Abstract

I claim that most of the dichotomies of truths associated with modern Analytic philosophy should be rejected, and the rest drawn in different places. I argue that a very wide range of truths is necessary, including a wide range of factual truths: truths of metaphysics, most truths of science, and all causal truths; all truths are factual and none are vacuous; all truths are knowable a posteriori ; and all truths are analytic and none are synthetic. ;I argue for that, in the case of what I call "Deep Kinds" and "narrow classes", and ordinary individuals, there are many essential attributes, not always obviously reducible to a few, some being unknown in most cases, and so there are often more than can be captured, even implicitly, in a short essential definition, without a great deal of investigation. ;I argue for by arguing against the opposite view's main support: the belief that some truths are conventional or otherwise arbitrary. I say that a definition of a Deep Kind may be formulated as the result of an empirical investigation, not an arbitrary act, and that once the definition, as an assignment of a meaning to the term, is given, the truth values of definitional truths based on it are not matters of arbitrary choice. ;I argue for that we can know a necessary truth empirically by observing the incompatibility of its subject and the negation of its predicate in the actual world and deducing that exactly similar subjects would have exactly similar predicates in other possible worlds. ;I argue for by maintaining, on the basis of ordinary language, that the meaning of a term is its extension, i.e., its actual referents plus its potential for referring, and that all truths are logical truths because all are identities, even if contingent ones