While historically prominent theories of truth such as the correspondence theory, coherentism, pragmatism, verificationism, and instrumentalism diverge in many ways, they converge in at least one fundamental respect. They are all monist theories of truth. They incorporate the thesis that there is one property—and one property only—in virtue of which propositions can be true. The truth pluralist, on the other hand, rejects this idea. There are several properties in virtue of which propositions can be true. This article offers a survey (...) of recent work on alethic pluralism—presenting various incarnations of the view, objections leveled against them, and various lines of response available to pluralists. (shrink)

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.

This thesis comprises three main chapters—each comprising one relatively standalone paper. The unifying theme is fragmentalism about truth, which is the view that the predicate “true” either expresses distinct concepts or expresses distinct properties. -/- In Chapter 1, I provide a formal development of alethic pluralism. Pluralism is the view that there are distinct truth properties associated with distinct domains of subject matter, where a truth property satisfies certain truth-characterizing principles. On behalf of pluralists, I propose an account of logic (...) and semantics that shows how they can answer central conceptual and logical challenges for their view. -/- In Chapter 2, I motivate and develop a modal account of propositions on the basis of an iterative conception of propositions, where the modality is logico-mathematical. The modal account of propositions takes the conception to motivate an inherently potential hierarchy of propositions. I show that the account helps provide satisfying solutions to the intensional paradoxes of Russell-Myhill, Kaplan, and Prior. -/- In Chapter 3, I propose that “true” is polysemous. I suggest that “true” is initially polysemous between correspondence truth and disquotational truth, and further polysemous between the meanings corresponding to the subconcepts of the concept truth generated by the indefinite extensibility of that concept. I show that the proposal provides satisfying solutions to the semantic paradoxes. (shrink)