I argue that one good reason for Scientific Realists to be interested in correspondence theories is the hope they offer us of being able to state and defend realistic theses in the face of well-known difficulties about modern physics: such theses as, that our theories are approximately true, or that they will tend to approach the truth. I go on to claim that this hope is unlikely to be fulfilled. I suggest that Realism can still survive in the face of (...) these difficulties, as a claim about the kind of theories we want to aim for. I relate this conception of Realism to various contemporary discussions, both by realists and antirealists. (shrink)

Hartry Field has suggested that we should adopt at least a methodological deflationism: [W]e should assume full-fledged deflationism as a working hypothesis. That way, if full-fledged deflationism should turn out to be inadequate, we will at least have a clearer sense than we now have of just where it is that inflationist assumptions ... are needed. I argue here that we do not need to be methodological deflationists. More pre-cisely, I argue that we have no need for a disquotational truth-predicate; (...) that the word true, in ordinary language, is not a disquotational truth-predicate; and that it is not at all clear that it is even possible to introduce a disquotational truth-predicate into ordinary language. If so, then we have no clear sense how it is even possible to be a methodological deflationist. My goal here is not to convince a committed deflationist to abandon his or her position. My goal, rather, is to argue, contrary to what many seem to think, that reflection on the apparently trivial character of T-sentences should not incline us to deflationism. (shrink)

There is an incompatibility between the deflationist approach to truth, which makes truth transparent on the basis of an antecedent grasp of meaning, and the traditional endeavour, exemplified by Davidson, to explicate meaning through of truth. I suggest that both parties are in the explanatory red: deflationist lack a non-truth-involving theory of meaning and Davidsonians lack a non-deflationary account of truth. My focus is on the attempts of the latter party to resolve their problem. I look in detail at Davidson's (...) more recent work and suggest that it seeks to articulate a primitive notion of truth that may balance between a notion that collapses into deflationism and one that is wholly subsumed under a general theory of interpretation. I conclude that this tightrope walk is ultimately unsuccessful. Equally, however, some reasons are provided for thinking that deflationism might be equally unsuccessful with its problem. 'Truth or meaning?' remains an open question. (shrink)

Scientific realism says of our best scientific theories that (1) most of their important posits exist and (2) most of their central claims are approximately true. Antirealists sometimes offer the pessimistic induction in reply: since (1) and (2) are false about past successful theories, they are probably false about our own best theories too. The contemporary debate about this argument has turned (and become stuck) on the question, Do the central terms of successful scientific theories refer? For example, Larry Laudan (...) offers a list of successful theories that employed central terms that failed to refer, and Philip Kitcher replies with a view about reference in which the central terms of such theories did sometimes refer. This article attempts to break this stalemate by proposing a direct version of the pessimistic induction, one that makes no explicit appeal to a substantive notion or theory of reference. While it is premature to say that this argument succeeds in showing that realism is probably false, the direct pessimistic induction is not subject to any kind of reference-based objection that might cripple a weaker, indirect version of the argument. Any attempt to trounce the direct pessimistic induction with a theory of reference fails. (shrink)

The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, there is a crucial step that is left undefended, and that (...) without a defense of this step, the flight to reference is a fatally flawed strategy; it cannot succeed in resolving philosophical issues. In this paper we begin by setting out the flight to reference strategy and explaining what is wrong with arguments that invoke the strategy. We then illustrate the problem by considering arguments for and against eliminative materialism. In the final section we argue that much the same problem undermines Philip Kitcher's attempt to defend scientific realism. (shrink)

: This paper analyzes the development of Kuhn's metaphilosophical position concerning the proper relationship between the history and the philosophy of science. I reconstruct Kuhn's model of scientific change presented in Structure as having the logical status of a Weberian explanatory theory; the philosophy of science and the history of science were of equal importance in its development and defense. However, Kuhn's metaphilosophical position changed in the 1990s, when he gave primacy to philosophy over the history of science in response (...) to the challenge new sociology of science presented to his views. I analyze Kuhn's seldom discussed 'first principles' and argue that the locution should be understood as marking this metaphilosophical shift. Kuhn's project in his last writings was to develop epistemology and metaphysics capable of withstanding relativism and of selecting cognitive internal historiography as the appropriate historiography for the philosophy of science. I sketch the contours of this project which Kuhn was unable to complete in his lifetime. (shrink)

'Epistemic' theories of vagueness notoriously claim that (despite the appearances to the contrary) all of our vague terms have sharp boundaries, it's just that we can't know what they are. Epistemic theories are typically criticized for failing to explain (1) the source of the ignorance postulated, and (2) how our terms could come to have such precise boundaries. Both of these objections will, however, be shown to rest on certain 'presentist' assumptions about the relation between use and meaning, and if (...) allows that the meaning constitutive elements of our linguistic practices can extend into the future, the possibility of a new sort of 'normative epistemicism' emerges. (shrink)

In his groundbreaking book, Thin Objects, Linnebo (2018) argues for an account of neo-Fregean abstraction principles and thin existence that does not rely on analyticity or conceptual rules. It instead relies on a metaphysical notion he calls “sufficiency”. In this short discussion, I defend the analytic or conceptual rule account of thin existence.

According to MODERATISM, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges like <There is an external world>, <I am not a brain in a vat (BIV)>, and so on. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by combining the claim that external world propositions have a substantive truth property like correspondence with the claim that hinges (...) have a deflationary truth property. I argue that the resulting view cannot offer a coherent characterization of ‘skeptical switch scenarios’ while providing an effective anti-skeptical strategy. In a more positive vein, I defend an approach that combines a correspondence conception of truth with epistemological disjunctivism. (shrink)

Through a series of empirical studies involving native speakers of English, German, and Chinese, this paper reveals that the predicate “true” is inherently ambiguous in the empirical domain. Truth statements such as “It is true that Tom is at the party” seem to be ambivalent between two readings. On the first reading, the statement means “Reality is such that Tom is at the party.” On the second reading, the statement means “According to what X believes, Tom is at the party.” (...) While there appear to exist some cross-cultural differences in the interpretation of the statements, the overall findings robustly indicate that “true” has multiple meanings in the realm of empirical matters. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a lot of skepticism about the existence of facts. It seems that one of the last places for their application is in truthmaking theory. In this paper I discuss two approaches to the use of facts in truthmaking. The first, categorial, holds that facts are entities that belong to one of three ontological categories (true propositions, truth of propositions, instantiations of universals).The second, deflationary, holds that a fact is merely a functional concept denoting any (...) entity that performs a truthmaking function. I argue that in the face of significant criticism of categorial facts as truthmakers, a defender of facts may resort to the deflationary concept. Nevertheless, even in this case we can do without facts as truthmakers. (shrink)

Philosophical literature has focused on the concept of trust, but often considers distrust merely as an afterthought. Distrust however, because of its pervasive role in our everyday lives, can be quite damaging. Thus, understanding the rationality of distrust is crucial for understanding our testimonial practices. In this paper I analyze whether it is rational or irrational to distrust an informant on the basis of identity bias. My aim is to show that distrust is irrational when based on negative identity bias. (...) First, I adopt Annalisa Coliva’s account of social hinge epistemology where it is rationally required to assume certain basic presuppositions, such that people are generally reliable informants, to obtain propositional justification and participate in the testimonial practice. Secondly, I show how distrust based on negative identity bias can spread across other domains of interaction and jeopardize the testimonial practice as we fail to assume that people are generally reliable informants. Thirdly, I argue that considering bias as a defeater is beneficial to maintain the claim that bias-based distrust is irrational, as it prevents the acquisition of propositional justification. Finally, I show that distrust is rational when based on evidence and reason that the speaker is not reliable or sincere. (shrink)

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)

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)

The meanings of utterances and thoughts are commonly regarded in philosophical semantics as abstract objects, called «propositions», which account for how different utterances and thoughts can be synonymous and which constitute the primary truth-bearers. I argue that meanings are instead natural properties that play causal roles in the world, that the kind of «One over Many» thinking underlying the characterization of shared meanings as abstract objects is misguided and that utterances and thoughts having truth-values in virtue of their meanings does (...) not entail that meanings themselves are truth-bearers. (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)

What is it that we are doing when we make ethical claims and judgments, such as the claim that we morally ought to assist refugees? This dissertation introduces and defends a novel theory of ethical thought and discourse. I begin by identifying the surface features of ethical thought and discourse to be explained, including the realist and cognitivist (i.e. belief-like) appearance of ethical judgments, and the apparent close connection between making a sincere ethical judgment and being motivated to act on (...) it. I examine prominent attempts to explain these features, with a focus on recent ‘hybrid’ theories combining elements of expressivism and cognitivism. Despite their initial promise, I argue that extant hybrid theories are nevertheless committed to problematic semantic, metasemantic, or pragmatic assumptions. I then discuss what I take to be the strongest existing option, ethical neo-expressivism (Bar-On and Chrisman, 2009; Bar-On, Chrisman, and Sias, 2014), and develop it into an explicitly hybrid theory proposing that ethical judgments incorporate both motivationally-charged affective states and moral beliefs. I then supplement this account with a theory of the proper function (following Millikan, 1984) of ethical claims and judgments, arguing that they function simultaneously to track the morally salient features of social situations, and to coordinate our behavior around these features. Finally, I defend one of the cognitivist commitments of the theory – namely, that objective moral knowledge is possible – by applying recent work on the epistemology of fundamental or ‘core’ intellectual commitments (Lynch, 2012; Pritchard, 2016) to the moral realm. (shrink)

Nominalists need some account of correctness for sentences committed to the existence of abstract objects. This paper proposes a new statement of such conditions specifically for properties. The account builds on an earlier proposal of mine, but avoids the counter-examples against the latter pointed out by Thomas Schindler, particularly, the sentence ‘There are inexpressible properties’. I argue that the new proposal is independently motivated and more faithful to the spirit of the kind of error-theoretic nominalism that the original proposal was (...) part of. Along the way, I also propose novel treatments of Arthur Pap’s and W.V.O. Quine’s notoriously hard-to-paraphrase sentences about abstracta. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially explained in terms of the speech act of rejection. We implement the deflationist insight in a bilateral theory by taking (...) the meaning of the truth predicate to be explained by its inferential relation to assertion. We combine this account of the meaning of the truth predicate with a new diagnosis of the Liar Paradox: its derivation requires the truth rules to preserve evidence, but these rules only preserve commitment. The result is a novel inferential deflationist theory of truth, which solves the Liar Paradox in a principled manner. We end by showing that our theory and simple extensions thereof have the resources to axiomatize the internal logic of several supervaluational hierarchies, including Cantini’s. This solves open problems of Halbach (2011) and Horsten (2011). (shrink)

We argue that knowledge is not the norm of belief given that ‘I believe’ is used to hedge. We explore the consequences of this argument for the normative relationship between belief and assertion.

Serious actualists take it that all properties are existence entailing. I present a simple puzzle about sentence tokens which seems to show that serious actualism is false. I then consider the most promising response to the puzzle. This is the idea that the serious actualist should take ordinary property-talk to contain an implicit existential presupposition. I argue that this approach does not work: it fails to generalise appropriately to all sentence types and tokens. In particular, it fails to capture the (...) right distinctions we ought to make between what I call _typographical sentence types_—an interesting and previously undiscussed class of fine-grained sentence types which are partially individuated by their typography, or how they look when written out. (shrink)

The paper proposes a strategy for understanding metaphysical grounding in deflationary terms and, more generally, proposes a form of methodological deflationism with respect to the notions of ground. The idea is to define a deflationary is grounded in-predicate by appeal to the two-place non-causal connective ‘because’ and a deflationary truth predicate. To this end, we discuss the explanatory role of the truth-predicate in non-causal explanations and develop a theory of truth for the language of the ‘because’-connective. We argue that at (...) least from a logical perspective our deflationary notion of ground is up to the task. (shrink)

Carnap was one of the first to use the term 'non-cognitivism'. His linguistic pluralism and voluntarism, and his deflationary views of ontology and semantics, are highly congenial to those of us who want to take non-cognitivism in the direction of global expressivism. In his own case, however, this move is in tension with his continued endorsement of what he calls 'the general thesis of logical empiricism', that 'there is no third kind of knowledge besides empirical and logical knowledge.’ So while (...) Carnap clears a path towards global expressivism, he doesn't seem to appreciate what it requires him to leave behind. (shrink)

This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look (...) to Amie Thomasson’s work for a general strategy for offering a unified expressivist account of modality. Modals in general, we propose, are devices for expressing metalinguistic commitments within the object language, with deontic, epistemic, and metaphysical modals all expressing different kinds of metalinguistic commitments. (shrink)

Truth about matters of fact is objective. This is not just because truth is objective. It is also because facts are objective. An objective fact makes an assertion of that fact true. The objectivity of the fact adds a further element of objectivity to the objective truth of the assertion. True assertions of fact are true because truth is objective and because the facts that make them true are objective. True assertions of fact are objective twice over. Their objectivity is (...) twofold. Or, at least, that is the point I seek to establish here. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relation between Crispin Wright’s alethic pluralism and my global expressivism. I argue that on many topics Wright’s own view counts as expressivism in my sense, but that truth itself is a striking exception. Unlike me, Wright never seems to countenance an expressivist account of truth, though the materials needed are available to him in his approaches to other topics.

Eli Hirsch argues that certain ontological disputes involve a conflict between “equivalent” languages, and that the principle of charity compels each disputant to interpret the other as speaking truly in their own language. For Hirsch, a language’s semantics maps sentences (in context) onto sets of possible worlds but assigns no role to reference. I argue that this method leads to an overly uncharitable portrayal of the disputes at issue – whereby ontologists who speak “equivalent” languages can only argue about syntax. (...) Lack of charity stems from the fact that this portrayal likely fails to uphold the self-conception of the disputants – and particularly what I will call “the weak self-conception”. As a result, Hirsch’s deflationism falls victim of the same principle of charity that informs it. (shrink)

Totuus on nykyisellään laaja-alaisen kritiikin kohteena niin akateemisessa, poliittisessa kuin vähemmän formaalissakin kontekstissa. Puolustan filosofisesti kestävää ja selitysvoimaista totuuskäsitettä tältä laaja-alaiselta kritiikiltä argumentoimalla sen arvon ja normatiivisuuden puolesta. Totuus on välineellisesti arvokas käsite, joka mahdollistaa todellisuuden erottamisen kuvitelmasta ja toiveajattelusta. Tämän lisäksi todet uskomukset ovat välineellisesti arvokkaita moninaisten hyötyjen, kuten onnistuneiden ennustusten ja navigoinnin saavuttamisessa. Toisaalta olemme joskus kiinnostuneita totuudesta pelkästään sen itsensä takia. Totuuden normatiivisuudesta kertoo taipumuksemme pitää sitä yleisenä tiedollisten pyrkimysten päämääränä ja yhtenä uskomuksen sekä väitettävyyden oikeellisuuden standardina, (...) johon suhteessa olemme eri mieltä ja jonka puhumista edellytämme luokka- ja oikeussaleissamme sekä parlamenteissamme. Edellisen nojalla totuus ei osoittaudu pelkästään mielenkiintoiseksi teoreettisen tarkastelun kohteeksi, vaan käsitteeksi, jolla on laaja-alaista tieteellistä ja yhteiskunnallista merkittävyyttä. (shrink)

Kirjoituksessa argumentoin, että metafysiikka on ollut valistusta, vaikka se edelleen kaipaa lisää valistumista, kun valistus ymmärretään avoimena prosessina, joka ei ole ajasta ja paikasta riippuvaista. Käsittelen ensin sitä, mitä metafysiikka ja valistus ovat. Sitten lausun länsimaisen metafysiikan historiasta hyvin lyhyesti. Päätän esseen argumentoimalla, että metafysiikka on valistunutta siinä mielessä, että klassisen substanssi-ominaisuus-skeeman sokeasta seuraamisesta on pitkälti päästy eroon. Metafysiikka kaipaa kuitenkin lisää valistusta ja kriittistä tarkastelua, jotta vapaudumme täysin kyseisen skeeman ja modernin predikaatti-logiikan johdatuksen aiheuttamasta kolmesta ongelmallisesta suositusta (tausta)oletuksesta: (1) (...) perustavat partikulaariset yksilöoliot ovat (periaatteessa) laskettavia, (2) ne eivät ole relationaalisia ja (3) ominaisuudet ovat ontologisesti riippuvaisia kantajistaan. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree. A lot. Pervasive disagreement is part of the territory; consensus is hard to find. Some think this should lead us to embrace philosophical skepticism: skepticism about the extent to which we can know, or justifiably believe, the philosophical views we defend and advance. Most philosophers in the literature fall into one camp or the other: philosophical skepticism or philosophical anti-skepticism. Drawing on the insights of hinge epistemology, this paper proposes another way forward, an intermediate position that appeals both (...) to skeptical and anti-skeptical intuitions concerning the possibility and scope of philosophical knowledge. The main advantage of our account is that it’s able to recover some philosophical knowledge while also being compatible with philosophical skepticism. (shrink)

Well over half a century before the development of contemporary experimental philosophy, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss conducted a number of empirical investigations intended to document non-philosophers’ convictions regarding a number of topics of philosophical interest. In the 1930s and 1950s, Næss collected data relevant to non-philosophers’ conceptions of truth. This research attracted the attention of Alfred Tarski at the time, and has recently been re-evaluated by Robert Barnard and Joseph Ulatowski. In this paper I return to Næss’s research on (...) truth in order to better develop an account of how such empirical data does or doesn’t bear on the philosophical study of truth. I examine Næss’s findings from his various studies on truth, and challenge the interpretation of those studies offered by Barnard and Ulatowski. (shrink)

It is widely believed that deflationary truth has no explanatory power. I will argue that it does. Specifically, I will consider some objections to deflationary truth having explanatory power, and argue that they fail. The position which will emerge is that the deflationary concept of truth is analogous to the concept of an average. Scientists take averages to be explanatory, and I will argue that the concept of deflationary truth is explanatory in the same way. I then argue that this (...) deflationary _concept_ of truth motivates a theory of the _property_ of truth which is metaphysically disunified, but that this is no obstacle to explanation. This leads to a way of understanding the deflationary/substantive distinction in terms of grounding. (shrink)

Félix Milette Les débats concernant la question de la vérité s’articulent principalement autour du clivage entre inflationnistes et déflationnistes, les premiers cherchant à comprendre la nature sous-jacente de la propriété d’être vrai, les seconds niant que cette propriété possède une nature philosophiquement intéressante. Au cours des dernières décennies, un certain nombre de déflationnistes « modérés » ont formulé cette dernière thèse en affirmant que la vérité n’est pas une propriété substantielle. Comment devrions-nous comprendre le sens de cette affirmation? Dans cet (...) article, l’auteur se donne pour tâche d’évaluer les différentes analyses de l’insubstantialité qui ont été proposées pour saisir en quoi consiste la position distinctive du déflationnisme modéré. Nous conclurons en affirmant qu’aucune d’entre elles, dans leur forme actuelle, n’est en mesure de servir les fins du déflationnisme. (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.

In this paper I investigate how differences in approach to truth and logic (in particular, a deflationist vs. a substantivist approach to these fields) affect philosophers’ views concerning pluralism and normativity in these fields. My perspective on truth and logic is largely epistemic, focusing on the role of truth in knowledge (rather than on the use of the words “true” and “truth” in natural language), and my reference group includes Carnap (1934), Harman (1986), Horwich (1990), Wright (1992), Beall and Restall (...) (2006), Field (2009), Lynch (2009), and Sher (2016a).1 Whenever possible, I focus on positive rather than negative views on the issues involved, although in some cases this is not possible. (shrink)

Mental fictionalism holds that folk psychology should be regarded as a kind of fiction. The present version gives a Lewisian prefix semantics for mentalistic discourse, where roughly, a mentalistic sentence “p” is true iff “p” is deducible from the folk psychological fiction. An eliminativist version of the view can seem self-refuting, but this charge is neutralized. Yet a different kind of “self-effacing” emerges: Mental fictionalism appears to be a mere “parasite” on a future science of cognition, without contributing anything substantial. (...) The paper then rebuts the objection, illustrating that prefix semantics resolves a lingering problem for eliminativism from Boghossian. The problem is that eliminativists seem unable to adopt realism about neuroscience, for such realism implies that neuroscientific statements *represent* reality accurately. However, a deflationary version of prefix semantics allows the eliminativist to draw an ontologically relevant distinction (roughly) between truths that have a story-telling prefix and those that do not. (Deflationism means there is no implication that the unprefixed sentences robustly represent reality.) The overarching lesson is that eliminativists need to approach to ontology carefully so to avoid self-refutation; however, prefix semantical mental fictionalism provides the resources for them to do so. (shrink)

This essay attempts to recover the ancient Egyptian category of "maat" as a valuable resource for contemporary metaethics and particular attention is given to its affinity with versions of modern non-cognitivism.

The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth into an explicit definition of the concept hence coalesced with the question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and ingenious move was to introduce a new concept, satisfaction, which could be, on the one hand, recursively defined, and which, on the other hand, straightforwardly yielded an explication of truth. A surprising 'by-product' of Tarski's effort to bring truth under control was (...) the breathtaking finding that truth is in a precisely defined sense ineffable, that no non trivial language can contain a truth-predicate which would be adequate for the very 4 language. This implied that truth proved itself to be strangely 'language-dependent': we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a concept of truth applicable to every language. In a sense, this means, as Quine put it, that truth belongs to "transcendental metaphysics", and Tarski's 'scientific' investigations seem to lead us back towards a surprising proximity of some more traditional philosophical views on truth. 3. TARSKI'S THEORY AS A PARADIGM So far Tarski himself. Subsequent philosophers then had to find out what his considerations of the concept of truth really mean and what are their consequences; and this now seems to be an almost interminable task. (shrink)

What requirements must deflationary formal theories of truth satisfy? This chapter argues against the widely accepted view that compositional and Tarskian theories of truth are substantial or otherwise unacceptable to deflationists. First, two purposes that a formal truth theory can serve are distinguished: one descriptive, the other logical (i.e., to characterise the correctness of inferences involving ‘true’). The chapter argues that the most compelling arguments for the incompatibility of compositional and Tarskian theories concern descriptive theories only. -/- Second, two requirements (...) that any deflationist truth theory intended to serve a logical purpose must satisfy are put forward. These requirements, it is argued, suggest that (i) many well-known compositional and Tarskian theories are acceptable from a deflationist standpoint (including CT); (ii) certain other popular theories of truth (including KF and FS) are not similarly acceptable; (iii) there are no conclusive reasons to impose a conservativeness requirement on deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

According to Realism about Epistemic Value, there is such a thing as epistemic value and it is appropriate to evaluate things—e.g., beliefs—for epistemic value because there is such a thing as epistemic value. Allan Hazlett's A Luxury of the Understanding is a sustained critique of Realism. Hazlett challenges proponent of Realism to answer explanatory questions while not justifiably violating certain constraints, including two proposed naturalistic constraints. Hazlett argues they cannot. Here I defend Realism. I argue that it is easy for (...) proponents of Realism to answer Hazlett's explanatory questions. The interesting issue is whether those answers violate Hazlett's naturalistic constraints. My own view is that epistemic value is irreducible to natural properties; it thus violates Hazlett's proposed constraints. I argue that this is justifiable because Hazlett fails to convincingly motivate his naturalistic constraints and there is reason for thinking epistemic value is irreducible to natural properties anyway. (shrink)

Is there good reason to worry about celebrity involvement in democratic politics? The rise of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky has led political theorists and commentators to worry that the role of expertise in democratic politics has been undermined. According to one recent critique, celebrities possess a significant degree of epistemic power that is unconnected to appropriate expertise. This presents a problem both for deliberative and epistemic theories of democratic legitimacy, which ignore this form of power, (...) and for real existing democracies attempting to meet the standards of legitimacy set out by these theories. But do these critiques apply to democratic elitism? In this paper, we argue that recognition of celebrity epistemic power in fact represents a valuable resource for supporting the legitimacy and practice of democratic elitism, though these benefits do come with certain risks to which elite theories are particularly vulnerable. (shrink)

Minimalism about truth is one of the main contenders for our best theory of truth, but minimalists face the charge of being unable to properly state their theory. Donald Davidson incisively pointed out that minimalists must generalize over occurrences of the same expression placed in two different contexts, which is futile. In order to meet the challenge, Paul Horwich argues that one can nevertheless characterize the axioms of the minimalist theory. Sten Lindström and Tim Button have independently argued that Horwich’s (...) attempt to formulate minimalism remains unsuccessful. We show how to properly state Horwich’s axioms by appealing to propositional functions that are given by definite descriptions. Both Lindström and Button discuss proposals similar to ours and conclude that they are unsuccessful. Our new suggestion avoids these objections. (shrink)

If we accept certain Peircean commitments, Gettier’s two cases are not cases of justified true belief because the beliefs are not true. On the Peircean view, propositions are sign substitutes, or “representamens.” In typical cases of thought about the world, propositions represent facts. In each of Gettier’s examples, we have a case in which a person S believes some proposition p, there is some fact F* such that were p to represent F* to S then p would be true, and (...) yet p does not represent F* to S but some other fact F of which p is false. Since truth is a property of propositions with respect to their representational function, it follows that the belief is not true. Although an examination of Gettier’s two cases, this essay is not a defense of the justified true belief analysis of knowledge, for there are objections to the JTB analysis other than Gettier’s two cases. Rather, Gettier’s two cases are of particular interest for the light they shed on the nature of truth and representation. (shrink)

The thesis that nothing is true has long been thought to be a self-refuting position not worthy of serious philosophical consideration. Recently, however, the thesis of alethic nihilism—that nothing is true—has been explicitly defended (notably by David Liggins). Nihilism is also, I argue, a consequence of other views about truth that have recently been advocated, such as fictionalism about truth and the inconsistency account. After offering an account of alethic nihilism, and how it purports to avoid the self-refutation problem, I (...) argue that it avoids the problem at the expense of changing the subject. I then present other arguments against nihilism and responses to the considerations offered in defense of it. The only tenable position is that something is indeed true. (shrink)