Truth-Aptness

Philosophy begins and ends in disagreement. Philosophers disagree among themselves in innumerable ways, and this pervasive and permanent dissent is a sign of their inability to solve philosophical problems and establish substantive truths. This raises the question: What should I do with my philosophical beliefs in light of philosophy's epistemic failure? In this open-access book, János Tozsér develops four possible answers into comprehensive metaphilosophical visions and argues that we cannot find peace either by committing ourselves to one of these visions (...) or by abandoning our philosophical beliefs. Tozsér calls this disheartening insight "the experience of breakdown", making the case that philosophy's truth-seeking and justificatory tools are unsuitable for establishing truths. Shedding light on the epistemic status of our philosophical beliefs, Tozsér adopts a broad approach to assess the metaphilosophical visions used by philosophers to interpret their own activity and determine their epistemic self-esteem. Open access was funded by the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungary. (shrink)

The book offers a characterization of the meaning and role of the notion of truth in natural languages and an explanation of why, in spite of the big amount of proposals about truth, this task has proved to be resistant to the different analyses. The general thesis of the book is that defining truth is perfectly possible and that the average educated philosopher of language has the tools to do it. The book offers an updated treatment of the meaning of (...) truth ascriptions from taking into account the latest views in philosophy of language and linguistics. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has reshaped debates about Realism by offering a new landscape of what's at stake in the discussions between realists and their opponents. Instead of arguing whether a given discourse can be truth apt， discussion should focus, Wright contends, on what kind of truth predicate a discourse can enjoy. Namely, whether truth for a discourse can be 'robust' or merely ‘minimal' Wright's approach has important implications for Quine's well-known Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference. The bulk of this paper (...) will be devoted to showing that an argument involving minimalism about truth which Wright offersagainst the Inscrutability Thesis fails by reductio. By the end of the paper, we'll see how Wright's proposed frame of' discussion for Realism bears on themetaphysical status of Semantic Theories. (shrink)

Taking up a single question--"What does it mean to say a proposition of law is true?"--this book advances a major new account of truth in law. Drawing upon the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, as well as more recent postmodern theory of the relationship between language, meaning, and the world, Patterson examines leading contemporary jurisprudential approaches to this question and finds them flawed in similar and previously unnoticed ways. He offers a powerful alternative account of legal justification, one in which linguistic (...) practice--the use of forms of legal argument--holds the key to legal meaning. (shrink)

This article examines several answers to the question, can lexical definitions be true or false.