We give a precis of our book Insensitive Semantics.

In this paper, I give a metaphilosophical analysis of the core idea of deflationism by discussing some basic conceptual and methodological issues involved in the debate between deflationism and substantivism. In so doing, I argue for three positive points. First, the crux of the dispute between deflationism and substantivism is whether or not truth is substantive in its metaphysical nature and in its explanatory role in philosophical enterprises, rather than whether or not a minimal approach regarding conceptual resources is taken (...) to explain truth; a minimal approach itself is philosophically innocent. Second, there is no intrinsic connection between the core idea of deflationism and the Tarski-style equivalence thesis, which is often identified as implying or supporting the former. Third, there are some unbridged fundamental gaps between the core idea of deflationism and various redundancy theses; these redundancy theses cannot be identified as the former, nor can they be used to justify the former on their own. (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive introduction to the major philosophical theories attempting to explain the workings of language.

The criterion of truth is the measure of the truthfulness and reliability of our knowledge. It is also the basis for determining the correctness of our concepts and how much our perceptions, ideas, and concepts accord with objective reality. Idealism holds to the idea that the criterion of truth does not involve the integration between theory as created by human intelligence and objective reality, but rather that the criterion of truth involves the "clarity and correctness" of perception, viewpoints, and concepts (...) by the subject. For instance, the Machists 1 think that the criterion of truth is experience, however, they neither interpret experience from a materialistic viewpoint, nor view experience as the result of humans interacting with nature as they reform it. The Machists view experience as a summary of perceptions and as the subjective experience of humans. In this sense, perception must be tested by perception itself. In attempting to escape the trap of solipsism , they proposed "collective experience" as the criterion of truth. According to such a view, anything that involves "common significance," that is, anything acknowledged by everyone, is the truth. Lenin exposed the absurdity of idealist theory by pointing out that by following the view of "socially formed experience" it is very easy to consider as normal the most absurd and farcical notions, such as ghosts, for such beliefs are also a form of human "experience." Religion also possesses a "common significance," for innumerable people believe in ghosts and miracles, etc. Nevertheless, religion does not become the truth because of this. The concept of the "criterion of truth" held by the Machists played a dominant role in modern bourgeois philosophy. Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, along with other reactionaries in philosophy all denied scientific criteria. They would rather that the masses remain ignorant of how to understand and determine the truth. (shrink)

Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

1. 1. PROGRAM It will be our aim to reconstruct, with precision, certain views which have been traditionally associated with nominalism and to investigate problems arising from these views in the construction of interpreted formal systems. Several such systems are developed in accordance with the demand that the sentences of a system which is acceptable to a nominalist must not imply the existence of any entities other than individuals. Emphasis will be placed on the constructionist method of philosophical analysis. To (...) follow this method is to introduce the central notions of the subject-matter to be investigated into a system governed by exact rules. For example, the constructionist method of investigating the properties of geometric figures may consist in formulating a system of postulates and definitions which, together with the apparatus of formal logic, generates all necessary truths concerning geometric figures. Similarly, a constructionist analysis of the notion of an individual may take the form of an axiomatic theory whose provable assertions are just those which seem essential to the role played by the concept of an individual in system atic contexts. Such axiomatic theories gain in interest if they are supple mented by precise semantical rules specifying the denotation of all terms and the truth conditions of all sentences of the theory. (shrink)

Many topics have not been covered, in most cases because I don't know quite what to say about them. Would it be possible to add a decidability predicate to the language? What about stronger connectives, like exclusion negation or Lukasiewicz implication? Would an expanded language do better at expressing its own semantics? Would it contain new and more terrible paradoxes? Can the account be supplemented with a workable notion of inherent truth (see note 36)? In what sense does stage semantics (...) lie “between” fixed point and stability semantics? In what sense, exactly, are our semantical rules inconsistent? In what sense, if any, does their inconsistency resolve the problem of the paradoxes?The ideals of strength, grounding, and closure together define an intuitively appealing conception of truth. Nothing would be gained by insisting that it was the intuitive conception of truth, and in fact recent developments make me wonder whether such a thing exists. However that may be, until the alternatives are better understood it would be foolish to attempt to decide between them. Truth gives up her secrets slowly and grudgingly, and loves to confound our presumptions. (shrink)

I INTRODUCTION - THE TOPIC EXPLAINED 1 GENERAL DIFFERENCES From its inception to the present, philosophy may be viewed as a series of struggles between ...

412 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY There are theories that try, in my opinion unsuccessfully, to do just this. Tarski's theory, which restricts itself to cases in which truth is predicated of sentences of certain formal languages, is not one of them. Thus, Tarski cannot be seen.

In this paper we show that first-order languages extended with partially ordered connectives and partially ordered quantifiers define, under a certain interpretation, their own truth-predicate. The interpretation in question is in terms of games of imperfect information. This result is compared with those of Kripke and Feferman.

Classic work by one of the most brilliant figures in post-war analytic philosophy.

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)

Whereas the relationship between truth and propositional content has already been intensively investigated, there are only very few studies devoted to the task of illuminating the relationship between truth and illocutionary acts. This book fills that gap. This innovative collection addresses such themes as: the relation between the concept of truth and the success conditions of assertions and kindred speech acts the linguistic devices of expressing the truth of a proposition the relation between predication and truth.

Since the publication of Hartry Field’s influential paper “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” there has been an ongoing discussion about the philosophical import of Tarski’s definition. Most of the arguments have aimed to play down that import, starting with that of Field himself. He interpreted Tarski as trying to provide a physicalistic reduction of semantic concepts like truth, and concluded that Tarski had partially failed. Robert Stalnaker and Scott Soames claimed then that Field should have obtained a stronger conclusion, namely that (...) Tarski’s failure in his allegedly intended physicalistic reduction was total. From another front, Hilary Putnam argued for an even more sweeping thesis: “[a]s a philosophical account of truth, Tarski’s theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.” Scott Soames followed suit also on this count, endorsing Putnam’s argument in section iii of the aforementioned paper; and John Etchemendy used a very similar argument to contend that “a Tarskian definition of truth [...] cannot possibly illuminate the semantic properties of the object language.” The paper argues that these contentions are based on several misunderstandings about the nature of a definition like Tarski’s. Regarding the Putnam-Soames-Etchemendy argument, we must apply a distinction Frege found natural to draw—and is natural to draw anyway—between what he called “constructive” definitions, definitions properly so called, which are mere stipulations, and what he described as “analytic” definitions, definitions which aim to make explicit the meaning of a term already in use. Regarding the Field-Soames-Stalnaker criticism, the paper contends that the true aims of a Tarskian truth definition are perfectly well fulfilled without Field’s amendments. (shrink)

A correspondence theory of truth explains truth in terms of various correspondence relations (e.G., Reference) between words and the extralinguistic world. What are the consequences of quine's doctrine of indeterminacy for correspondence theories? in "ontological relativity" quine implicitly claims that correspondence theories are impossible; that is what the doctrine of 'relative reference' amounts to. But quine's doctrine of relative reference is incoherent. Those who think the indeterminacy thesis valid should not try to relativize reference, They should abandon the relation and (...) replace it by certain more general correspondence relations between words and extralinguistic objects. Doing so will not interfere with the task of defining truth in terms of correspondence relations. (shrink)