Book Symposium: Truth as One and Many

2016

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common 'pluralizing tendency' with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here.

Philosophical Books, 2005

Few of us will deny that if a person believes something false, then she is wrong or mistaken, and that if a person believes something true, she is right. If someone believes that p, and < p> is true, then she is right about whether p; and if someone believes that p, and <p> is false, then she is wrong about whether p.

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common " pluralizing tendency " with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here.

The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42, 2012

According to deflationism, truth has no substantial nature. In contrast, Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch have argued that truth has a normative nature, and, moreover, if it is has a normative nature, it must have a further underlying substantial nature capable of explaining this normative nature. In this paper, I argue for the plausibility of an alternative: that truth has a normative nature without having any further underlying substantial nature. Thus, while I contend for a “maniacal” pluralism about the underlying truth-constituting properties of truth- bearers that is consonant with deflationism, I suggest truth may have a normative nature nonetheless. Furthermore, in arguing for the plausibility of this, the dual aspects theory of truth, I simultaneously advocate for cognitive particularism, the view that the fundamental explanations for cognitive norms are particular to the content-types of belief rather than stemming, more generally, from the nature of belief and truth alone.

The Normative and the Natural, 2016

If, as we argue, normative claims don’t describe the world, then in what sense can they be true? Many philosophers have offered what we call substantive theories of truth. For example, on a correspondence theory of truth, to say, “It is true that roses are red” is to assert some relationship of correspondence between “roses are red” and the world: the sentence is true just in case it corresponds to the way the world really is. We argue that these substantive theories have fatal weaknesses. Instead, we endorse a range of ‘low cost’ theories of truth—anaphoric, minimalist, disquotational, and a few others. Low cost theories of truth do not give a substantive theory of truth as above. We argue that low-cost theories are preferable to substantive theories, in that they do not introduce some troublesome relation between a sentence and the world. For example, a low cost theory of truth might hold that “‘roses are red’ is true” asserts the same thing as “roses are red”; the ‘is true’ adds nothing to the content of the sentence. Thus, such theories are deflationary rather than substantive. Rather, such theories focus on the practical significance of truth talk: what is the significance of calling a sentence ‘true’? What does it add? In Chap. 4 (and subsequent chapters), we argue that we can embrace a low-cost theory of truth while still giving an account of normative claims (a) on which some normative claims are objectively true, and (b) and which does not commit us to normative objects or properties in the world that would run afoul of the naturalist commitments we made in Chap. 1. Nor does our account of normative discourse commit us to a doctrine of ‘non-overlapping magisteria,’ whereby one discipline is simply insulated from questions from other disciplines.

In C. D. Wright and N. J. L. L. Pedersen (eds.): New Waves in Truth (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2010., 2010

When talking about truth, we ordinarily take ourselves to be talking about one-and-the-same thing. Alethic monists suggest that theorizing about truth ought to begin with this default or pre-reflective stance, and, subsequently, parlay it into a set of theoretical principles that are aptly summarized by the thesis that truth is one. Foremost among them is the invariance principle. (inv) The nature of truth is uniform or invariant across discipline or sector of discourse.

Analytic Philosophy, 2011

Teorema, 2016

In The nature of truth: An updated approach to the meaning of truth ascriptions (2012), M. J. Frápolli presents a novel approach to the meaning of truth ascriptions, defending that these expressions should play an essential role in our understanding of truth. A crucial part of that account is the detailed taxonomy of the different types of truth ascriptions, as well as the different pragmatic roles truth ascriptions can perform. In this critical notice I will show that the proposed framework has several flaws concerning the two central points: the taxonomy and the pragmatic roles of truth ascriptions.

Studia Logica, 2009