A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic had been responsible for introducing the Vienna Circle’s ideas, developed within a Germanophone framework, to an Anglophone readership. Inevitably, this migration from one context to another resulted in the alteration of some of the concepts being transmitted. Such alterations have served to facilitate a number of false impressions of Logical Empiricism from which recent scholarship still tries to recover. In this paper, I will attempt to point to the ways in which LTL has (...) helped to foster the various mistaken stereotypes about Logical Empiricism which were combined into the received view. I will begin by examining Ayer’s all too brief presentation of an Anglocentric lineage for his ideas. This lineage, as we shall see, simply omits the major 19th century Germanophone influences on the rise of analytic philosophy. The Germanophone ideas he presents are selectively introduced into an Anglophone context, and directed towards various concerns that arose within that context. I will focus on the differences between Carnap’s version of the overcoming of metaphysics, and Ayer’s reconfiguration into what he calls the elimination of metaphysics. Having discussed the above, I will very briefly outline the consequences that Ayer’s radicalisation of the Vienna Circle’s doctrines had on the subsequent Anglophone reception of Logical Empiricism. (shrink)

The book provides a historical and systematic exposition of the semantic theory of truth formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1930s. This theory became famous very soon and inspired logicians and philosophers. It has two different, but interconnected aspects: formal-logical and philosophical. The book deals with both, but it is intended mostly as a philosophical monograph. It explains Tarski’s motivation and presents discussions about his ideas as well as points out various applications of the semantic theory of truth to philosophical (...) problems. (shrink)

Traces of the coherence theory are to be found in rationalistic epistemological systems of Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Fichte. However, the first fully advanced coherence theory was proposed by Bradley in XIX century. He was followed by Joachim, McTaggart, and particularly Blanshard and Ewing. The coherence theory later became popular among philosophers of the Vienna Circle, notably in Neurath and Hempel.2 Recently, Rescher tried to combine various proposals of coherentists into one fully unified view.

The present article purports to show that the protocol sentence debate, pursued by some leading members of the Vienna Circle in the mid-1930s, was essentially a controversy over the explanation and the real significance of the concept of truth. It is further shown that the fundamental issue underlying the discussions about the concept of truth was the relationship between form and content, as well as between logic/language and the world. R. Carnap was the philosopher who most explicitly and systematically attempted (...) to come to grips with this problem. It is shown that the form-content distinction pervades the three most important phases of Carnap's philosophical development: the structuralist (in Der logische Aufbau der Welt), the syntactical and the semantical. His final semantical stance is essentially determined by the concept of linguistic frameworks. The article purports to demonstrate that this concept cannot be dispensed with in philosophy, but that Carnap failed to work out its ontological implications. Finally, the concept of an internal ontology is briefly delineated. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo intento demostrar que, dadas ciertas condiciones, puede haber una relación de necesidad epistémica entre prueba y verdad. Esa es la tesis principal, desarrollada en la segunda parte de la investigación y publicada también en este volumen. Pero tiene apoyo en algunas tesis secundarias, que son expuestas y fundamentadas aquí, en esta primera parte. Las más relevantes son: no es correcto interpretar la fórmula de Tarski como una definición sofisticada de la noción correspondentista de verdad; la verdad, (...) en discursos teóricos, es un parámetro objetivo y alcanzable, en función del cual, siquiera provisoriamente y con base en razones, pueden ser dirimidas disputas de justificación; existe una conexión conceptual entre verdad y justicia retributiva; aunque usualmente esto no se explicite, la relación que interesa es entre prueba legítima y verdad; verdad no equivale a justificación; prueba equivale a justificación; justificaciones epistémicas pueden colapsar frente a la verdad. (shrink)

Kuhn argued against both the correspondence theory of truth and convergent realism. Although he likely misunderstood the nature of the correspondence theory, which it seems he wrongly believed to be an epistemic theory, Kuhn had an important epistemic point to make. He maintained that any assessment of correspondence between beliefs and reality is not possible, and therefore, the acceptance of beliefs and the presumption of their truthfulness has to be decided on the basis of other criteria. I will show that (...) via Kuhn’s suggested epistemic values, specifically via problem-solving, his philosophy can be incorporated into a coherentist epistemology. Further, coherentism is, in principle, compatible with convergent realism. However, an argument for increasing likeness to truth requires appropriate historical continuity. Kuhn maintained that the history of science is full of discontinuity, and therefore, the historical condition of convergent realism is not satisfied.Keywords: Thomas Kuhn; The correspondence theory of truth; The coherence theory of justification; Convergent realism; Rationalism. (shrink)

I challenge the assumption that the pragmatist-, coherence-, identity- and deflationary theories of truth are essentially incompatible and rival views to the correspondence theory, without endorsing pluralism. With the exception of some versions of the identity theory, the alternative theories only appear to genuinely contradict the correspondence theory, either when they are wedded to a rejection of an objective reality, or when it is assumed that a ‘theory of truth’ is a theory of the function of the truth-predicate. I argue (...) that the correspondence theory should not be understood as a theory about the function of the truth-predicate, and that the core ideas of the alternative views, once separated from any anti-realist convictions, are best understood as complementary views about different aspects of a fairly complex phenomenon, notably of how our beliefs relate to their subject matter and how we reason and talk about that relation. (shrink)

This Master's Thesis discusses the nature of the Eucharistic Sacrifice in the systematic theology of two German scholars; Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg and Roman Catholic theologian Joseph Ratzinger, the latter perhaps better known as pope (emeritus) Benedict XVI.