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)

Quasi-realist expressivists have developed a growing liking for minimalism about truth. It has gone almost unnoticed, though, that minimalism also drives an anti-Archimedean movement which launches a direct attack on expressivists’ non-moral self-image by proclaiming that all metaethical positions are built on moral grounds. This interplay between expressivism, minimalism and anti-Archimedeanism makes for an intriguing metaethical encounter. As such, the first part of this dissertation examines expressivism’s marriage to minimalism and defends it against its critics. The second part then turns (...) to the anti-Archimedean challenge to expressivism and shows how to ward off this challenge by securing expressivism’s non-moral, metaethical status without having to abandon minimalism about truth. (shrink)

Substantivism is a general philosophical methodology advocating a substantive approach to philosophical theorizing. In this article, I present an overview of this methodology with a special emphasis on the field of truth. I begin with a framework for understanding what is at stake in the substantivist–deflationist debate and describe the substantivist critique of deflationism. I then proceed to discuss contemporary substantivism as a positive methodology, present examples of recent substantivist theories of truth, delineate several principles of philosophical substantivism, and connect (...) it to contemporary thought about the nature and methods of philosophy. Due to limitations of space, I am unable to discuss all the forms contemporary substantivism has taken. But I try to give a clear sense of the central principles, challenges, and promise of this methodology. (shrink)

Minimalists about truth contend that traditional inflationary theories systematically fail to explain certain facts about truth, and that this failure licenses a ‘reversal of explanatory direction’. Once reversed, they purport that their own minimal theory adequately explains all of the facts involving truth. But minimalists’ main objection to inflationism seems to misfire, and the subsequent reversal of explanatory direction, if it can be made sense of, leaves minimalism in no better explanatory position; and even if the objection were serviceable and (...) the reversal legitimate, minimalists’ adequacy thesis is still implausible. (shrink)

In these replies I develop responses to the fascinating issues raised in the commentaries on my book The Metaphysics of Truth from Matti Eklund, Gila Sher, Crispin Wright, and Jeremy Wyatt. I focus on four main areas where there seemed to be a degree of convergence amongst the critics: (1) the viability and use of the sparse/abundant property distinction; (2) truth, dependence, and superassertibility; (3) correspondence, realism, and anti—realism; and (4) my ‘globalizing’ argument against deflationism.

This thesis offers a naturalist revision of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This goal is pursued through an encounter of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and theory of truth with contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. I take issue with Badiou’s inability to elucidate the link between the empirical and the ontological, and his residual reliance on a Heideggerian project of fundamental ontology, which undermines his own immanentist principles. I will argue for both a bottom-up naturalisation of Badiou’s philosophical approach (...) to mathematics and a top-down naturalisation. Articulating my particular understanding of what realism and naturalism should commit us to, I propose a creative fusion of Badiou’s attention to metamathematical results with a structural-informational metaphysics, proposing a ‘matherialism’ uniting the more daring speculative insights of the former with the naturalist and empiricist commitments motivating the latter. (shrink)

A perennial issue in contemporary philosophy is the question of how, in Wilfrid Sellars’ terms, categories of the ‘manifest image’ relate to those of the ‘scientific image’. A widespread kind of naturalism assumes that the categories of science have a certain kind of ontological priority and that other categories (meaning, mind, morality and so on) have to be somehow placed or located in the world of science to be fully vindicated. Huw Price has argued in several papers that if one (...) gives up a view of how language functions he calls ‘representationalism’ then this way of understanding placement problems—object naturalism—necessarily lapses. Price argues that in foregoing representationalism and embracing semantic deflationism we should remain naturalists, but subject naturalists, seeking to understand the function our different discourses play in our lives as natural beings: the project of global expressivism. This argument has recently been challenged by several authors who argue that object naturalism can coherently and rationally be pursued within a semantic deflationist framework. I will argue that these objections to Price’s view are all ultimately unconvincing given a wide enough purview of the dialectic. The viability and coherence of global expressivism itself, and whether it is the only possible form of subject naturalism, are briefly addressed in conclusion. (shrink)

According to deflationism, truth is insubstantial. Edwards (2018) argues that the deflationist thesis of insubstantiality is incoherent, regardless of how it is characterized. By clarifying the deflationist concepts of reference and truth (and their relations) and addressing the distinction between substantial properties and insubstantial properties within the deflationist framework, we will argue that Edwards’s self-defeating argument is problematic and ultimately unconvincing.

The main conclusion of this article is that propositional attitudes are physical brain processes that pertain to language. Hence, propositional attitudes cannot be direct manifestations of our mental states, neither direct representations; instead they must be understood as second-order representations. Thus, propositional attitudes cannot serve for explaining our basic mental activity. Otherwise, propositional attitudes must be understood as language shortcuts used for referring to basic mental states, events or processes.