Primitivists about truth maintain that truth cannot be analysed in more fundamental terms. Defences of primitivism date back to the early years of analytic philosophy, being offered by G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gottlob Frege. In more recent years, a number of contemporary philosophers—including Donald Davidson, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Douglas Patterson, and Jamin Asay—have followed suit, defending their own versions of primitivism. I'll begin by offering a brief history of primitivism, situating each of these views within the landscape of (...) primitivist truth theories and detailing some of their core motivations and apparent shortcomings. To close the discussion, I'll offer a diagnosis of the prospects of primitivism, focusing on the mystery challenge, which has loomed large throughout the history of primitivist truth theories, and the methodology that should be used in evaluating primitivist (and other) truth theories going forward. (shrink)

Anaphoric deflationism is a prosententialist account of the use of “true.” Prosentences are, for sentences, the equivalent of what pronouns are for nouns: as pronouns refer to previously introduced nouns, so prosentences like “that’s true” inherit their content from previously introduced sentences. This kind of deflationism concerning the use of “true” (especially in Brandom’s version) is an explanation in terms of anaphora; the prosentence depends anaphorically on the sentence providing its content. A relevant implication of this theory is that “true” (...) is not understood as a predicate and that truth is not a property. Primitivism, defended by Frege, Moore, and Davidson, is associated with two ideas: (1) that truth is a primitive and central trait of our conceptual system and (2) that truth, as such, cannot be defined. This second claim can be called “negative primitivism,” and it especially points out the facts about the “indefinability” of truth generally advocated by primitivists. In what follows, a connection is established between the deflationist’s rejection of the predicate and of the property and facts (and primitivist ideas) about the indefinability of truth. This connection establishes a common framework to lend further explanatory power to both options. According to the resulting view, this indefinability can explain the appeal and soundness of a deflationist dismissal of predicates and properties dealing with truth. (shrink)

W latach 1893 i 1903 ukazały się dwa tomy najważniejszego dzieła Fregego Grundegezte der Arithmetik. Ten okres można nazwać „szczytem logicyzmu” Fregego. Chociaż temat prawdy w logiczno-filozoficznej twórczości Fregego był podejmowany wielokrotnie, to brakuje pozycji skupiającej się na badaniu poglądów w tym okresie. Dotyczy to w szczególności literatury polskiej. Moim zadaniem jest zebranie i uporządkowanie wszystkich wypowiedzi Fregego na temat prawdy w okresie wydawania wspomnianych tomów. Realizując to zadanie, badam użycie tego pojęcia w pierwszym tomie Grundegezte der Arithmetik oraz w (...) niepublikowanym tekście Logik. Podejmuję zagadnienie funkcjonowania tego terminu w szczególnych kontekstach: antynomii, geometrii i wyrażania ogólności. Na koniec zasygnalizuję kwestię sposobu rozumienia późniejszych wypowiedzi Fregego na temat prawdy. (shrink)

In 1893 and 1903, two volumes of the most important of Frege’s works Grundegezte der Arithmetik were published. This period can be called the peak of Frege’s logicism. Although the subject of truth in Frege’s logical and philosophical works has been repeatedly investigated, there is a lack of studies on his view in this period, especially in Polish literature. In this article, therefore, I carry out the following research task: to collect and order Frege’s statements about truth during the period (...) of publishing the two volumes of Grundegezte der Arithmetik. I refer to the texts published during Frege’s life, published posthumously and his correspondence. Particularly noteworthy are: Grundegezte der Arithmetik and the unpublished Logik. That is why there are two separate sections dedicated to these two texts, whereas the discussions of truth from other texts are grouped thematically: the problem of antinomy, geometry, expression of generality, and others. The subject of truth appears there in relation to logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics and ontology. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to offer and defend a correspondence theory of truth. I begin by critically examining the coherence, pragmatic, simple, redundancy, disquotational, minimal, and prosentential theories of truth. Special attention is paid to several versions of disquotationalism, whose plausibility has led to its fairly constant support since the pioneering work of Alfred Tarski, through that by W. V. Quine, and recently in the work of Paul Horwich. I argue that none of these theories meets the correspondence (...) intuition---that a true sentence or proposition in some way corresponds to reality---despite the explicit claims by each to capture this intuition. I distinguish six versions of the correspondence theory, and defend two against traditional objections, standardly taken as decisive against them, and show, plainly, that these two theories capture the correspondence intuition. Due to the importance of meeting this intuition, only these two theories stands a chance of being a satisfactory theory of truth. I argue that the version of the correspondence theory incorporating a simple semantic representation relation is preferable to its rival, for which the representation relation is complex. I present and argue for a novel version of this correspondence theory according to which truth is a correspondence property sensitive to semantic context. One consequence of this context-sensitivity is that an ungrounded sentence does not express a proposition. In addition to accounting for the similarity between the Liar and Truth-Teller sentences, this theory of truth is immune to the Liar Paradox, including empirical versions. It is argued that the Liar Paradox is devastating to all of the other theories above, and even formal theories of truth designed to solve it, such as the revision and vagueness theories. Customized versions of the Liar Paradox besetting this theory are handled by its context-sensitivity, and by enforcing the distinction between truth and truth value. This same pair of considerations also yields solutions to Lob's Paradox and Grelling's Paradox. Arguments similar to those given to defend this correspondence theory show that with one minor alteration, Kripke's fixed point theory may be used to model this correspondence notion of truth. (shrink)