Is truth a normative concept?

Synthese 195 (3):1127-1138 (2018)
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Abstract

My answer will be ‘no’. And I’ll defend it by: distinguishing a concept’s having normative import from its being functionally normative; sketching a method for telling whether or not a concept is of the latter sort; responding to the antideflationist, Dummettian argument in favor of the conclusion that truth is functionally normative; proceeding to address a less familiar route to that conclusion—one that’s consistent with deflationism about truth, but that depends on the further assumption that meaning is intrinsically normative; and arguing that this further assumption is mistaken.

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Paul Horwich
New York University

Citations of this work

Invariance as a basis for necessity and laws.Gila Sher - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3945-3974.
Pluralism and Normativity in Truth and Logic.Gila Sher - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (4):337-350.
Deflating truth about taste.Filippo Ferrari & Sebastiano Moruzzi - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (4):389-402.

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References found in this work

Truth and objectivity.Crispin Wright - 1992 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Truth.Paul Horwich - 1990 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press. Edited by Frank Jackson & Michael Smith.
Making it Explicit.Isaac Levi & Robert B. Brandom - 1994 - Journal of Philosophy 93 (3):145.
Wittgenstein on rules and private language.Saul Kripke - 1982 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 173 (4):496-499.
Truth.Paul Horwich - 2005 - In Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 261-272.

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