Truth theory

ABSTRACT: Minimalists about truth contend that traditional inflationary theories systematically fail to explain certain facts about truth, and that this failure licenses a 'reversal of explanatory direction'. Once reversed, they purport that their own minimal theory adequately explains all of the facts involving truth. But minimalists' main objection to inflationism seems to misfire, and the subsequent reversal of explanatory direction, if it can be made sense of, leaves minimalism in no better explanatory position; and even if the objection were serviceable and the reversal legitimate, minimalists' adequacy thesis is still implausible.

本論は、平成27年度京都大学文学部・文学研究科・研究科横断Ｂタイプ集中講義「論理学上級I」（平成28年1月23日〜24日）のために、ウソツキのパラドックスへの対応を軸に、真理理論の初歩を解説するものである。本授業は、歴史的正確さをある程度犠牲にし、現代的な論理学の立場からタルスキ・クリプキらの理論を再構成するとともに、現代行われている古典論理上の公理的真理理論や非古典論理上の真理理論研究を紹介し、それらがいかなる哲学的アイディアに基づいており、どのような道が両者の間に通っているかを検討することを目的とする。

The quest to provide a fundamental understanding and explanation of reality is an ambitious one. Perhaps it is too ambitious. The possible restrictions for such an enterprise to be successful must be inquired in order to determine the issue. Section 1 explores one’s understanding in reaching (scientific) conclusions: to what extent does a successful account testify to understanding? Section 2 focuses on the other side of such an account: does it provide an explanation in a more fundamental sense than pointing out causes of phenomena, or is it restricted to such a task? A critical stance vis-à-vis the (scientific) enterprise of unearthing reality’s structure remains necessary in order not to confuse a consistent and productive theory with one that demonstrates an understanding and explanation in the sense of this article.

This article is focused on answering the question to what extent one can be a sceptic. Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism serves as a guide. In section 1, it is investigated whether three logical laws have a certain foundation or are subject to doubt. In section 2, Sextus’s way to deal with these laws is examined; the question arises how dogmatic his approach is. After that, a possible ‘reply’ by Sextus to the criticism receives attention. Section 3 is concentrated on a possible alternative to Sextus’s approach. Besides logical laws, some important methods are concerned.

Alethic functionalism, as propounded by Michael Lynch, is the view that there are different ways to be true, but that these differences nevertheless contain enough unity to forestall outright pluralism. This view has many virtues. Yet, since one could conceivably apply Lynch's "one and many" strategy to other debates, I try show to how his argumentative steps can be used to solve—not just the controversy pertaining to truth—but any controversy that surrounds a "What is X?" question.

Fictional and non-ctional texts rely on the same language to express their meaning; yet many philosophers in the analytic tradition would say, with reason, that ctional texts literally make no truth claims, or more modestly that the rhetorical and literary devices (e.g., metaphor) to which ction and non-ction writers alike have recourse are unconnected to truth or have no propositional content.

We review three pairwise similar paradoxes, the modest liar paradox, McGee’s paradox and Yablo’s paradox, which imply the ω- inconsistency. We show that is caused by the fact that co-inductive def- initions of formulae are possible because of the existence of the truth predicate.

Recently, co-induction plays a very important role in computer science to represent behaviors of non-terminate automatons [MT91][Cq93]. Now philosophers begin to study languages whose formulae are constructed co-inductively, ie these languages are allowed to have sentences of infinite length [L04]. However, such languages are not so new: they have already appeared in the study of truth theories, for example. In this paper, we review such an appearance of co-inductive sentences which causes famous paradoxes, the modest liar paradox [Rs93][ ...

A new approach to truth is offered which dispenses with the truth predicate, and replaces it with a special kind of quantifier which simultaneously binds variables in sentential and nominal positions. The resulting theory of truth for a (first-order) language is shown to be able to handle blind truth ascriptions, and is shown to be compatible with a characterization of the semantic and syntactic principles governing that language. Comparisons with other approaches to truth are drawn. An axiomatization of AU-quantifiers and a model theory for them is given, and an appendix contains a completeness proof.