This paper explores the nature of the concept of truth. It does not offer an analysis or definition of truth, or an account of how it relates to other concepts. Instead, it explores what sort of concept truth is by considering what sorts of thoughts it enables us to think. My conclusion is that truth is a part of each and every propositional thought. The concept of truth is therefore best thought of as the ability to token propositional thoughts. I (...) explore what implications this view has for existing accounts of concepts, and argue that truth is a concept unlike any other. (shrink)

Conceptual primitivism is the view that truth is among our most basic and fundamental concepts. It cannot be defined, analyzed, or reduced into concepts that are more fundamental. Primitivism is opposed to both traditional attempts at defining truth (in terms of correspondence, coherence, or utility) and deflationary theories that argue that the notion of truth is exhausted by means of the truth schema. Though primitivism might be thought of as a view of last resort, I believe that the view is (...) independently attractive, and can be argued for directly. In this paper I offer what I take to be the strongest argument in favor of conceptual primitivism, which relies upon the Fregean doctrine of the omnipresence of truth. (shrink)

In recent decades deflationary theories of truth have been challenged with a technical argument based on the notion of conservativeness. In this paper, I shall stress that conservative extensions of theories and expandability of their models are not equivalent notions. Then, I shall argue that the deflationary thesis of the unsubstantiality of truth is better understood as leveraging on the stronger notion of expandability of models. Once expandability is involved in the argument, some notable consequences follow: the strategy proposed by (...) Hartry Field in response to the conservativeness objection is strongly undermined and even simpler proposals (such as theories based on standard t-sentences) are shown to be quite problematical. (shrink)

It is argued that we should distinguish ontic truth––the True––that Frege claimed is sui generis and indefinable, from the semantic concept, for which Tarski provided a definition. Frege’s argument that truth is not definable is clarified and Wittgenstein’s introduction of the distinction between saying and showing is interpreted as an attempted response to Frege’s rejection of the correspondence theory. It is argued that conflicts between realism and Dummettian anti-realism result from their proponents not thoroughly distinguishing between the two closely connected (...) ways of thinking about truth. Last, the distinction is used to clarify and endorse the Fregean claim that all true sentences indicate the True, identified as ontic truth. (shrink)

Can knowledge be defined? We expound an argument of John Cook Wilson's that it cannot. Cook Wilson's argument connects knowing with having the power to inquire. We suggest that if he is right about that connection, then knowledge is, indeed, indefinable.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Frege’s argument against the relativity of truth contained in his posthumous writing Logic from 1897. Two points are made. The first is that the argument is a performative version of the common objection that truth relativism is incoherent: it is designed to show that the assertion of the relativity of truth involves a performative incoherence, because the absoluteness of truth is a success condition for making assertions. From a modern point of view, (...) the central premise of the argument, that the successful making of assertions depends on the absoluteness of truth, is highly doubtful. The second point is that this premise can be made plausible within the framework of Frege’s conception of truth and assertion: it can be derived from his thesis that, in order to put something forward as true, we do not need the word ‘true’, but only the assertoric force. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege takes logic to be the science of truth throughout his career. However, the mature Frege makes remarks which seem to go against the idea that logic is the science of truth. This paper shows that we can explain away this tension in the mature Frege’s conception of logic if we accept that truth is an object, that is, the truth-vale True qua the reference of a sentence, for Frege. Even though the main thesis of this paper is a (...) conditional, I provide reasons why we ought to consider the possibility seriously that truth is an object for Frege. I also explain how we can make sense of Frege’s conception of logic as the science of truth while accepting truth is an object. (shrink)

In the explanations of logical laws and inference rules of the mature version of Begriffsschrift in Grundgesetze, Frege uses the predicate “… is the True.” Scholars like Greimann maintain that this predicate is a metalinguistic truth-predicate for Frege. This paper examines an argument for this claim that is based on the “nominal reading” of Frege’s conception of sentences—the claim that for Frege a sentence “p” is equivalent to a nonsentential phrase like “the truth-value of the thought that p.” In particular, (...) this paper attempts to establish two points concerning this argument based on the nominal reading. First, the argument implies a claim about the nature of assertion which Frege repeatedly denies in his mature works. Secondly, the nominal reading on which the argument depends is false. A sentence “p” is not equivalent to a nonsentential phrase like “the truth-value of the thought that p” for Frege. Our discussion will lead to an important lesson about Frege’s conception of sentences and of assertion. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the circularity reading of Frege's argument for the indefinability of truth. According to this reading, Frege is appealing to a sort of circularity in the argument. I argue that the circularity reading is interpretatively incorrect, or makes Frege's argument a non‐starter.