What is truth? What role does truth play in the connections between language and the world? What is the relationship between truth and being? Douglas Edwards tackles these questions and develops a distinctive metaphysical worldview. He argues that in some domains language responds to the world, whereas in others language generates the world.

Two central themes of Douglas Edwards’s The Metaphysics of Truth are anti-deflationism and substantial pluralism. In Part I of this paper I discuss Edwards’s grounds for rejecting deflationism and suggest a few additional grounds. In Part II I discuss Edward's truth-pluralism and respond to his criticism of my correspondence-pluralism. While these pluralisms share significant features, their differences also raise several important questions.

The Metaphysics of Truth, by EdwardsDouglas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 208.

_ The Metaphysics of Truth _By EdwardsDouglasOxford University Press, 2018. x + 198 pp.

This paper explores how consideration of the notions of naturalness and eligibility, which have played an increasingly significant role in contemporary metaphysics, might impact on the study of truth. In particular, it aims to demonstrate how taking such notions seriously may be of benefit to ‘representational’ theories of truth by showing how the naturalness of truth on a representational account provides a response to the ‘Scope Problem’ presented by Lynch (2009).

Book Review The Metaphysics of Truth by Douglas Edwards Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 210. ISBN 9780198758693. £45.00 ($56.00) (hardcover).

The article examines main competing conceptions of the cor­respondence theory of truth. First, the author investigates pos­sible candidates for the role of truth-bearers. Among those he examines following entities: instances of sentences as concrete sequences of symbols (sounds or letters), which should satisfy wide scope of requirements, such as to be grammatical, mean­ingful, affirmative and so on; abstract propositions, which are ex­pressed by concrete sentences; utterances (either explicit or in lingua mentalis); beliefs of agents as their special mental (...) states. Then he turns to the study of possible candidates for the role of truth-makers, i.e. of those entities to which truth-bearers should correspond to be true. He observes states of affairs, situations, facts and mereological sums of individuals. Then he shows that a notion of correspondence is a functional relationship of interpre­tation of linguistic expressions, where certain fragment of real­ity is taken as a model, i.e. as a finite set of elements on which some functions and relations can be operationally defined. He shows how in some simple cases such interpretation function can be built in operationalist’s manner. After that, he considers some natural objections to this approach, which point that he has no direct cognitive access to the actual world, so it is not possible to take its fragments as a model for any theory. Such objections lead us to the coherentist’s approach, but he shows that the question about origin and status of so-called “specified set” implicitly either leads to infinite regress or requires certain correspondence on some level of investigation and reasoning. Finally, the authore presents some reflections on the meaning of correspondence approach for scientific realism and all other versions of realistic philosophy and metaphysics. (shrink)

In this work Ockham proposes a theory of simple predication, which he uses in explicating the truth conditions of progressively more complicated kinds of propositions. His discussion includes what he takes to be the correct semantic treatment of quantified propositions, past tense and future tense propositions, and modal propositions, all of which are receiving much attention from contemporary philosophers. He also illustrates the use of exponential analysis to deal with propositions that prove troublesome in both semantic theory and other (...) disciplines, such as metaphysics, physics, and theology. This type of analysis plays an essential role in his substantive philosophical and theological works, and in many cases then can hardly be understood without a prior acquaintance with this section of the Summa. An introduction by Alfred J. Freddoso clarifies and summarizes Ockham's theory, discusses certain philosophical problems which it engenders, and proposes new interpretations for parts of it. The essay will be helpful both to those interested in Ockham as a historical figure and to those interested in his substantive systematic contributions to logical theory. (shrink)

I assess Edwards' two principal arguments against Deflationary conceptions of Truth and argue that neither is fully successful, then revisit the ‘Inflationary’ argument of chapter 1 of Truth and Objectivity. A case is outlined for a more variegated account of the opposition between realist and anti-realist views of different regions of thought than Edwards' account permits.

Truth-telling is a project that is both gripping and problematic for Rousseau, as he is both captured by an ideal of telling as complete, undistorted discernment, documentation and communication, and also haunted by the fear that telling can never be this innocent. For Rousseau, as for Kant, telling does not leave the told untouched; rather, telling gives us a type of contact with objects that is marked and mediated by the process of telling itself, and hence the possibility of (...) immediately grasping objects through telling is forever lost to us. The drive to capture things in themselves, which originates, according to Kant, in a formal principle of reason, shows up in Rousseau's writings as a nostalgia that governs and animates inquiry. I will read Rousseau, and the traumas of truth-telling he articulates, as important pretexts for Kant's critical epistemology. Rousseau discloses tensions that infect his truth-telling practices. Kant seeks to neutralize these tensions, not by dissolving them, but rather by translating them into the terms of transcendental philosophy and thus showing how they can be defused and rendered harmless in their empirical form, so as to secure the possibility of proper truth-telling. (shrink)

Is there any good reason to believe in Nietzsche's metaphysics even thought he himself claims that it is not "the truth" in correspondence with the world? According to Danto, Nietzsche's metaphysics is only valid for Nietzsche himself. However, this answer does not take into consideration Nietzsche's claim for the general superiority of his philosophy. Nietzsche's view seems inconsistent: on the one hand, he claimed all perspectives are equally false in respect to "the truth," but on the (...) other, he regarded his view as superior. This book explains in which respect Nietzshe justifies his claims, that Nietzsche's position is not inconsistent, and why consistency is important for him. (shrink)

What is 'truth'? The question that Pilate put to Jesus was laced with dramatic irony. But at a time when what is true and what is untrue have acquired a new currency, the question remains of crucial significance. Is truth a matter of the representation of things which lack truth in themselves? Or of mere coherence? Or is truth a convenient if redundant way of indicating how one's language refers to things outside oneself? In her ambitious (...) new book, Catherine Pickstock addresses these profound questions, arguing that epistemological approaches to truth either fail argumentatively or else offer only vacuity. She advances instead a bold metaphysical and realist appraisal which overcomes the Kantian impasse of 'subjective knowing' and ban on reaching beyond supposedly finite limits. Her book contends that in the end truth cannot be separated from the transcendent reality of the thinking soul. (shrink)

The notion of truth is a central subject both in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic. The logical approach on the one side and the philosophical one on the other, however, mostly deal with problems which, apparently, require different tools to be tackled. In this paper I argue that such a separation can and should be overcome, and, in order to build a bridge, I focus on the philosophical issue of the insubstantiality of truth, which is a crucial topic to (...) distinguish inflationist from deflationist proposals. Elaborating on the interpretation of insubstantiality in terms of the sparse/abundant classification of properties, I put forward a refined version in which certain flaws afflicting other formulations are solved. Then, I show how, using this improved variant, the philosophical notion of abundance can be fruitfully related to the formal notion of expandability of models, if a logical framework is adopted. Among other virtues, the obtained link can shed new light on the debate of deflationism and conservativity. (shrink)

Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

In this study, I expound Avicenna's doctrine of truth as it is presented in his Metaphysics of the Healing. My aim is to establish two theses. First, that Avicenna has a rich and systematic metaphysical doctrine of truth that is worked out within the epistemological, ontological, aitiological, and theological investigations of the Ilāhiyyāt. Second, that his doctrine of truth draws upon the accounts of truth he found in his predecessors, and that he amplifies these accounts (...) in light of his own innovative account of the first principles of metaphysics, which he articulates at the outset of his Ilāhiyyāt. I show that these first principles, along with Avicenna's... (shrink)

This work presents a version of the correspondence theory of truth based on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Russell's theory of truth and discusses related metaphysical issues such as predication, facts and propositions. Like Russell and one prominent interpretation of the Tractatus it assumes a realist view of universals. Part of the aim is to avoid Platonic propositions, and although sympathy with facts is maintained in the early chapters, the book argues that facts as real entities are not needed. It (...) includes discussion of contemporary philosophers such as David Armstrong, William Alston and Paul Horwich, as well as those who write about propositions and facts, and a number of students of Bertrand Russell. It will interest teachers and advanced students of philosophy who are interested in the realistic conception of truth and in issues in metaphysics related to the correspondence theory of truth, and those interested in Russell and the Tractatus. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline and defend a novel approach to alethic pluralism, the thesis that truth has more than one metaphysical nature: where truth is, in part, explained by reference, it is relational in character and can be regarded as consisting in correspondence; but where instead truth does not depend upon reference it is not relational and involves only coherence. In the process, I articulate a clear sense in which truth may or may not depend (...) upon reference: this involves distinguishing semantic denotation from pragmatic speaker reference and claiming that there may or may not exist a metasemantic connection between these two notions. Finally, I argue that reference is not in general inscrutable—that this metasemantic connection does exist in the case of our ordinary discourse about present macroscopic concrete objects—but that it is in pure mathematics, where reference cannot be secured, and which therefore plays no role in accounting for truth. In this manner, alethic pluralism is upheld. (shrink)

ABSTRACTZalabardo argues that the Tractatus account of picturing is a direct and successful refutation of Russell’s ‘multiple relation’ theory of judgment, its role being ontological: Wittgenstein...

An interpretation of God as exemplary cause is in consonance with Aristotle's biological works, although in the Metaphysics Aristotle does shy away from such an interpretation. It is possible to conceive the order of the world in Aristotle as "an expression of desire of God." The rational order that is present in the universe is dependent on God, on his thought. Each organism desires to realize its form, to become intelligible, and to thus imitate God's thought. Such an interpretation (...) of Aristotle coincides with and is completed by Aquinas's treatment of the truth as the origin and end of the universe in the Summa contra Gentiles. (shrink)

There has recently been a revival of interest in what truth is. For a long time, deflationism ruled the roost, telling us that there’s not much of metaphysical.

In this paper, I shall present a comparative study of two leading Daoists’ different conceptions of truth in the context of modern metaphysical debate on realism and antirealism. My basic contention in this paper is that both Laozi and Zhuangzi embrace the realist's thesis that the world is largely independent of us and the way we are; it has its own objective nature.

Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions provides the first book-length exposition and defense of semantic temporalism, the view that propositions are contents or semantic values that can change their truth-values across time.

This book addresses the metaphysics of Armstrongian states of affairs, i.e. instantiations of naturalist universals by particulars. The author argues that states of affairs are the best candidate for truthmakers and, in the spirit of logical atomism, that we need no molecular truthmakers for positive truths. In the book's context, this has the pleasing result that there are no molecular states of affairs. Following this account of truthmaking, the author first shows that the particulars in (first-order) states of affairs (...) are bare particulars. He then argues that the properties in states of affairs are simple, non-relational and concrete universals. Next, he argues that (material) relations in states of affairs are external relations. Lastly, he argues that a state of affairs is unified by a distinctive formal relation without giving rise to Bradley’s regress. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy, it is tempting to apply the metaphysics of properties to the specific case of truth, in the hope of making progress on the investigation of the latter. In this paper, I argue that a different approach, mostly independent from the metaphysics of properties and based on the naturalness, in Lewis’ sense, of semantic nations, is often a better alternative, both in general and in some specific cases. In particular, adopting the new perspective, I present (...) a new problem of combining logical validity and strong truth pluralism, and offer a way to sharply distinguish deflationism and primitivism about truth. The main original upshot of the paper is offering a perspective on philosophy of truth that sheds new light on the general problem of truth and on some particular issues. (shrink)

Since the epistemological turn initiated by Descartes at the start of the modern period and subsequently cemented by Kant's Copernican revolution in epistemology, attention has focused more on the issue of criteria of truth than the essence of truth. This is especially true in respect of discussions in philosophy of truth in contemporary philosophy. While Bradley recognizes the importance of the issue of criteria as far as the problem of truth is concerned, he is nonetheless more (...) concerned with the question of the nature of truth in his engagement with the problem of truth. Bradley sees a fundamental continuity between both concerns, to the extent that in the final analysis truth cannot be divorced from reality, so that truth is not merely a property of propositions as many contemporary theories of truth maintain, but rather a feature of reality. Bradley's approach is peculiar, no doubt, but I argue that it helps to correct certain imbalances associated with contemporary philosophies of truth. (shrink)

Davidson made a strikingly distinctive and valuable contribution to the practice of ontology. It was a species of argument for the existence of things of one kind or another. It combined Quine's doctrine that “To be is to be the value of a bound variable” with Davidson's own apparently anti‐Quinean views on semantics and logical form in natural language. Roughly: Suppose truth‐conditional analysis of certain English sentences assigns them logical forms containing characteristic quantifiers, and the quantifiers' domains include entities (...) of a certain sort. Then, assuming that some of the relevant sentences are true, it follows that there exist entities of that sort. This chapter expounds Davidson's extended defense of that method, and then considers and tries to rebut five potential objections to it. (shrink)

A response to critics, Douglas Patterson and Mark Textor, on Künne's modest theory of truth in *Conceptions of Truth*.

The Metaphysics of Knowledge presents the thesis that knowledge is an absolutely fundamental relation, with an indispensable role to play in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophy of mind and language. Knowledge has been generally assumed to be a propositional attitude like belief. But Keith Hossack argues that knowledge is not a relation to a content; rather, it a relation to a fact. This point of view allows us to explain many of the concepts of philosophical logic in terms (...) of knowledge. Hossack provides a theory of facts as structured combinations of particulars and universals, and presents a theory of content as the property of a mental act that determines its value for getting knowledge. He also defends a theory of representation in which the conceptual structure of a content is taken to picture the fact it represents. This permits definitions to be given of reference, truth, and necessity in terms of knowledge. Turning to the metaphysics of mind and language, Hossack argues that a conscious state is one that is identical with knowledge of its own occurrence. This allows us to characterize subjectivity, and, by illuminating the "I"-concept, allows us to gain a better understanding of the concept of a person. Language is then explained in terms of knowledge, as a device used by a community of persons for exchanging knowledge by testimony. The Metaphysics of Knowledge concludes that knowledge is too fundamental to be constituted by something else, such as one's functional or physical state; other things may cause knowledge, but do not constitute it. (shrink)

In fourth-century Greece, the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths. This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria. In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic (...) appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies. (shrink)

The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial (...) reinvention. It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law; Muhammad’s heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship; and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain quite permeable. Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large. (shrink)

Jamin Asay's book offers a fresh and daring perspective on the age-old question 'What is truth?', with a comprehensive articulation and defence of primitivism, the view that truth is a fundamental and indefinable concept. Often associated with Frege and the early Russell and Moore, primitivism has been largely absent from the larger conversation surrounding the nature of truth. Asay defends primitivism by drawing on a range of arguments from metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic, (...) and navigates between correspondence theory and deflationism by reviving analytic philosophy's first theory of truth. In its exploration of the role that truth plays in our cognitive and linguistic lives, The Primitivist Theory of Truth offers an account of not just the nature of truth, but the foundational role that truth plays in our conceptual scheme. It will be valuable for students and scholars of philosophy of language and of metaphysics. (shrink)

This volume provides a geographically and historically diverse overview of philosophical traditions that establish a deep connection between truth and practice, or even see truth itself as a kind of practice. Under the label "practices of truth" are subsumed disparate approaches that can be fruitfully brought together to explore the intersections between truth and practice in philosophy as well as to address a range of intriguing questions about truth that fall outside the domain of pure (...) theory. The chapters in this volume provide a variety of perspectives on key practices of truth in philosophy and in the history of philosophy, enriching our understanding of the different ways in which truth and practice may be connected, including the role of certain practices in enabling philosophical insight into truth; the ways in which truth may actually be embedded in some practices; and the impact of truth on practice. Practices of Truth in Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in the history of philosophy, comparative philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and the metaphysics of truth. (shrink)

It is argued that the assignment of truth values to future contingents is threatened not by a tensed metaphysics but by a temporally “local” notion of truth, i.e., by the assumption that whatever is true at a given time needs to be grounded in what exists at that time. If this assumption is accepted, tensed and tenseless metaphysics are equally vulnerable; if it is rejected, both can accommodate true future contingents. This means that semantic decisions are (...) largely independent of metaphysical considerations. The work of Correia and Rosenkranz (2018) is a clear example of how the tensed metaphysics of the growing block can incorporate true future contingents. Two potential worries are discussed in the context of their work: (a) that their grounding strategy overgeneralizes and admits true counterfactual contingents; and (b) that the growing block theory lacks sufficient resources to distinguish the unique possible future course of events that is relevant for the grounding of future contingents. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil - the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds of goodness, (...) showing how they fit into the Scholastic theory. The privation theory of evil is given its most comprehensive contemporary defence, including an account of truthmakers for truths of privation and an analysis of how causation by privation should be understood. In the end, all evil is deviance - a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing's essential nature. Key Features: Offers a comprehensive defence of a venerable metaphysical theory, conducted using the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy. Revives a much neglected approach to the question of good and evil in their most general nature. Shows how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory has more than historical relevance to a fundamental philosophical issue, but can be applied in a way that is both defensible and yet accessible to the modern philosopher. Provides what, for the Scholastic philosopher, is arguably the only solid metaphysical foundation for a separate treatment of the origins of morality. (shrink)

This book tackles the issues that arise in connection with intensional logic -- a formal system for representing and explaining the apparent failures of certain important principles of inference such as the substitution of identicals and existential generalization -- and intentional states --mental states such as beliefs, hopes, and desires that are directed towards the world. The theory offers a unified explanation of the various kinds of inferential failures associated with intensional logic but also unifies the study of intensional contexts (...) and intentional states by grounding the explanation of both phenomena in a single theory. When an axiomatized realm of abstract entities is added to the metaphysical structure of the world, we can use them to identify and individuate the contents of directed mental states. The special abstract entities can be viewed as the objectified contents of mental files, and they play a crucial role in the analysis of truth conditions of the sentences involved in inferential failures. (shrink)

In this thesis, Semantics, Meta-Semantics, and Ontology, I provide a critique of the method of truth in metaphysics. Davidson has suggested that we can determine the metaphysical nature and structure of reality through semantic investigations. By contrast, I argue that it is not semantics, but meta-semantics, which reveals the metaphysically necessary and sufficient truth conditions of our claims. As a consequence I reject the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment. In Part I, chapter 1, I argue that the (...) metaphysically primary truth bearers are not propositions, but rather concrete representations, either beliefs or sentences. I show, in chapter 2, that we can give sense to a truth predicate applying to sentences, given a truth operator and quantification into sentence position. I argue that this strategy does not commit us to the existence of propositions serving as truth bearers. In Part II I argue that although we must assign semantic values to sentences and/or predicates, the meaningfulness of these expressions is not thereby explained. In chapter 3 I articulate Davidson’s problem of predication and his solution, but argue that he was wrong to attribute this solution to Tarski. In chapter 4 I examine the semantics of modal languages; I conclude that although they require semantic values for predicates and/or sentences we should be instrumentalists about these theories. In Part III I consider the relationship between truth and existence. In chapter 5, I defend Pluralism about truth: in some domains of discourse, I claim, semantic reference plays a merely instrumental role in explaining truth. In chapter 6, I show that Hume’s Principle, which is committed by the Quinean criterion to the existence of numbers, can be true even though numbers do not exist. In doing so, I appeal to meta-semantic and diachronic considerations. In the conclusion I compare my views on ontology and commitment to Jody Azzouni’s; and in the appendix I suggest how one might pursue diachronic linguistics. (shrink)

Functionalism about truth is the view that truth is an explanatorily significant but multiply-realizable property. According to this view the properties that realize truth vary from domain to domain, but the property of truth is a single, higher-order, domain insensitive property. We argue that this view faces a challenge similar to the one that Jaegwon Kim laid out for the multiple realization thesis. The challenge is that the higher-order property of truth is equivalent to an (...) explanatorily idle disjunction of its realization bases. This consequence undermines the alethic functionalists’ non-deflationary ambitions. A plausible response to Kim’s argument fails to carry over to alethic functionalism on account of significant differences between alethic functionalism and psychological functionalism. Lynch’s revised view in his book Truth as One and Many ( 2009 ) fails to answer our challenge. The upshot is that, while mental functionalism may survive Kim’s argument, it mortally wounds functionalism about truth. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Theism presents an explanation and evaluation of Aquinas's natural theology, the paradigm of which is the first book of the Summa contra gentiles. Natural theology provides the traditional and still central means of integrating philosophy with (some of) theology. What makes this enterprise natural theology is its forgoing of appeals to revelation as evidence for the truth of propositions. What makes it natural theology is its agenda to investigate, by means of analysis and argument, not (...) only the existence and nature of God but also the relation of everything else—especially human nature and behaviour—to God, considered as reality's first principle. Natural theology still offers the best route by which philosophers can, as philosophers, approach theological propositions. The one presented in this book undertakes to show that there must be a necessary being that constitutes the ultimate explanation of the universe. (shrink)

Newman takes it as a given that truth involves some sort of correspondence between either sentences or propositions and something else in the nature of things. Furthermore, he holds that to have a viable correspondence theory of truth one must provide a metaphysical discussion of these topics: “ How sentences correspond to the world. How propositions correspond to the world. The nature of propositions. The nature of facts”. The subtitle’s mention of predication reveals the author’s view that facts (...) or states of affairs are nothing over and above particulars having monadic or polyadic universal characteristics. (shrink)

The book discusses the central notion of logic: the concept of logical consequence. It shows that the classical definition of consequence as truth preservation in all models must be restricted to all admissible models. The challenge for the philosophy of logic is therefore to supplement the definition with a criterion for admissible models. -/- The problem of logical constants, so prominent in the current debate, constitutes but a special case of this much more general demarcation problem. The book explores (...) the various dimensions of the problem of admissible models and argues that standard responses are unwarranted. As a result, it develops a new vision of logic, suggesting in particular that logic is deeply imbued with metaphysics. (shrink)