The following books have been received and many of them are still available for review. Interested reviewers please contact the reviews editor: [email protected], P. 2018. Philosophy in the H...

Deflationists believe that the question “What is truth?” should be answered not by means of a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of truth, but by figuring out what use we make of the concept of truth, and the word ‘true’, in practice. This article accepts this methodology, and it thereby rejects pluralism about truth that is driven by ontological considerations. However, it shows that there are practical considerations for a pluralism about truth, formulated at the level of use. The theory (...) expounded by this article states that truth is a dual-purpose tool; it can be used as a device for transferring justificatory burdens and, for select areas of discourse, it can also be used as a standard, a norm. This contrast in how truth is used introduces a bifurcation in our discourse that is reminiscent of metaphysical divides traced by more traditional versions of alethic pluralism. However, my pluralism “at the level of use” states that truth is plural solely at the level of use. It is unified at both the conceptual as well as the metaphysical level. At those levels, the theory takes its cue from deflationism. As such, this theory is offered as a midway point and as a potential way forward in the debate between deflationism and pluralism. (shrink)

There are many ways for truths to be true. How should we understand that idea? One is that there are different kinds of truth: the _ways_ are different truth-like properties. Another understanding is that a truth can be made true in different ways, by different kinds of entities. The former understanding supports alethic pluralism. But the latter can be understood as a kind of monism: truth is the existential property of having some truthmaker or other. On this view, the differences (...) reside in how a truth is made true, but not in its being true. I’ll discuss how these two understandings differ and what the potential advantages of the latter idea might be. (shrink)

The book provides a historical and systematic exposition of the semantic theory of truth formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1930s. This theory became famous very soon and inspired logicians and philosophers. It has two different, but interconnected aspects: formal-logical and philosophical. The book deals with both, but it is intended mostly as a philosophical monograph. It explains Tarski’s motivation and presents discussions about his ideas as well as points out various applications of the semantic theory of truth to philosophical (...) problems. (shrink)

According to a certain conception of language, any sentence can, when used on an occasion, have any of indefinitely many truth-conditions. Such a conception of language gives us reason to think that the question of whether the notion of truth has a distinctive content cannot be settled by looking solely at the predication of truth. By focusing on the predicate ‘true’ when trying to determine the significance of the notion of truth, we may have been looking in the wrong place.

Predicates of personal taste have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility (...) relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement. (shrink)

Metasemantic inferentialismhas gained popularity in the last few decades. Traditionally, inferentialism is combined with a deflationary attitude towards semantic terms such as truth and reference, i.e., many inferentialists hold that when we use these semantic terms we do not purport to refer to substantive properties. This combination makes inferentialism attractive for philosophers who see themselves as antirealists. Although the attractions of combining inferentialism and deflationism are easy to see, deflationism is also a controversial position. For one, deflationists maintain that truth (...) is an insubstantive property, but it is not altogether clear what an insubstantive property is. Secondly, as deflationists maintain that truth does not play an explanatory role, it is incompatible with the position that truth can explain the normativity of truth talk. Given that deflationism faces these objections, it would be preferable if the success of inferentialism did not depend on the deflationist’s ability to respond to these objections. I argue that someone attracted to inferentialism for its ability to accommodate antirealist intuitions about a domain (e.g. morality) is not committed to deflationism about truth. More specifically, I will show that inferentialism combined with a straightforward account of inferentialist truth-conditions is compatible with a version of truth pluralism. I call this position Inferentialist Truth Pluralism. (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)

Alethic pluralism holds that there are many ways of being true. The view has been accused of being unable to do justice to the traditional account of logical validity, understood as necessary truth preservation. In this paper I reformulate the debate in terms of the naturalness of generic truth, and discuss some notable consequences of this more careful reformulation. I show not only that some alleged solutions, like the resort to plural quantification, are ineffective, but also that the problem is (...) not really posed by mixed inferences, as usually thought. Finally, I argue that the traditional account of logical validity does carry a commitment to generic truth, so that a strong version of alethic pluralism can hardly vindicate it. (shrink)

Two central themes of Douglas Edwards’s The Metaphysics of Truth are anti-deflationism and substantial pluralism. In Part I of this paper I discuss Edwards’s grounds for rejecting deflationism and suggest a few additional grounds. In Part II I discuss Edward's truth-pluralism and respond to his criticism of my correspondence-pluralism. While these pluralisms share significant features, their differences also raise several important questions.

Many philosophers are baffled by necessity. Humeans, in particular, are deeply disturbed by the idea of necessary laws of nature. In this paper I offer a systematic yet down to earth explanation of necessity and laws in terms of invariance. The type of invariance I employ for this purpose generalizes an invariance used in meta-logic. The main idea is that properties and relations in general have certain degrees of invariance, and some properties/relations have a stronger degree of invariance than others. (...) The degrees of invariance of highly-invariant properties are associated with high degrees of necessity of laws governing/describing these properties, and this explains the necessity of such laws both in logic and in science. This non-mysterious explanation has rich ramifications for both fields, including the formality of logic and mathematics, the apparent conflict between the contingency of science and the necessity of its laws, the difference between logical-mathematical, physical, and biological laws/principles, the abstract character of laws, the applicability of logic and mathematics to science, scientific realism, and logical-mathematical realism. (shrink)

The answers to the questions in the title depend on the kind of pluralism one is talking about. We will focus here on our own views. The purpose of this article is to trace out some possible connections between these kinds of pluralism. We show how each of them might bear on the other, depending on how certain open questions are resolved.

Peter Trawny’s Heidegger: A Critical Introduction examines the various phases of the philosopher’s thought, with special attention to questions of politics and antisemitism. This review sums up the book and discusses the relevance of Heidegger today for analytic philosophy, Jewish thought, and political philosophy.

According to ontological pluralism there are several ways of being. This is so if there is an unrestricted quantifier that ranges over everything there is, and there are several semantically primitive, restricted quantifiers with possible meanings such that each restricted quantifier has a non-empty domain that is properly included in the domain of the unrestricted quantifier, the domains of the restricted quantifiers do not overlap, and the meaning of each restricted quantifier is at least as natural as the meaning of (...) the unrestricted quantifier. My long-standing interest in the debate concerning pluralism about truth has shaped my choice of focus in this piece. According to truth pluralism there are several ways of being true. Different properties are relevant to the truth of propositions concerning different domains. The problem of mixed compounds challenges truth pluralists to provide a principled account of the truth of mixed compounds, i.e. compounds whose constituents are true in different ways. My aim here is to present and articulate a corresponding issue facing ontological pluralists: the problem of mixed beings. The problem of mixed beings challenges ontological pluralists to provide a principled account of the way in which mixed beings exist, i.e. beings whose constituents exist in different ways. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the normativity of truth and logic. The paper has three objectives. First, I argue that logic is normative for thought in the sense of underwriting instrumental rationality. Logic is a good instrument for achieving truth, the goal of cognition. In recent work, Filippo Ferrari has argued that the normative nature of truth may vary across domains. My second aim is to extend this idea to logic, against the background of the idea that logic serves to underwrite instrumental (...) rationality. The third objective is to further develop Ferrari’s framework of normative alethic variability. I do so through a discussion of the normative problem of mixed compounds: the challenge of providing a principled account of the normativity of compounds with constituents whose respective normative profiles differ. I argue that the challenge can be met. Besides offering a solution to a major challenge, the response offered sheds new light on the normative variability framework: the truth of a single mixed compound may have different normative profiles across different ‘disagreement-realizers’. This feature of the view is rooted in a key commitment of the normative variability framework – namely, that disagreement and alethic normativity are intimately connected. (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.

Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct. -/- In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth as (...) correspondence, I develop a kind of alethic pluralism, which treats pragmatist truth as theoretically fundamental to truth as correspondence. This theoretical fundamentality of pragmatist truth allows the pragmatist to conditionally accept truth as correspondence for certain discourses without falling prey to the typical pragmatist objections to correspondence. This pluralist account of truth thus allows pragmatists to concede that, for certain domains of discourse, truth is correspondence, without thereby betraying their pragmatist principles. (shrink)

Truth pluralists say that truth-bearers in different “discourses”, “domains”, “domains of discourse”, or “domains of inquiry” are apt to be true in different ways – for instance, that mathematical discourse or ethical discourse is apt to be true in a different way to ordinary descriptive or scientific discourse. Moreover, the notion of a “domain” is often explicitly employed in formulating pluralist theories of truth. Consequently, the notion of a “domain” is attracting increasing attention, both critical and constructive. I argue that (...) this is a red herring. First, I identify the theoretical role for which pluralists appeal to domains, which is to answer what I call the “Individuation Problem”: saying what determines the way in which a particular truth-bearer is apt to be true. Second, I argue that pluralists need not appeal to domains for this purpose. I thus conclude that, despite the usual way of glossing the view, there is no role for the notion of a “domain” to play in the pluralist’s theory of truth. I argue that this defuses the “Problem of Mixed Atomics” and allows the pluralist to sidestep potentially intractable disputes about the nature of domains. (shrink)

Truth pluralists say that there are many ways to be true. Aaron Cotnoir (“Pluralism and Paradox” in: Pedersen and Wright (eds) Truth and pluralism: current debates, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013) has suggested a “uniquely pluralist response to the liar”. The basic idea is to maintain that, if a sentence says of itself that it is not true in a certain way, then that sentence is not apt to be true in that way, but is instead apt to be true (...) in a different way. While this is consistent with the basic tenets of truth pluralism, it is an open question whether or not it is amenable to any actual pluralist theory. The primary goal of this paper is to argue that Cotnoir's proposal is amenable to form-based pluralism, rather than domain-based pluralism. In particular, in Section 1, I argue that there are several serious obstacles in the way of the domain-based pluralist who wishes to endorse Cotnoir's proposal; in Section 2, I show how the form-based pluralist can overcome these difficulties. The secondary goal of the paper is to argue that most, if not all, substantivists about truth should find form-based pluralism independently attractive. As such, the possibility of a form-based pluralist solution to the liar is not merely a technical curiosity, but something in which substantivists about truth have a vested interest. (shrink)

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)

I have two objectives in this paper. The first is to investigate whether, and to what extent, truth is valuable. I do this by first isolating the value question from other normative questions. Second, I import into the debate about the nature of truth some key distinctions hailing from value theory. This will help us to clarify the sense in which truth is valuable. I then argue that there is significant variability in the value of truth in different areas of (...) discourse. I shall call this the axiological variability conjecture. I illustrate and substantiate AVC by contrasting the occurrence of disagreement in two paradigmatically evaluative areas of discourse, viz. matters of taste, on the one hand, and morality, on the other. I claim that there is a reasonable tendency to care much more about settling moral disagreements than taste disagreements and that this difference has to do, at least partly but significantly, with the different value that truth exhibits in these two areas of discourse. I then turn to the second objective of the paper—namely, to discuss how pluralistic accounts of the nature of truth may deal with the value of truth in light of AVC. I will argue that AVC is a problem for all versions of truth pluralism that are committed to the following two theses: that truth is a value concept; and that this characteristic of the concept has to be reflected in the metaphysical nature of any admissible truth properties—i.e., all the various properties that are admissible in the pluralist account are value-conferring properties and thus intrinsically valuable. In so doing, I will focus primarily on Michael Lynch’s functionalist incarnation of truth pluralism. Lynch terms this “Manifestation Alethic Pluralism”. My reason for this is twofold: first and foremost, MAP is a paradigmatic exemplification of a model of truth pluralism that is committed to both and ; second, MAP has, to date, enjoyed the most discussion, and currently provides the most developed account of truth pluralism. However, I argue that MAP lacks the resources to account for AVC. Owing to this, I suggest two ways out for an advocate of MAP, which force various structural changes in her view. (shrink)

I argue that deflationary theories of truth reveal an important lesson for the broader theory of truth: although the notion of truthmaking has played an essential role in many traditional theories of truth, it can be separated from and survive the rejection of substantive theories of truth. I argue that many of the traditional substantive theories of truth are unified in defining truth in terms of the ontological grounds that are needed to account for truth. Deflationists reject the idea that (...) a theory of truth needs such metaphysical implications, but in so doing they need not rule out the possibility of developing an independently motivated theory of truthmaking. I argue that deflationists can and should embrace truthmaker theory, once it is shorn from its connection to the traditional project of defining truth. (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)

An object-based correspondence theory of truth holds that a truth-bearer is true whenever its truth conditions are met by objects and their properties. In order to develop such a view, the principal task is to explain how truth-bearers become endowed with their truth conditions. Modern versions of the correspondence theory see this project as the synthesis of two theoretical endeavours: basic metasemantics and compositional semantics. Basic metasemantics is the theory of how simple, meaningful items (e.g. names and concepts) are endowed (...) with their contributions to truth conditions, and compositional semantics is the theory of how the meanings of simple items compose to generate (among other things) the truth conditions of sentences. Understanding truth along these broad lines was once popular; it was first championed by Field (1972). However, the once-popular conception of its tasks included an over-ambitious view of basic metasemantics. It was thought that reference needed to be analyzed (or reduced a posteriori) in terms of more fundamental, non-semantic relations (e.g. causal relations, indication, or teleological relations, in the case of mental representation). Obstacles in providing such an analysis engendered skepticism towards this understanding of truth and eventually gave way to its deflationary competitors. This dissertation aims to defend the modern, object-based correspondence theory against its rivals—especially deflationism. Chapter one provides a historically-grounded overview of the theory. Chapter two identifies two points of contrast between the correspondence theorist and the deflationist: they employ different orders of explanation for the variety of semantic phenomena, and they (traditionally) take different attitudes towards the prospects of reduction. Situating the dialectic in this way allows me to develop a middle ground: a moderate version of inflationism that takes the inflationary explanatory structure and combines it with a non-reductive, pluralist approach to basic metasemantics. Chapter three expands on the details of this pluralist account of reference. Chapter four contrasts the view with another rival approach to basic metasemantics: metasemantic interpretationism. And finally, chapter five applies the theory to answer another question of broad philosophical interest: what role does our conception of truth play in inquiry about the world? (shrink)

This thesis explores Officer Cadets' social construction of leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS). It addresses calls for more research into leadership behaviours. Taking a social constructionist perspective, the thesis focuses on unmasking the social construction of Leadership amongst Officer Cadets. This study adopts a reflexive approach, acknowledging the centrality of the researcher in the co-construction of the data. The thesis develops interdisciplinary links between the theoretical areas of Dark Leadership to problematize and inform contemporary understandings of Officer (...) Cadets' social construction of leadership through the emergent findings of the study. This qualitative study employed a mono-method research design consisting of semistructured interviews. Through these, participants shared their lived experiences and gave descriptions and understandings of their past leadership experiences before and current experiences within Sandhurst with a reflexive interview approach. The thesis utilises Reflexive Thematic analysis to interpret the data, with the results presented thematically. The thesis uses reflexive thematic analysis to explore dark leadership through a social constructionist lens; the research has evidenced functional changes to practices within Sandhurst and developed a model of what dark leadership at Sandhurst is from an Officer Cadets view. This approach highlights the importance of contextuality, the person and the situation through a holistic Leadership approach. The thesis proposes a holistic framework for leadership, which would advance toward de-coupling the dichotomies of leadership. (shrink)