This is a prepublication version of my book Objects and Attitudes. The book develops a novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, and quotation based on the view that sentences semantically act as predicates of various attitudinal and modal objects, entities like claims, requests, promises, obligations, and permissions, rather than standing for abstract propositions playing the role of objects. The approach develops truthmaker semantics for attitudinal and modal objects and has a wide range of applications to issues in philosophy of (...) language, semantics, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

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)

Primitivist theories of truth have been defended by some of the luminaries of analytic philosophy, including the early Moore and Russell, Frege, Davidson, and Sosa. In this paper, I take up a contemporary primitivist theory that has been systematically developed throughout a sizeable body of work but has yet to receive sustained critical attention—Jamin Asay's primitivist deflationism. Asay's major ambitions are to defend a novel primitivist account of the concept truth and to harmonise that account with a deflationary theory of (...) the property truth. I will elaborate a thoroughgoing critique of primitivist deflationism, arguing that we have reason to doubt all of the five theses that constitute the view. Along the way, I will also highlight a number of possible escape routes for the primitivist deflationist, explaining how they can make the view more resilient even as they compel us to rework some of its central commitments. (shrink)

This paper argues that truth predicates in natural language and their variants, predicates of correctness, satisfaction and validity, do not apply to propositions (not even with 'that'-clauses), but rather to a range of attitudinal and modal objects. As such natural language reflects a notion of truth that is primarily a normative notion of correctness constitutive of representational objects. The paper moreover argues that 'true' is part of a larger class of satisfaction predicates whose semantic differences are best accounted for in (...) terms of a truthmaker theory along the lines of Fine's recent truthmaker semantics. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of the concept of truth. It does not offer an analysis or definition of truth, or an account of how it relates to other concepts. Instead, it explores what sort of concept truth is by considering what sorts of thoughts it enables us to think. My conclusion is that truth is a part of each and every propositional thought. The concept of truth is therefore best thought of as the ability to token propositional thoughts. I (...) explore what implications this view has for existing accounts of concepts, and argue that truth is a concept unlike any other. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to deflationism as the provenance of the suspicion (...) that Truth doesn't exist. But it would be hasty to simply classify the account as deflationary. Each of the 'truth-like' properties that it recognizes is highly substantive--that is, complex and explanatorily potent. So we should deflate Truth by recognizing that it doesn't exist, but we should also recognize that one of the most vital tasks in truth theory is to discover the essences of the many truth-like properties. My aim here is to do precisely this. (shrink)