Putting Pluralism in its Place

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (1):175–191 (2018)
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Abstract

Pluralism about truth is the view that there are many properties, not just one, in virtue of which things are true. Pluralists hope to dodge the objections that face traditional monistic substantive views of truth, as well as those facing deflationary theories of truth. More specifically, pluralists hope to advance an explanatorily potent understanding of truth that can capture the subtleties of various realist and anti-realist domains of discourse, all while avoiding the scope problem. I offer a new objection to pluralism that challenges its fundamental commitment to there being a set of alethic properties in virtue of which claims are true. In its place I offer an alternative view that merges standard truthmaker theory with a primitivist conception of truth. This combination of views satisfies the theoretical desires that pluralists claim for themselves, but without taking on pluralism's host of challenges and problems.

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Jamin Asay
Purdue University

Citations of this work

Shopping for Truth Pluralism.Will Gamester - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11351-11377.
Pluralist theories of truth.Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen & Cory Wright - 2012 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Truth and Dependence.Jonathan Tallant & David Ingram - 2017 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4:955-980.

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Truth and Objectivity.Crispin Wright - 1992 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Truth.Paul Horwich - 1990 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press. Edited by Frank Jackson & Michael Smith.
Truth and truthmakers.D. M. Armstrong - 2004 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
New Work For a Theory of Universals.David Lewis - 1983 - In D. H. Mellor & Alex Oliver (eds.), Properties. Oxford University Press.

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