Abstract

This thesis offers a theory of actual human cognizers' epistemic connection to truth of their beliefs or statements. It comprises four major parts. First, I develop a quasirealist metaphysic which differs, in fundamental ways, from the customary realist and anti-realist ontologies. Second, I produce an account of nonepistemic truth and truthmaking relation according to which there is an irreducible logical gap between the concepts of propositional truth and evidential support. Although such a characterization places me in the same camp with the realists regarding the independence of the notion of propositional truth from that of evidence, I endorse antirealism with respect to the medium or "world" in/through which truths are made. Third, I question the ubiquitous supposition that nonepistemic truth is a necessary condition of propositional knowledge, concluding that it is not as sound as it first seems. Finally, I employ the ideas that have been developed in the preceding chapters in order to answer the question of the possibility and nature of higher-level empirical knowledge. The resultant account is a linguistic Kantian theory of actual---as opposed to misleadingly idealized---human agents' alethic world, and, in this sense, it shares the gist of Immanuel Kant's epistemic-ontological perspective: we do have reliable and objective knowledge of the world around us; but this certainly does not mean that such knowledge comes without substantial limits