This book addresses the contemporary disillusion with truth, manifest in sceptical relativism. Contending that all contemporary theories of truth are too narrow, it argues for a novel conception of truth, by showing how error is implicated in the actions of all living things; and by analyzing uses of 'true' in non-linguistic contexts.

This paper offers a reading of Hartmann’s philosophy of literature from the perspective of contemporary aesthetics. In particular, I focus on his defense of the truth-value of literary works. After outlining the main concern of the paper (sect. 1), I place Hartmann’s view within the context of current aesthetic cognitivism (sect. 2). In the following three sections, I discuss Hartmann’s account, examining his critique of the thesis that literature is cognitively valuable because it transmits factual truths (sect. 3); his (...) defense of the view that literature discloses life (sect. 4); and the link between cognitive value and the ontology of the literary work (sect. 5). Finally, I discuss Hartmann’s focus on the concept of “truth” in the light of recent debates on knowledge of “what it is like” and on “understanding” (sect. 6). (shrink)

Alfred Tarski’s work on truth has played such a central role in the discourse on truth that most coming to it for the first time have probably already heard a great deal about what is said there. Unfortunately, since the work is largely technical and Tarski was only tan- gentially philosophical, a certain incautious assimilation dominates many philosophical discussions of Tarski’s ideas, and so, examining Tarski on the concept of truth is in many ways an act (...) of unlearning. -/- In this paper I focus on those key ideas in Tarski’s work that have made a lasting impact on the philosophical discourse. These are the notions of T-sentence, Convention T, Tarskian truth definition, and Tarski’s general limiting theses on the expressibility and definability of truth. Though these ideas are in name familiar, we will seek in this essay to uncover and remove certain widespread misunderstandings of each. Tarski’s name also features prominently in discussions of the liar paradox, so we will take time out to explain Tarski’s connection to this ancient puzzle. (shrink)

Truth is one of the most debated topics in philosophy; Wolfgang Kunne presents a comprehensive critical examination of all major theories, from Aristotle to the present day. He argues that it is possible to give a satisfactory 'modest' account of truth without invoking problematic notions like correspondence, fact, or meaning. The clarity of exposition and the wealth of examples will make Conceptions of Truth an invaluable and stimulating guide for advanced students and scholars.

Review on Realist conception of Truth, of the W. P. Alston.

In this paper I argue, contrary to Chad Hansen’s view , that pre-Han 漢 Chinese philosophy has the semantic concept of truth. Hansen argues that, first, pre-Han Chinese thinkers do not have motivations to introduce the concept of truth in their philosophy due to their peculiar theory of language; second, the concept does not fit well with philosophical texts at that time, and in particular, the Mozi 墨子 text about the three standards of doctrine. However, (...) I argue that Chinese thinkers indeed have reasons to introduce the concept of truth. Hansen’s reading of the three standards of doctrine takes the standards as standards of correct word use, thus attributing to the authors of the Mozi an understanding of yan 言 as something without complete propositional content. However, I argue, a reading that sees the three standards as standards for something with complete propositional content explains better the passages in which the authors apply the standards to various issues. Finally I argue that the term ran 然 is sometimes used as a truth predicate in classical Chinese texts, because it has several important features identical to that of the truth predicate “is true” in English. (shrink)

A familiar form of alethic pluralism is built on the view that while there is a single concept of truth, there are multiple properties associated with it. A newer form of alethic pluralism develops the view that there are multiple concepts of truth. Importantly, this form of pluralism has been offered an empirical footing, notably in the work of Barnard and Ulatowski, Mizumoto, and Wyatt. My paper offers a critical appraisal of that project: while the appeal to (...) empirical data is a welcome addition to the philosophy of truth, I doubt that it supports conceptual pluralism. First, I argue that there are severe challenges involved in the very formulation of conceptual pluralism about truth: it risks being an incoherent thesis. Once that problem is addressed, I review the empirical data that have been associated with the thesis, and argue that the evidence points not toward a plurality of truth concepts but rather a plurality of theories about truth. (shrink)

Based on the writings of D.S. Kothari; includes his brief biographical sketch and review of his four books.

A transformed idea of truth is central to the project of reformational philosophy. This essay lays groundwork for such an idea by proposing a critical retrieval of Herman Dooyeweerd’s conception of truth. First it summarizes relevant passages in Dooyeweerd’s New Critique. Then it demonstrates several problems in his conception: he misconstrues religious truth, misconceives its relation to theoretical truth, and overlooks central questions of epistemology and truth theory. By addressing these problems, reformational philosophers can find (...) new ways to think about truth that retain the holism, normativity, and radicalness of Dooyeweerd’s conception. [T]he decisive blow against the idea of religiously neutral philosophy must be delivered on the field of the problem of truth… The postulate of neutrality always stands and falls with an idea of truth that takes theoretical truth to be self-sufficient. (shrink)

The model theoretic concept of truth has thus far been applied mainly to mathematical languages and theories. The paper presents an attempt to apply it to languages of empirical theories. Such an application must do justice to some characteristic features of empirical discourse. The paper outlines the main problems which a model theoretic theory of truth for empirical languages is bound to face and suggests some solutions to those problems.

This paper aims to shed light upon an understanding of the concept of truth in Gorgias, a 5th century BC sophist or rhetorician. Traditionally it has been suggested that Gorgias weighs on a type of logical validity on the grounds of endoxa in order to achieve persuasion in his speeches. It is doubtless that Gorgias, for instance in Encomium of Helen, emphasising the role of truth in a speech, indeed admits that an active agent must be blamed (...) if the agent really yields an blamable event, and constructs his argument on the basis of such a common endoxa. However, for the success of persuasion by truth, Gorgias do not only rely on an endoxa for the logical validity, but also on appeal to the nature of things or events. Gorgias in the speech articulates that a naturally stronger thing must rule and a naturally weaker thing must be ruled, and also emphasises that the lineage of Helen and her physical beauty by nature surpass those of ordinary people. These points in his argumentation are the validating factors to rescue Helen from the traditional blame and to praise her as well; yet, they are not what can be proven by logical validity but justified only by their nature. In this respect, concerning the concept of truth for the success of persuasion does Gorgias utilise not only logical validity but also justification by correspondence to the nature of things. (shrink)

I argue that in Plato's _Sophist, the account of true and false statement which emerges within the discussion of not being and falsehood neither entails nor outwardly suggests any of the traditional characterizations of a correspondence "theory" of truth. On the contrary, what emerges is a minimalistic "conception" of truth which requires neither positing the existence of facts nor formulating an explanatory definition of truth. I make comparisons with Aristotle's discussion of truth in the _Categories and (...) _De Interpretatione, and I offer reasons why one should not expect to find the emergence of a "theory" of truth in the _Sophist. (shrink)

Book Information Conceptions of Truth. Conceptions of Truth Wolfgang Künne , Oxford : Clarendon Press , 2003 , xiii + 493 , £50.00 ( cloth ) By Wolfgang Künne. Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. xiii + 493. £50.00 (cloth:).

In this paper on Karl Barth's conception of truth I shall try to state his position regarding the nature of truth and the criterion of truth, and secondly I shall draw from his position some propositions which I believe exhibit a pattern in his theology which brings it into close relationship to a philosophical tradition.

The article discusses the concept of truth in social sciences. Based upon Leibniz’s sufficient reason principle, it is proposed three stadiums of the principle of sufficient reasons: ontological, epistemological and existential, which in turn allow three versions of the concept of truth in the social sciences. El artículo discute el concepto de verdad en las ciencias sociales. Basado en el principio de razón suficiente de Leibniz, se proponen tres estadios del principio de razón suficiente: ontológico, epistemológico (...) y existencial, los cuales permiten entender tres versiones del concepto de verdad en las ciencias sociales. (shrink)

This chapter reviews Davidson's main work on truth. It focuses on the connections between truth, meaning, and interpretation that form the core of Davidson's views, and on the relations of his views to traditional theories of truth. It highlights several key ideas that comprise Davidson's approach to truth: Tarski's work on truth is fundamental to understanding the concept, as is the relation of truth to meaning, and we fail to understand that connection adequately (...) unless we take into account the constraints of radical interpretation. Furthermore, in understanding those connections, we see that truth is not a redundant or trivial concept, but equally, it is not a locus for metaphysical commitments. (shrink)

Following Hartry Field in distinguishing disquotational truth from a conception that grounds truth conditions in a community's usage, it is argued that the notions are materially inequivalent (since the latter allows truth-value gaps) and that both are needed. In addition to allowing blanket endorsements ("Everything the Pope says is true"), disquotational truth facilitates mathematical discovery, as when we establish the Gödel sentence by noting that the theorems are all disquotationally true and the disquotational truths are consistent. (...) We require a more substantial notion, however, if we intend to use truth values and truth conditions in explaining communication by language. (shrink)

The identity conception of truth holds that a thinkable is true just in case it is a fact. As such, it sets itself against correspondence theories of truth, while respecting the substantive role played by truth in respect of enquiry. In this article, I motivate and develop that view, and, in so doing, promote a particular conception of sense. This allows me to defend the view from two substantial criticisms. First, that the identity conception of truth (...) is incoherent in respect of its treatment of objects in the realm of reference, and, second, that it is committed to a view of the world in which ordinary objects have no place. (shrink)

The purpose Tarski speaks of is "to do justice to our intuitions which adhere to the classical Aristotelian conception of truth." Tarski takes this to be some form of correspondence theory. He has earlier considered and rejected an even less satisfactory formula of this sort: 'a sentence is true if it corresponds to reality'. His own semantic conception of truth is meant to be a more precise variant doing justice to the correspondence standpoint. In this spirit I shall (...) presently suggest a revised version of. (shrink)

Given Heidegger’s inflammatory remarks about the intellectual poverty of modern logic, it may come as a surprise to be told that he has something to contribute to the philosophy of logic. One of the rewards of Daniel Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth is its argument that Heidegger can illuminate such issues in the philosophy of logic as the character of propositions, the nature of bivalence, and the concept of truth. Dahlstrom focuses on Heidegger’s work in the (...) years immediately before and after the publication of Being and Time, with particular emphasis on the lecture courses from this period, especially the one published as Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. (shrink)

It is stated that husserl's theory of truth is ambiguous. When husserl attacked psychological interpretations of truth, A logicism seemed to be predominant; later he inclined toward intuitionism, Where truth is constituted by the real presence of the object. Purely logical relations in an eternal order of truth, Independent of things, Seems to conflict with the idea of evidence, Which is a psychological experience. It is concluded that truth is the result of an intuition in (...) which the thing itself is given. Finally, Parallels are drawn between husserl's double truth and leibniz's truths of reason and truths of fact. (staff). (shrink)

We sketch an account according to which the semantic concepts themselves are not pathological and the pathologies that attend the semantic predicates arise because of the intention to impose on them a role they cannot fulfill, that of expressing semantic concepts for a language that includes them. We provide a simplified model of the account and argue in its light that (i) a consequence is that our meaning intentions are unsuccessful, and such semantic predicates fail to express any concept, (...) and that (ii) in light of this it is incorrect to characterize the pathology simply as semantic inconsistency; a more nuanced view of the problem is needed. We also show that the defects of the semantic predicates need not undercut the use of a truth theory in a compositional semantics for a language containing them because the meaning theory per se need not involve commitment to the axioms of the truth theory it exploits. (shrink)

Alston begins his exposition of the realist conception of truth in chapter 1 with a roughly Aristotelian formulation: “A statement is true if and only if what the statement says to be the case actually is the case”. This condition has the drawback that it defines truth via illocutionary acts; yet, as Alston argues, propositions are the most basic truth-bearers. Alston therefore turns to the universalized T-schema for a condition that characterizes the truth of propositions without (...) mentioning illocutionary acts: “ The proposition that p is true iff p”, where “” is a substitutional rather than objectual quantifier over propositions. Later Alston avers that this account of truth is equivalent to another that is overtly realist in characterizing truth in terms of facts, a minimalist correspondence theory: “ The proposition that p is true iff it is a fact that p”. (shrink)

Wolfgang Künne's Conceptions of Truth (2003) is a magnificent achievement. Wonderfully clear, erudite, compendious, honest and insightful on some very tricky issues – these are some of its many virtues. I have benefited a great deal from studying it. In this short note, I will concentrate on Künne's own positive proposal about the concept of truth, his modestly named ‘Modest Account’. I will raise some questions about its ultimate viability.

In this paper the authors recapitulate, justify, and defend against criticism the extension of the redundancy theory of truth to cover a wide range of uses of ‘true’ and ‘false’. In this they are guided by the work of A. N. Prior. They argue Prior was right about the scope and limits of the redundancy theory and that the line he drew between those uses of ‘true’ which are and are not susceptible to treatment via redundancy serves to distinguish (...) two important and mutually irreducible types of truth: redundancy truth and predicative truth. Only the latter serves for semantic theorizing. (shrink)

In this essay, I will examine Henri Maldiney’s phenomenological aesthetics, focusing on his claim that “art is the truth of the sensible.” This claim is presented by Maldiney in the context of a two-fold critique of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective attempts to phenomenologically elucidate the experience of artworks. According to Maldiney, both Husserl and Heidegger fail to recognize what he, following Erwin Straus, terms the “pathic” moment of sense experience, which is also the key moment of the aesthetic reception (...) of art. Drawing on this concept of the pathic and its way of engaging what Maldiney calls the “transpassibility” of receptivity, I argue that his phenomenology of art can be viewed as an attempt to bring together the two senses of the aesthetic in the Kantian sense, namely as an aesthetics of sense experience and as an aesthetics of art, from within the domain of sensibility itself. I develop this idea by turning to Maldiney’s notion of rhythm and examining how he thinks that it can be applied to the visual arts. Ultimately, I suggest that Maldiney’s aesthetics imbues art with ontological significance, since he takes the rhythmic presence of artworks to be a sensuous manifestation of the rhythmic ground of the world’s constitution. The truth of art, in this sense, is a revelation of the ontological functioning of rhythm. (shrink)

Intuitionism’s disagreement with classical logic is standardly based on its specific understanding of truth. But different intuitionists have actually explicated the notion of truth in fundamentally different ways. These are considered systematically and separately, and evaluated critically. It is argued that each account faces difficult problems. They all either have implausible consequences or are viciously circular.

In the paper the problem of definability and undefinability of the concept of satisfaction and truth is considered. Connections between satisfaction and truth on the one hand and consistency of certain systems of omega-logic and transfinite induction on the other are indicated.

On the basis of elementary thinking about language functioning, a solution of truth paradoxes is given and a corresponding semantics of a truth predicate is founded. It is shown that it is precisely the two-valued description of the maximal intrinsic fixed point of the strong Kleene three-valued semantics.

The object reading of Frege's conception of truth holds that, for him, truth is an object---the truth-value the True. Greimann rejects the object reading and suggests an alternative reading. According to his suggested reading, Frege is the proponent of the assertion theory of truth the main thesis of which is that truth is what is expressed by the form of assertoric sentences and truth as such is neither an object nor a property. I argue (...) that Frege cannot accept the assertion theory. I also defend the object reading by elaborating it further and replying to Greimann's criticisms. (shrink)

This essay traces the evolution of the pragmatist elements in Wiggins's distinctive view of truth and shows its connections to the founder of pragmatism, C.S. Peirce and one of Peirce's greatest successors, F.P. Ramsey. Wiggin's pragmatism, like that of Peirce and Ramsey, is a pragmatism that attempts to arrive at what Wiggins calls ‘a sensible subjectivism’ – an account of truth that respects both the human inventiveness and the objectivity that are each a part of our search for (...) the truth. (shrink)