism attracting increasing amounts of attention, the motivations for the view remain underdeveloped. This paper investigates whether pluralism is well-motivated on ontological grounds: that is, on the basis that different discourses are concerned with (...) different kinds of entities. Arguments that draw on six different ontological contrasts are examined: concrete versus abstract entities; mind-independent versus mind-dependent entities; sparse versus merely abundant properties; objective versus projected entities; natural versus non-natural entities; and ontological pluralism. I argue that the additional premises needed to move from such contrasts to truth pluralism are either implausible or unmotivated, often doing little more than to bifurcate the nature of truth when a more theoretically conservative option is available. If there is a compelling motivation for pluralism, I suggest, it’s likely to lie elsewhere. (shrink)

Pluralism about truth is the view that there are many properties, not just one, in virtue of which things are true. Pluralists hope to dodge the objections that face traditional monistic substantive views of truth, as well as those facing deflationary theories of truth. More specifically, pluralists hope to advance an explanatorily potent understanding of truth that can capture the subtleties of various realist and anti-realist domains of discourse, all while avoiding the scope problem. I offer a new objection to (...) pluralism that challenges its fundamental commitment to there being a set of alethic properties in virtue of which claims are true. In its place I offer an alternative view that merges standard truthmaker theory with a primitivist conception of truth. This combination of views satisfies the theoretical desires that pluralists claim for themselves, but without taking on pluralism's host of challenges and problems. (shrink)

According to alethic pluralism, sentences belonging to different domains of discourse can be true by having different alethic (i.e., truth-constituting) properties. Against this pluralistic view, Jamin Asay has recently argued that pluralists' appeal to multiple alethic properties is ill-motivated because the main advantages of pluralism can already be obtained within the framework of standard truthmaker theory. In response to this objection, this paper argues that Asay's claim does not hold with respect to one of the central advantages of pluralism, namely, (...) the ability to offer a proper understanding of the realism/anti-realism debate. This is because, first, when simply construed, truthmaker theory can only provide an inadequate understanding of the debate, and second, when construed in certain ways that allow it to avoid inadequacy, it becomes committed to multiple alethic properties. (shrink)

After stressing how the attempt to provide a plausible account of the connection between language and the world was one of Putnam’s constant preoccupations, this article describes the four stages his thinking about the concepts of truth and reality went through. Particular attention is paid to the kinds of problems that made him abandon each stage to enter the next. The analysis highlights how all the stages but one express a general non-epistemic stance towards truth and reality—the right stance, according (...) to Putnam, in order to develop full-blooded realism. Since the last stage combines a version of direct realism with a pluralist conception of truth, the article proceeds by focusing on Putnam’s alethic pluralism, carefully distinguishing it from alethic deflationism. Finally a suggestion is made as to where Putnam’s alethic pluralism may be placed within the constellation of current pluralist positions about truth. (shrink)

This thesis engages with three topics and the relationships between them: (i) the phenomenon of disagreement (paradigmatically, where one person makes a claim and another denies it); (ii) the normative character of disagreements (the issue of whether, and in what sense, one of the parties is “at fault” for believing something that’s untrue); (iii) the issue of which theory of what truth is can best accommodate the norms relating belief and truth. People disagree about all sorts of things: about whether (...) climate is changing, death penalty is wrong, sushi is delicious, or Louis C.K. is funny. However, even focusing on disagreements in the evaluative domain (e.g., taste, moral and comedic), where people have the intuition that there is ‘no fact of the matter’ about who is right, there are significant differences that require explanation. For instance, disagreement about taste is generally perceived as shallow. People accept to disagree and live comfortably with that fact. By contrast, moral disagreement is perceived as deep and sometimes hard to tolerate. Comedic disagreement is similar to taste. However, it may involve an element of ‘intellectual snobbery’ that is absent in taste disagreement. The immediate questions are whether these contrasts allow of precise characterization and what is responsible for them. I argue that, once a case is made for the truth-aptness of judgments in these areas, the contrast can be explained in terms of variable normative function of truth – as exerting a lightweight normative constraint in the domain of taste and a stricter constraint in the moral domain. In particular I claim that while truth in the moral domain exerts a sui generis deontic control, this normative feature of truth is silent in both the taste and the comedic domains. This leads me to investigate how to conceive of truth in the light of normative variability. I argue that an amended version of deflationism – minimally inflated deflationism – can account for the normative variability of truth. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated (...) interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to deflationism as the provenance of the suspicion (...) that Truth doesn't exist. But it would be hasty to simply classify the account as deflationary. Each of the 'truth-like' properties that it recognizes is highly substantive--that is, complex and explanatorily potent. So we should deflate Truth by recognizing that it doesn't exist, but we should also recognize that one of the most vital tasks in truth theory is to discover the essences of the many truth-like properties. My aim here is to do precisely this. (shrink)