In this book, Scott Soames illuminates the notion of truth and the role it plays in our ordinary thought as well as in our logical, philosophical, and scientific theories. Soames aims to integrate and deepen the most significant insights on truth from a variety of sources. He powerfully brings together the best technical work and the most important philosophical reflection on truth and shows how each can illuminate the other. Investigating such questions as whether we need a truth predicate at (...) all, what theoretical tasks it allows us to accomplish, and how we are to understand the content of any predicate capable of accomplishing these tasks, Soames organizes his discussion into three parts. Part I addresses crucial foundational issues as it identifies the bearers of truth, provides a basis for distinguishing truth from other notions, and formulates positive responses to well-known forms of truth-skepticism. Part II explicates the formal theories of Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke and evaluates the philosophical significance of their work. It discusses their treatments of the Liar paradox, the relationship between truth and proof, the notion of a partially defined predicate, the concepts of logical truth and logical consequence, and the connection between truth and meaning. Part III extends important lessons drawn from Tarski and Kripke into new domains: vague predicates, the Sorites paradox, and the development of a larger, deflationary perspective on truth. Throughout the book, Soames examines a wide range of deflationary theories of truth, and attempts to separate what is correct and worth preserving in them from what is not. In doing so, he seeks to clear up many of the most significant philosophical doubts about truth. Written for a general audience while offering engaging material to the specialist, this rich study will be profitably read by both. (shrink)

Written by a distinguished roster of philosophers, this volume includes chapters on truth and meaning; the philosophy of action; radical interpretation; philosophical psychology; knowledge of the external world; other minds and our own minds; and the implications of Davidson's work for literary theory. Donald Davidson has been one of the most influential figures in modern analytic philosophy and has made significant contributions to a wide range of subjects. Embodied in a series of landmark essays stretching over nearly 40 years, his (...) principal work exhibits a unity rare among philosophers contributing on so many diverse fronts. Kirk Ludwig, the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has taught at the University of Florida's Department of Philosophy since 1995. His areas of research specialization include philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. He has contributed chapters to a number of volumes on these topics as well as published articles in Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Mind and Language, and elsewhere. (shrink)

Michael Dummett; VIII.—Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 141–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/59.1.

What is truth. Paul Horwich advocates the controversial theory of minimalism, that is that the nature of truth is entirely captured in the trivial fact that each proposition specifies its own condition for being true, and that truth is therefore an entirely mundane and unpuzzling concept. The first edition of Truth, published in 1980, established itself as the best account of minimalism and as an excellent introduction to the debate for students. For this new edition, Horwich has refined and developed (...) his treatment of the subject in the light of subsequent discussions, while preserving the distinctive format that made the earlier edition so successful. (shrink)

Such a conception, says Dummett, will form "a base camp for an assault on the metaphysical peaks: I have no greater ambition in this book than to set up a base ...

You are, I suspect, exceedingly good at knowing what you intend to do. In saying this I pay you no special compliment. Knowing what one intends is the normal state to be in. And this cries out for some explanation. How is it that we are so authoritative about our own intentions? There are two different approaches that one can take in answering this question. The first credits us with special perceptual powers which we use when we examine our own (...) minds. On this view we detect our own mental states in much the same way that we detect the state of the world around us; but the powers we direct inward are much less prone t o error than those we direct outwards. The alternative approach denies that there is such a thing as inward perception. On this view the whole idea the we detect our own mental states using some kind of internal perceptual apparatus is misguided; a wholly different account is needed. (shrink)

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where (...) accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. -/- At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one’s own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are. (shrink)

Michael Dummett; VIII.—Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 141–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/59.1.

Controversy has arisen of late over the claim that deflationism about truth requires that we explain meaning in terms of something other than truth-conditions. This controversy, it is argued, is due to unclarity as to whether the basic deflationary claim that a sentence and a sentence that attributes truth to it are equivalent in meaning is intended to involve the truth- predicate of the object language for which we develop an account of meaning, or is intended to involve the truth- (...) predicate of the metalanguage in which we develop an account of meaning. The former view is compatible with the truth-conditional theory of meaning for the object language, the latter is incompatible with it. However, the former view is also trivially true; hence we should endorse the claim that any form of deflationism worth being interested in is incompatible with understanding meaning truth-conditionally. (shrink)

The mainstream view in the philosophy of language holds that every meaningful sentence has a truth-condition. This view, however, runs into difficulties with non-objective sentences such as sentences on matters of taste or value: these do not appear to be either true or false, but are generally taken to be meaningful. How can this conflict be resolved? -/- Truth Without Objectivity examines various ways of resolving this fundamental problem, before developing and defending its own original solution, a relativist theory of (...) truth. Standard solutions maintain either that in uttering non-objective sentences speakers make implicit reference to their own preferences and thus have unproblematic truth conditions, or that they have no truth conditions at all. Max Kölbel argues that both of these proposed solutions are inadequate, and that a third well-known position, minimalism, can only solve the problem if it is developed in the direction of relativism about truth. -/- Kölbel defends the idea that truth (as invoked in semantics) is a neutral notion: a sentence’s possessing a truth condition does not yet entail that it concerns an objective subject matter, because truth and objectivity are independent of one another. He argues that this notion of ‘truth without objectivity’ leads directly to relativism about truth, and goes on to defend one form of relativism against well-known objections. (shrink)

Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present the definitive critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson. Davidson 's ideas had a deep and broad influence in the central areas of philosophy; he presented them in brilliant essays over four decades, but never set out explicitly the overarching scheme in which they all have their place. Lepore's and Ludwig's book will therefore be the key work, besides Davidson 's own, for understanding one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.

This second edition of the book contains a new chapter on the notions of natural-kind words and natural kinds.

They reject the correspondence theory, insist truth is anemic, and advance an "anti-theory" of truth that is essentially a collection of platitudes: "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white; "Grass is green" is true if and only if grass is green. According to disquotationalists, the only profound insight about truth is that it lacks profundity. David contrasts the correspondence theory with disquotationalism and then develops the latter position in rich detail - more than has been (...) available in previous literature - to show its faults. (shrink)

The paper addresses itself to the "Homeric struggle" in the theory of meaning between those (e.g., Grice) who try to analyze declarative meaning in terms of an intention to induce a belief and those (e.g., Davidson) for who declarative meaning consists in truth conditions. (The point of departure is Strawson's celebrated discussion of this issue, in his Inaugural Lecture.) I argue that neither style of analysis is satisfactory, and develop a "hybrid" that may be-although what I take from the Gricean (...) side in the struggle is not the notion of an intention, but that of somebody's reason for speaking as he does. The paper applies the hybrid analysis to resolve certain problems connected with the rationale for compositional, truth-theoretic semantics. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the major contributions of Donald Davidson to philosophy in the 20th century.

For the claim that the satisfaction of certain conditions is sufficient for the application of some concept to serve as part of the (`reductive') analysis of that concept, we require the conditions to be specified without employing that very concept. An account of the application conditions of a concept not meeting this requirement, we call analytically circular. For such a claim to be usable in determining the extension of the concept, however, such circularity may not matter, since if the concept (...) figures in a certain kind of intensional context in the specification of the conditions, the satisfaction of those conditions may not itself depend on the extension of the concept. We put this by saying that although analytically circular, the account may yet not be inferentially circular. (shrink)

Michael Dummett; VIII.—Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 141–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/59.1.

Is truth a substantial feature of truth-bearers? Correspondence theorists answer in the affirmative, deflationists in the negative. Correspondence theorists cite in their defense the dependence of truth on meaning or representational content. Deflationists in turn cite the conceptual centrality of simple equivalences such as ''Snow is white' is true iff snow is white'' and 'It is true that snow is white iff snow is white'. The apparent facts to which these theorists appeal correspond to some of our firmest and most (...) basic convictions about truth. An account of truth that fails to accommodate either sort of apparent fact is inadequate. The account presented in this essay attempts to avoid this inadequacy by 'deflating' truth for propositions but 'inflating' truth for entities that express propositions, thus drawing from the insights of both deflationists and correspondence theorists. (shrink)