Conceptions Of Truth

Truth is one of the most debated topics in philosophy; Wolfgang Künne presents a comprehensive critical examination of all major theories. Conceptions of Truth is organized around a flow-chart comprising sixteen key questions, ranging from 'Is truth a property?' to 'Is truth epistemically constrained?' Künne expounds and engages with the ideas of many thinkers, from Aristotle and the Stoics, to Continental analytic philosophers like Bolzano, Brentano, andKotarbinski, to such leading figures in current debates as Dummett, Putnam, Wright, and Horwich. He explains many important distinctions (between varieties of correspondence, for example, between different conceptions of making true, between various kinds of eternalism and temporalism) which have so far been neglected in theliterature. Künne argues that it is possible to give a satisfactory 'modest' account of truth without invoking problematic notions like correspondence, fact, or meaning. And he offers a novel argument to support the realist claim that truth outruns justifiability.The clarity of exposition and the wealth of examples will make Conceptions of Truth an invaluable and stimulating guide for advanced students and scholars in metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of language.

One of the most important Anglo-American philosophers of our time here joins the current philosophical debate about the nature of truth. William P. Alston formulates and defends a realist conception of truth, which he calls alethic realism (from "aletheia," Greek for truth). This idea holds that the truth value of a statement (belief or proposition) depends on whether what the statement is about is as the statement says it is. Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam are two of the prominent and widely influential contemporary philosophers whose anti-realist ideas Alston attacks.

Truth is one of the most debated topics in philosophy; Wolfgang Künne presents a comprehensive critical examination of all major theories. Conceptions of Truth is organized around a flow-chart comprising sixteen key questions, ranging from 'Is truth a property?' to 'Is truth epistemically constrained?' Künne expounds and engages with the ideas of many thinkers, from Aristotle and the Stoics, to Continental analytic philosophers like Bolzano, Brentano, andKotarbinski, to such leading figures in current debates as Dummett, Putnam, Wright, and Horwich. He explains many important distinctions (between varieties of correspondence, for example, between different conceptions of making true, between various kinds of eternalism and temporalism) which have so far been neglected in theliterature. Künne argues that it is possible to give a satisfactory 'modest' account of truth without invoking problematic notions like correspondence, fact, or meaning. And he offers a novel argument to support the realist claim that truth outruns justifiability.The clarity of exposition and the wealth of examples will make Conceptions of Truth an invaluable and stimulating guide for advanced students and scholars in metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of language.

Truth is one of the most debated topics in philosophy; Wolfgang Künne presents a comprehensive critical examination of all major theories. Conceptions of Truth is organized around a flow-chart comprising sixteen key questions, ranging from Is truth a property? to Is truth epistemically constrained? Künne expounds and engages with the ideas of many thinkers, from Aristotle and the Stoics, to Continental analytic philosophers like Bolzano, Brentano, and Kotarbinski, to such leading figures in current debates as Dummett, Putnam, Wright, and Horwich. He explains many important distinctions (between varieties of correspondence, for example, between different conceptions of making true, between various kinds of eternalism and temporalism) which have so far been neglected in the literature. Künne argues that it is possible to give a satisfactory 'modest' account of truth without invoking problematic notions like correspondence, fact, or meaning. And he offers a novel argument to support the realist claim that truth outruns justifiability. The clarity of exposition and the wealth of examples will make Conceptions of Truth an invaluable and stimulating guide for advanced students and scholars in metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of language.

The concept of likeness to truth, like that of truth itself, is fundamental to a realist conception of inquiry. To demonstrate this we need only make two rather modest aim of an inquiry, as an inquiry, is realist assumptions: the truth doctrine (that the the truth of some matter) and the progress doctrine (that one false theory may realise this aim better than another). Together these yield the conclusion that a false theory may be more truthlike, or closer to the truth, than another. It is the aim of this book to give a rigorous philosophical analysis of the concept of likeness to truth, and to examine the consequences, some of them no doubt surprising to those who have been unduly impressed by the (admittedly important) true/false dichotomy. Truthlikeness is not only a requirement of a particular philosophical outlook, it is as deeply embedded in common sense as the concept of truth. Everyone seems to be capable of grading various propositions, in different (hypothetical) situations, according to their closeness to the truth in those situations. And (if my experience is anything to go by) there is remarkable unanimity on these pretheoretical judge ments. This is not proof that there is a single coherent concept underlying these judgements. The whole point of engaging in philosophical analysis is to make this claim plausible.

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological contexts. The latter include, for instance, contexts that generate Liar Paradox. Their central claim is that truth is a circular concept. In support of this claim they provide a widely applicable theory (the "revision theory") of circular concepts. Under the revision theory, when truth is seen as circular both its ordinary features and its pathological features fall into a simple understandable pattern. The Revision Theory of Truth is unique in placing truth in the context of a general theory of definitions. This theory makes sense of arbitrary systems of mutually interdependent concepts, of which circular concepts, such as truth, are but a special case.

This brief book takes readers to the very heart of what it is that philosophy can do well. Completed shortly before Donald Davidson's death at 85, Truth and Predication brings full circle a journey moving from the insights of Plato and Aristotle to the problems of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Davidson, countering many of his contemporaries, argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous, and that we need an effective theory of truth in order to live well. Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar; in the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life--such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use--how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth. Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.

Aristotle's theory of truth, which has been the most influential account of the concept of truth from Antiquity onwards, spans several areas of philosophy: philosophy of language, logic, ontology and epistemology. In this 2004 book, Paolo Crivelli discusses all the main aspects of Aristotle's views on truth and falsehood. He analyses in detail the main relevant passages, addresses some well-known problems of Aristotelian semantics, and assesses Aristotle's theory from the point of view of modern analytic philosophy. In the process he discusses most of the literature on Aristotle's semantic theory to have appeared in the last two centuries. His book vindicates and clarifies the often repeated claim that Aristotle's is a correspondence theory of truth. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in both ancient philosophy and modern philosophy of language.