Book Review The Metaphysics of Truth by Douglas Edwards Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 210. ISBN 9780198758693. £45.00 ($56.00) (hardcover).

Common-sense allows that talk about moral truths makes perfect sense. If you object to the United States’ Declaration of Independence’s assertion that it is a truth that ‘all men’ are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’, you are more likely to object that these rights are not unalienable or that they are not endowed by the Creator, or even that its wording ignores the fact that women have rights too, than that this is not the sort of thing (...) which could be a truth. Whether it is a truth or not seems beside the point, anyway; the writers of the Declaration could just have well written, ‘We hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and also that it is self-evident that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ save only that its cadence would lack some of the poetic resonance of the version which garnered Hancock’s signature. Yet famously, ethical noncognitivists have proclaimed that moral sentences can’t be true or false – that, like ‘Hooray!’ or ‘dammit!’, they are not even the kinds of things to be true or false. Noncognitivism is sometimes even defined as the view that this is so, but even philosophers who define ‘noncognitivism’ more broadly, as consistent with the idea that moral sentences may be true or false, have believed that they needed to do important philosophical spadework in order to make sense of how moral sentences could be true or false. In this article we’ll look at the puzzle about moral truth as it is faced by early noncognitivists and by metaethical expressivists, the early noncognitivists’ contemporary cousins. We’ll look at what it would take for expressivists to ‘earn the right’ to talk about moral truths at all, and in particular at what it would take for them to earn the right to claim that moral truths behave in the ways that we should expect – including that meaningful moral sentences which lack presuppositions are true or false, and that classically valid arguments are truth-preserving.. (shrink)

The problem that motivates me arises from a constellation of factors pulling in different, sometimes opposing directions. Simplifying, they are: (1) The complexity of the world; (2) Humans’ ambitious project of theoretical knowledge of the world; (3) The severe limitations of humans’ cognitive capacities; (4) The considerable intricacy of humans’ cognitive capacities . Given these circumstances, the question arises whether a serious notion of truth is applicable to human theories of the world. In particular, I am interested in the questions: (...) (a) Is a substantive standard of truth for human theories of the world possible? (b) What kind of standard would that be? (shrink)

Aesthetic properties are often thought to have either no evaluative component or an evaluative component that can be isolated from their descriptive component. The present article argues that this popular view is without adequate support. First, doubt is cast on the idea that some paradigmatic aesthetic properties are purely descriptive. Second, the idea that the evaluative component of an aesthetic property can always be neatly separated from its descriptive component is called into question. Meanwhile, a speculative hypothesis is launched regarding (...) the structure of being garish and being cacophonous. Finally, an explanation is given of how the issue of the structure of aesthetic properties bears on their reality and (presumed) response-dependence. (shrink)

What is the role of a notion of truth in our form of life? What is it to possess a notion of truth? How different would we be, if we did not possess a notion of truth? Gulliver’s description of three peoples encountered during his fifth travel will help me to answer. One might say that the basic anti-realist tenet is that we should explain the notion of truth by connecting it with our practice of assertion. In this sense the (...) outcome of my commentary of the fifth part of Gulliver’s Travels will amount to a non-reductive anti-realist conception of truth. It can be called a dialectical conception of truth because it focuses on a particular way of resolving disagreements: an epistemically virtuous practice of verbal exchange that cares for truth. The main thesis is that an implicit awareness of the epistemically virtuous practice is a necessary condition for being in full possession of the notion of truth. The commentary will also involve an argument against deflationism and a critique of some claims made by Huw Price. (shrink)

Christine Tappolet posed a problem for alethic pluralism: either deny the truth of conjunctions whose conjuncts are from distinct domains of inquiry, or posit a generic global truth property thus making other truth properties redundant. Douglas Edwards has attempted to solve the problem by avoiding the horns of Tappolet's dilemma. After first noting an unappreciated consequence of Edwards's view regarding a proliferation of truth properties, I show that Edwards's proposal fails to avoid Tappolet's original dilemma. His response is not successful, (...) as it lets in a generic truth property through the ‘back door’. I conclude by briefly offering a new solution to the problem, and an alternative diagnosis of Tappolet's dilemma.1. Tappolet's dilemmaThe alethic pluralist ; Sher ; Wright ) contends that propositions from different domains can be true in different ways. Mixed conjunctions have conjuncts from different domains; consider for example, ‘1+1=2 and murder is wrong’. A pressing question for the pluralist: if each conjunct is true in a distinct way, in what way is the conjunction true? Tappolet argues, " [M]ixed conjunctions need to be true in a further way. … But then each conjunct has to be true in the same way. This is what follows from the truism that a conjunction is true if and only if its conjuncts are true. Hence the question arises again why this further way of being true is not the only one we need. " Edwards puts Tappolet's contention as a dilemma: either admit a generic truth property that can apply to all propositions, regardless of domain or deny that mixed conjunctions can be true. It is prima facie plausible that mixed conjunctions can be true. Moreover, admitting a generic truth property would seemingly undermine alethic pluralism by making other truth properties redundant.2. Edwards's solutionEdwards's solution attempts …. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that moral projectivism cannot be coherently fix the content of our moral responses. To this purpose, I develop a number of arguments against moral dispositionalism and, in this context, I challenge both David Lewis' dispositionalist account of colour and Chistine Korsgaard's procedural realism.

_ Source: _Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 281 - 295 The paper contains the replies to the comments made by Alan Millar, Yuval Avnur, Giorgio Volpe, and Maria Baghramian on my _Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology_. It addresses, in particular, the nature of perceptual justification, the truth of hinges, my response to Humean skepticism and the issue of epistemic relativism.

Dans la première partie de cet article, je presente une thèse parapluie — la thèse de l'«exhaustion» — qui cerne bien l'élément central des diverses positions déflationnistes au sujet de la vérité : l'idée que le contenu du prédicat de vérité s'épuise entièrement dans le contenu de ce à quoi le prédicats'applique. Je soutiens que cette thèse n'est supportée que d'une manière triviale par l'idée courante que la vérite résiste à une analyse substantielle, car les prédicats en général ne se (...) prêtent guere à ce genre d'analyse. J'examine ensuite deux élaborations positives de la thèse de l'exhaustion; et je soutiens que ni l'une ni l'autre ne commence même à montrer que la thèse en question soit explicativement adéquate. (shrink)

Are colors relational or non-relational properties of their bearers? Is red a property that is instantiated by all and only the objects with a certain intrinsic (/non-relational) nature? Or does an object with a particular intrinsic (/non-relational) nature count as red only in virtue of standing in certain relations - for example, only when it looks a certain way to a certain perceiver, or only in certain circumstances of observation? In this paper I shall argue for the view that color (...) properties are relational (henceforth, relationalism), and against the view that colors are not relational (henceforth, anti- or non-relationalism). (shrink)

If correct, Christopher Peacocke’s [20] “manifestationism without verificationism,” would explode the dichotomy between realism and inferentialism in the contemporary philosophy of language. I first explicate Peacocke’s theory, defending it from a criticism of Neil Tennant’s. This involves devising a recursive definition for grasp of logical contents along the lines Peacocke suggests. Unfortunately though, the generalized account reveals the Achilles’ heel of the whole theory. By inventing a new logical operator with the introduction rule for the existential quantifier and the elimination (...) rule for the universal quantifier, I am able to show that Peacocke’s theory only avoids verificationism to the extent that it does not satisfy manifestationism. (shrink)

Some explanations in social science, psychology and biology belong to a higher level than other explanations. And higher explanations possess the virtue of abstracting away from the details of lower explanations, many philosophers argue. As a result, these higher explanations are irreplaceable. And this suggests that there are genuine higher laws or patterns involving social, psychological and biological states. I show that this ‘abstractness argument’ is really an argument schema, not a single argument. This is because the argument uses the (...) ‘is lower than’ relation, and this relation admits of different readings. I then suggest four rigorous definitions of the ‘is lower than’ relation, and show that the abstractness argument’s prospects are much brighter for some of these definitions than for others. To show this, I evaluate the so-called ‘disjunctive threat’ to the abstractness argument. (shrink)

Many still seem confident that the kind of semantic theory Putnam once proposed for natural kind terms is right. This paper seeks to show that this confidence is misplaced because the general idea underlying the theory is incoherent. Consequently, the theory must be rejected prior to any consideration of its epistemological, ontological or metaphysical acceptability. Part I sets the stage by showing that falsehoods, indeed absurdities, follow from the theory when one deliberately suspends certain devices Putnam built into it , (...) presumably in order to block such entailments. Part II then raises the decisive issue of at what cost these devices do the job they need to do. It argues that - apart from possessing no other motivation than their capacity to block the consequences derived in Part I - they only fulfil this blocking function if they render the theory unable to deal with fiction and related 'make-believe' activities. Part III indicates the affinity Putnam's account has with the classically 'denotative' view of meaning, and thus how its weaknesses may be seen as a variant of the classical weakness of 'denotative' approaches. It concludes that the theory is a conceptual muddle. (shrink)

This paper addresses the “creeping minimalism” challenge to quasi-realist forms of expressivism by arguing that the solution suggested by Dreier doesn’t work and proposing an alternative solution based on the different inferential roles of ethical and descriptive judgments.

An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory and epistemic relativism. Mechanisms of traditional epistemic defeat and meta-epistemic defeat are compared and contrasted, and some new puzzles are introduced.

One of the deepest ideological divides in contemporary epistemology concerns the relative importance of belief versus credence. A prominent consideration in favor of credence-based epistemology is the ease with which it appears to account for rational action. In contrast, cases with risky payoff structures threaten to break the link between rational belief and rational action. This threat poses a challenge to traditional epistemology, which maintains the theoretical prominence of belief. The core problem, we suggest, is that belief may not be (...) enough to register all aspects of a subject’s epistemic position with respect to any given proposition. We claim this problem can be solved by introducing other doxastic attitudes—genuine representations—that differ in strength from belief. The resulting alternative picture, a kind of doxastic states pluralism, retains the central features of traditional epistemology—most saliently, an emphasis on truth as a kind of objective accuracy—while adequately accounting for rational action. (shrink)

In To be is to be the object of a possible act of choice the authors defended Boolos’ thesis that plural quantification is part of logic. To this purpose, plural quantification was explained in terms of plural reference, and a semantics of plural acts of choice, performed by an ideal team of agents, was introduced. In this paper, following that approach, we develop a theory of concepts that—in a sense to be explained—can be labeled as a theory of logical concepts. (...) Within this theory, we propose a new logicist approach to natural numbers. Then, we compare our logicism with Frege’s traditional logicism. (shrink)

Even though pragmatic theories of truth are not widely held, they have advantages not found elsewhere. Here I focus on one such advantage: that a pragmatic theory of truth does not limit the range of truth-apt beliefs and thereby “block the way of inquiry.” Furthermore, I argue that this speaks for a particular formulation of the pragmatic theory of truth, one that shifts away from Peircean approaches and their emphasis on temporal independence, and toward a theory that instead emphasizes truth’s (...) subject independence. (shrink)

The first half of Mark Quentin Gardiner’s recent book, Semantic Challenges to Realism: Dummett and Putnam, is a sustained, systematic, and, for the most part, novel attempt to demolish the case against semantic realism instigated by Michael Dummett. In this article I reply on the anti-realist’s be-half. I aim to demonstrate that none of Gardiner’s main anti-Dummettian arguments are successful, and moreover that his errors are, in the main, consequences of serious misconstruals of vital aspects of the semantic realist and (...) anti-realist positions. (shrink)

claims that constructive mathematics is inadequate for spacetime physics and hence that constructive mathematics cannot be considered as an alternative to classical mathematics. He also argues that the contructivist must be guilty of a form of a priorism unless she adopts a strong form of anti-realism for science. Here I want to dispute both claims. First, even if there are non-constructive results in physics this does not show that adequate constructive alternatives could not be formulated. Secondly, the constructivist adopts a (...) 'philosophy first' approach that Hellman rejects. This deep difference means that the viability of constructive mathematics cannot yet be decided by determining whether current scientific theories require classical mathematics. We need to decide which approach is most appropriate before we can even determine how we should go about deciding whether we should be constructive or classical mathematicians. (shrink)

If ethical expressivism is true, then moral judgements are motivational desire-like states and do not robustly represent reality. This gives rise to the problem of how to understand moral error. How can we be mistaken if there is no moral reality to be mistaken about? The standard expressivist explanation of moral doubt is couched in terms of our fear that our judgements may not survive improvements to our epistemic situation. There is a debate between Egan :205–219, 2007), Blackburn :201–213, 2009), (...) Köhler :161–165, 2015) and Ridge :1–21, 2015) on the adequacy of this explanation when it comes to the phenomenon of fundamental moral error. This paper is my contribution to the debate. I argue, contrary to Blackburn and Ridge, that expressivism is committed to some first-order anti-realist sounding claims, and thus quasi-realism fails. If expressivism is true, none of us can coherently believe we might be fundamentally mistaken. However, contrary to Egan and Köhler, I do not think this is bad. Expressivists can still do what motivated the project of quasi-realism in the first place: they can interpret, make sense of, and vindicate ordinary moral discourse. I end by showing it yields some positive results for moral philosophers too – it effectively amounts to a transcendental argument against unhealthy moral scepticism. (shrink)

T. W. Adorno's and Max Horkheimer'sDialectic of Enlightenmentis fifty years old. Its disconcerting darkness now seems so bound to the time of its writing, one may well wonder if we have anything to learn from it. Are its main lines of argument relevant to our social and philosophical world? Are the losses it records losses we can still recognise as our own?

Another view has entered the metaethical debate—relaxed realism [Dworkin 1996; Parfit 2011; Scanlon 2014]. Relaxed realists claim that there are irreducible moral properties, but seek to avoid the...

I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at fault, since, in their context (...) of assertion V was bivalent. This theory requires a theory of assertion that is a form of cognitive expressivism. (shrink)

Philosophers are often interested in explaining significant contrasts between ordinary descriptive discourses, on the one hand, and discourses – such as ethics, mathematics, or mentalistic discourse – that are thought to be more problematic in various ways. But certain strategies for ‘saving the differences’ can make it too difficult to preserve notable similarities across discourses. My own preference is for strategies that ‘save the differences’ without sacrificing logico-semantic continuities or committing to deflationism about truth, but also without embracing either truth-pluralism (...) or global expressivism.I motivate my preference by examining, as a test case, mentalistic discourse. I begin by reconstructing three philosophical puzzles that have led philosophers to think of mentalistic discourse as problematic (Section 2). These puzzles concern the semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical status of contrasts between first-person present-tense attributions – ‘avowals’ – and all other ordinary contingent attributions. I then briefly present my own,neo-expressiviststrategy for addressing the puzzles (Section 3). Unlike traditional ‘simple expressivism’ (which is the analogue in the mentalistic realm of ethical emotivism), neo-expressivism is not committed to avowals’ being non-truth-apt or having non-propositional meanings. And yet it does not require embracing either deflationism about truth or global expressivism. It preserves continuities between mentalistic and other discourses while allowing us to capture discontinuities. Moreover, it is possible to apply the neo-expressivist framework in other areas where the notion of expression is deemed explanatorily useful, as illustrated by consideringethical neo-expressivism(Section 4). In the final section (5), I make more general comments on truth and meaning and tease out some of the commitments of the approach I advocate. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline and defend a novel approach to alethic pluralism, the thesis that truth has more than one metaphysical nature: where truth is, in part, explained by reference, it is relational in character and can be regarded as consisting in correspondence; but where instead truth does not depend upon reference it is not relational and involves only coherence. In the process, I articulate a clear sense in which truth may or may not depend upon reference: this involves (...) distinguishing semantic denotation from pragmatic speaker reference and claiming that there may or may not exist a metasemantic connection between these two notions. Finally, I argue that reference is not in general inscrutable—that this metasemantic connection does exist in the case of our ordinary discourse about present macroscopic concrete objects—but that it is in pure mathematics, where reference cannot be secured, and which therefore plays no role in accounting for truth. In this manner, alethic pluralism is upheld. (shrink)

Philosophers are very fond of making non-factualist claims—claims to the effect that there is no fact of the matter as to whether something is the case. But can these claims be coherently stated in the context of classical logic? Some care is needed here, we argue, otherwise one ends up denying a tautology or embracing a contradiction. In the end, we think there are only two strategies available to someone who wants to be a non-factualist about something, and remain within (...) the province of classical logic. But one of these strategies is rather controversial, and the other requires substantially more work than is often supposed. Being a non-factualist is no easy business, and it may not be the most philosophically perspicuous way to go. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nature of scientific realism. I begin by considering the anomalous fact that Bas van Fraassen’s account of scientific realism is strikingly similar to Arthur Fine’s account of scientific non-realism. To resolve this puzzle, I demonstrate how the two theorists understand the nature of truth and its connection to ontology, and how that informs their conception of the realism debate. I then argue that the debate is much better captured by the theory of truthmaking, and not by (...) any particular theory of truth. To be a scientific realist is to adopt a realism-relevant account of what makes true the scientific theories one accepts. The truthmaking approach restores realism’s metaphysical core—distancing itself from linguistic conceptions of the debate—and thereby offers a better characterization of what is at stake in the question of scientific realism. (shrink)

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)

Pluralism about truth is the view that there are many properties, not just one, in virtue of which things are true. Pluralists hope to dodge the objections that face traditional monistic substantive views of truth, as well as those facing deflationary theories of truth. More specifically, pluralists hope to advance an explanatorily potent understanding of truth that can capture the subtleties of various realist and anti-realist domains of discourse, all while avoiding the scope problem. I offer a new objection to (...) pluralism that challenges its fundamental commitment to there being a set of alethic properties in virtue of which claims are true. In its place I offer an alternative view that merges standard truthmaker theory with a primitivist conception of truth. This combination of views satisfies the theoretical desires that pluralists claim for themselves, but without taking on pluralism's host of challenges and problems. (shrink)

The theory of truthmaking has long aroused skepticism from philosophers who believe it to be tangled up in contentious ontological commitments and unnecessary theoretical baggage. I argue in A Theory of Truthmaking that this suspicion is unfounded. Philosophers across the spectrum can take advantage of truthmaking, and use it to better understand the ontological implications of topics that arise all over the philosophical landscape. Challenging the current orthodoxy that truthmaking's fundamental purpose is to be a tool for explaining why truths (...) are true, the book revives the conception of truthmaking as fundamentally an exercise in ontology: a means for coordinating one's beliefs about what is true and one's ontological commitments. I go on to show how truthmaking connects to analyticity, truth, and realism, and how it contributes to debates over nominalism, presentism, mathematical objects, and fictional characters. (shrink)

I argue that there is no metaphysically substantive property of truth. Although many take this thesis to be central to deflationism about truth, it is sometimes left unclear what a metaphysically substantive property of truth is supposed to be. I offer a precise account by relying on the distinction between the property and concept of truth. Metaphysical substantivism is the view that the property of truth is a sparse property, regardless of how one understands the nature of sparse properties. I (...) then offer two new arguments against metaphysical substantivism that employ ideas involving recombination and truthmaking. First, I argue that there are no theoretically compelling reasons to posit the existence of a metaphysically substantive property of truth. Secondly, I argue that if we do posit the existence of such a property, then we end up with a view that is either contradictory or unmotivated. What we’re left with is a metaphysically deflationary account of the property of truth that fully respects the metaphysical ambitions of truthmaker theory, and that is consistent with both the view that truth is a deflated, explanatorily impotent concept and the view that truth is an explanatorily powerful concept. (shrink)

In this paper, I use an example from the history of philosophy to show how independently defining each side of a pair of contrary predicates is apt to lead to contradiction. In the Euthyphro, piety is defined as that which is loved by some of the gods while impiety is defined as that which is hated by some of the gods. Socrates points out that since the gods harbor contrary sentiments, some things are both pious and impious. But “pious” and (...) “impious” are contrary predicates; they cannot simultaneously characterize the same thing. Euthyphro changes his definition, but the problem of recognizing emotional ambivalence is only side-stepped. I go on to show how contemporary philosophers run into a similar problem. According to Prinz, something is good if and only if we harbor positive sentiments towards it and bad if and only if we harbor negative sentiments towards it. Thus, if we are ambivalent towards something (if we harbor both positive and negative sentiments towards it), then it is both good and bad. Like “pious” and “impious”, “good” and “bad” are contraries. Next, according to the fitting-attitude theory first elaborated by Brentano and favored by contemporary meta-ethicists like Blackburn, Brandt, Ewing, Garcia, Gibbard, McDowell, and Wiggins, something is good if and only if it is a fitting (appropriate) object of approbation, and something is bad if and only if it is a fitting (appropriate) object of disapprobation. I argue that moral ambivalence is sometimes appropriate, i.e., that the correct response to some things is to both love and hate them. Hence, according to the fitting-attitudes theory, some things are both good and bad. I conclude by discussing a variety of ways in which the problem of ambivalence may be solved, suggesting that attitudes of approbation and disapprobation be further individuated by the reasons for them. (shrink)

According to a subjectivist theory, normative reasons are grounded in facts about our desires. According to an instrumentalist theory, reasons are grounded also in facts about the relevant means to desired objects. These are distinct theories. The widespread tendency to conflate the normativity of subjective and instrumentalist precepts obscures two facts. First, instrumentalist precepts incorporate a subjective element with an objective one. Second, combining these elements into a single theory of normative reasons requires explaining how and why they are to (...) be combined. I argue that the most plausible justification for combining the two elements—which appeals to a theory of well‐being—exposes the inadequacy of the instrumentalist theory: The grounds required to justify the instrumentalist combination are also grounds for the normativity of prudential precepts and with them practical reasons that may have no internal connection to an agent's conative, motivational states. (shrink)

The prevailing theoretical framework for theorising about representation construes all representation as involving objective representational contents. This classic framework has tended to drive philosophers either to claim that evaluative judgements are representations and therefore objective, or else to claim that evaluative judgements are not really representations, because they are not objective. However, a more general, already well-explored framework is available, which will allow theorists to treat evaluative judgements as full-fledged representations while leaving open whether they are objective. Such a more (...) general conception of representational content is exemplified, e.g. by Lewis's ‘centred contents’ and Gibbard's framework of ‘contents of judgement’, thus it is not new. I shall start in §1 by introducing the more general framework of perspectival contents and then illustrate in §2 how awareness of it can help expose the fallaciousness of certain widely used forms of argumentation in metaethics. (shrink)

We think of logic as objective. We also think that we are reliable about logic. These views jointly generate a puzzle: How is it that we are reliable about logic? How is it that our logical beliefs match an objective domain of logical fact? This is an instance of a more general challenge to explain our reliability about a priori domains. In this paper, I argue that the nature of this challenge has not been properly understood. I explicate the challenge (...) both in general and for the particular case of logic. I also argue that two seemingly attractive responses – appealing to a faculty of rational insight or to the nature of concept possession – are incapable of answering the challenge. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of various forms of alethic pluralism. Along the way we will draw a number of distinctions that, hopefully, will be useful in mapping the pluralist landscape. Finally, we will argue that a commitment to alethic disjunctivism, a certain brand of pluralism, might be difficult to avoid for adherents of the other pluralist views to be discussed. We will proceed as follows: Section 1 introduces alethic monism and alethic pluralism. Section 2 (...) presents a distinction between strong and moderate versions of monism and pluralism, understood as theses about the existence of truth properties. Section 3 introduces four pluralist positions: strong alethic pluralism, alethic disjunctivism, second-order functionalism and manifestation functionalism. These positions are classified using the basic framework from Section 2, and a further distinction between pure and mixed versions of pluralism is drawn. Interestingly, alethic disjunctivism and the two kinds of functionalism—i.e. three out of four positions— have a mixed character. They incorporate a monist thesis. The only pure form of pluralism is strong alethic pluralism. Section 4 adds another distinction to the stock: one-level and two-level views. Each of the mixed positions operates with two levels, locating certain “alethically potent”—or grounding—properties at a lower level and others at a higher level. We briefly discuss the nature of grounding. In Section 5, we answer a question about mixed, two-level views, viz. whether they are as much monist as pluralist in nature, or more. They are not. Section 6 is devoted to the task of arguing that the strong pluralist, the second-order functionalist, and the manifestation functionalist will find it hard to deny a commitment to alethic disjunctivism. (shrink)

Traditional inflationary approaches that specify the nature of truth are attractive in certain ways; yet, while many of these theories successfully explain why propositions in certain domains of discourse are true, they fail to adequately specify the nature of truth because they run up against counterexamples when attempting to generalize across all domains. One popular consequence is skepticism about the efficaciousness of inflationary approaches altogether. Yet, by recognizing that the failure to explain the truth of disparate propositions often stems from (...) inflationary approaches' allegiance to alethic monism, pluralist approaches are able to avoid this explanatory inadequacy and the resulting skepticism, though at the cost of inviting other conceptual difficulties. A novel approach, alethic functionalism, attempts to circumvent the problems faced by pluralist approaches while preserving their main insights. Unfortunately, it too generates additional problems---namely, with its suspect appropriation of the multiple realizability paradigm and its platitude-based strategy---that need to be dissolved before it can constitute an adequate inflationary approach to the nature of truth. (shrink)

Moral disagreement has long been thought to create serious problems for certain views in metaethics. More specifically, moral disagreement has been thought to pose problems for any metaethical view that rejects relativism—that is, for any view that implies that whenever two thinkers disagree about a moral question, at least one of those thinkers’ beliefs about the question is not correct. In this essay, I shall outline a solution to one of these problems. As I shall argue, it turns out in (...) the end that this problem is not really a special problem about moral disagreement at all: it is a general problem about disagreement as such. For this reason, in the later sections of this essay, I shall turn to some general questions in epistemology, about the epistemic significance of disagreement. (shrink)

For the last 40 years or so the is/ought gap, the fact/value distinction and the naturalistic fallacy have figured prominently in ethical debates. This longevity, however, has had an adverse side effect. So familiar have they become that they—and their respective rationales—have tended to become blurred. It is the purpose of this paper to explain why they should be kept distinct.

In a blurb on the dust jacket, Hilary Putnam describes Barry Allen'sTruth in Philosophyas “a good, provocative, and important book” discussing issues of “common concern to both analytic and continental philosophers.” Yet Putnam admits that Allen's views “are ones that I myself am committed to combating and … I am certain most analytic philosophers will want to combat.” All the more reason to read this book, of course: know your enemy. Since Rorty clarified recent European philosophy for us in the (...) 1980s, we have seen the continuing political transformation of what used to be an abstract, purely academic domain. Indeed, in his last chapter, Allen connects truth with politics in his discussion of Foucault:The production and circulation of truth is as capable of complicity with tyranny, and all the more so with tutelage, as any instrument of government, and its products do not have tobe falseto have this effect.… Truth is inextricably situated amid all the major asymmetries of social power, (p. 173)Foucault challenges the assumption of many that in liberal democracies (of which Putnam, after his youthful excesses, must consider himself a defender) truth and freedom need each other. (shrink)