This volume is designed to set out some of the central issues in the theory of truth. It draws together, for the first time, the debates between philosophers who favor 'robust' or 'substantive' theories of truth, and those other, 'deflationist' or minimalists, who deny that such theories can be given. The editors provide a substantial introduction, in which they look at how the debates relate to further issues, such as the Liar paradox and formal truth theories.

In this paper, I examine a solution to the Liar paradox found in the work of Ockham, Burley, and Pseudo-Sherwood. I reject the accounts of this solution offered by modern commentators. I argue that this medieval line suggests a non-hierarchical solution to the Liar, according to which ?true? is analysed as an indexical term, and paradox is avoided by minimal restrictions on tokens of ?true?. In certain respects, this solution resembles the recent approaches of Charles Parsons and Tyler Burge; in (...) other respects, it is related to a suggestion of Gödel. But, as a whole, it suggests an original solution to the Liar paradox, quite unlike any current proposals. (shrink)

In 1905, Richard discovered his paradox of definability, and in a letter written that year he presented both the paradox and a solution to it.Soon afterwards, Poincaré endorsed a variant of Richard?s solution.In this paper, I critically examine Richard?s and Poincaré?s ways out.I draw on an objection of Peano?s, and argue that their stated solutions do not work.But I also claim that their writings suggest another way out, different from their stated solutions, and different from the orthodox Tarskian approach.I argue (...) that this second solution does not prevent the return of the paradox. (shrink)

This book is about one of the most baffling of all paradoxes – the famous Liar paradox. Suppose we say: 'We are lying now'. Then if we are lying, we are telling the truth; and if we are telling the truth we are lying. This paradox is more than an intriguing puzzle, since it involves the concept of truth. Thus any coherent theory of truth must deal with the Liar. Keith Simmons discusses the solutions proposed by medieval philosophers (...) and offers his own solutions and in the process assesses other attempts to solve the paradox. Unlike such attempts, Simmons' 'singularity' solution does not abandon classical semantics and does not appeal to the kind of hierarchical view found in Barwise's and Etchemendy's The Liar. Moreover, Simmons' solution resolves the vexing problem of semantic universality – the problem of whether there are semantic concepts beyond the expressive reach of a natural language such as English. (shrink)

There is a core metaphysical claim shared by all deflationists: truth is not a genuine, substantive property. But anyone who denies that truth is a genuine property must still make sense of our pervasive truth talk. In addressing questions about the meaning and function of ‘true’, deflationists engage in a linguistic or semantic project, a project that typically goes hand-in-hand with a deflationary account of the concept of truth. A thoroughgoing deflationary account of truth will go beyond the negative metaphysical (...) claim about truth and the positive linguistic account of the word ‘true’: it will also maintain that the concept of truth is a ‘thin’ concept that bears no substantive conceptual connections to other concepts to which it is traditionally tied. (shrink)

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics (...) of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse. (shrink)

This book aims to provide a solution to the semantic paradoxes. It argues for a unified solution to the paradoxes generated by our concepts of denotation, predicate extension, and truth. The solution makes two main claims. The first is that our semantic expressions 'denotes', 'extension' and 'true' are context-sensitive. The second, inspired by a brief, tantalizing remark of Godel's, is that these expressions are significant everywhere except for certain singularities, in analogy with division by zero. A formal theory of singularities (...) is presented and applied to a wide variety of versions of the definability paradoxes, Russell's paradox, and the Liar paradox. Keith Simmons argues that the singularity theory satisfies the following desiderata: it recognizes that the proper setting of the semantic paradoxes is natural language, not regimented formal languages; it minimizes any revision to our semantic concepts; it respects as far as possible Tarski's intuition that natural languages are universal; it responds adequately to the threat of revenge paradoxes; and it preserves classical logic and semantics. Simmons draws out the consequences of the singularity theory for deflationary views of our semantic concepts, and concludes that if we accept the singularity theory, we must reject deflationism. (shrink)

This dissertation is a critical examination of dialetheism, the view that there are true contradictions. Dialetheism's proponents argue that adopting the view will allow us to solve hitherto unsolved problems, including the well-known logical paradoxes. ;Dialetheism faces three kinds of challenge. Challenges of the first kind put in doubt the intrinsic coherence of dialetheism. It can be claimed, for example, that it is incoherent for a claim to be both true and false; that claims known to be false cannot be (...) accepted; that claims known to be false cannot be rationally accepted; and that dialetheism entails the falsity of some of its own theoretical claims. The second kind of challenge concerns the use of paraconsistent logics, which dialetheists must adopt on pain of accepting the truth of every proposition. I examine a number of paraconsistent logics, and conclude that either they come at an unacceptably high price or they do not support the dialetheist project. ;I devote most attention to the third kind of challenge, according to which dialetheism fails to provide the promised solutions to the paradoxes and other previously intractable problems, and so we lose the major motivation for the theory. Proponents claim that dialetheism allows for the solution of numerous problems, particularly in metaphysics, law, and logic. In the case of metaphysics, it is claimed that dialetheism allows us to deal with puzzles involving change, vagueness, and motion. However, I argue that the proposed solution does not eliminate the old metaphysical problems, and in fact gives rise to new ones. In the case of law, it is claimed that dialetheism can allow us to deal with legal contradiction. I argue there are more plausible means of solving such conflicts. The strongest case for dialetheism is that it allows us to solve logical and semantic paradoxes of self-reference, some of which have endured for well over two thousand years. I construct a paradox that the dialetheist cannot accommodate, and which shows that dialetheism never provided a solution to the paradoxes at all, even in their more familiar forms. (shrink)

I argue for an account of semantic paradox that requires minimal logical revision. I first consider a phenomenon that is common to the paradoxes of definability, Russell’s paradox and the Liar. The phenomenon—which I call Repetition—is this: given a paradoxical expression, we can go on to produce a semantically unproblematic expression composed of the very same words. I argue that Kripke’s and Field’s theories of truth make heavy weather of Repetition, and suggest a simpler contextual account. I go on to (...) outline a ‘singularity’ theory of semantical predicates in the spirit of remarks of Gödel. According to this theory, ‘denotes’, ‘extension’ and ‘true’ are context-sensitive expression that apply almost everywhere on a given occasion of use, except for certain singular points. I then turn to revenge paradoxes, and argue that even the dialetheist is subject to revenge. I then examine how the singularity theory responds to revenge. (shrink)

Consider the following argument written on the board in room 227: 1 = 1. So, the argument on the board in room 227 is not valid. This argument generates a paradox. The aim of this paper is to present a resolution of this paradox and related paradoxes of validity, including a version of the Curry paradox. The proposal stresses the close connections between these validity paradoxes and paradoxes of truth and paradoxes of denotation. So a more general aim is to (...) provide a unified response to semantic paradox. The positive proposal is in part inspired by a brief, tantalizing suggestion of Gödel’s, that the paradoxes might appear “as something analogous to dividing by zero”—so that the concept of validity, for example, is everywhere applicable except for certain singular points or singularities. A second central claim is that ‘valid’ is a context-sensitive predicate. The key notions of this contextual-singularity theory are presented and applied to a variety of cases. Any purported solution to paradox must deal with the phenomenon of revenge, and a response to revenge is outlined. The paper closes with remarks about the accommodation of Tarski’s claim that natural languages are universal. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead and Emmanuel Levinas are not often considered together in the contemporary philosophical literature. There are clearly sensible reasons for this. While Whitehead is a systematic thinker who explicitly engages in metaphysical philosophy within the tradition of process thought and who does not focus primarily on ethics, Levinas is resistant to systematic metaphysics and works within the phenomenological tradition in order to argue that ethics is first philosophy. Despite these significant points of contrast between Whitehead and Levinas, in (...) this paper we argue that the two might stand as resources for each other in various ways. Since this paper is meant to be explorative and suggestive rather than comprehensive and conclusive, we argue for just two possible points of resonance between these important philosophers: (1) Both Levinas and Whitehead develop an account of selfhood that is intrinsically relational and concerned with responsibility—we term this account “Ethical Subjectivity;” and (2) Both Levinas and Whitehead operate according to what we call a “Hermeneutics of the Other” that stresses epistemic humility and dialogical openness. (shrink)

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In this paper, I raise some interconnected concerns for Paul Horwich’s minimal theory of truth, framed by these three questions: How should the minimal theory be formulated? How does the minimal theory address the liar paradox? What is the explanatory role of the concept of truth? I conclude that we cannot be linguistic or conceptual deflationists about truth.

A Curry paradox about truth is generated by the following sentence, written on the board in room 101:If the sentence on the board in room 101 is true then 1 ≠ 1.A Curry paradox about validity is generated by the following argument, written on the board in room 102:The argument on the board in room 102 is valid. Therefore, 1 ≠ 1.Though the sentence and the argument generate Curry paradoxes, they also generate more basic paradoxes, in a sense to be (...) made clear. I argue that if we solve these more basic paradoxes, we have solutions to both kinds of Curry paradox. The positive proposal is in part inspired by a brief remark of Gödel’s, that the paradoxes might appear “as something analogous to dividing by zero”—so that the concepts of truth and validity, for example, are everywhere applicable except for certain singular points or singularities. A second central claim is that 'true' and 'valid' are context-sensitive predicates. This contextual-singularity approach to the Curry paradoxes applies also to other paradoxes of truth, validity, denotation, and predicate-extension. So a more general aim of the paper is to provide a unified response to semantic paradox. (shrink)

In this paper I present two new paradoxes, a definability paradox (related to the paradoxes of Berry, Richard and König), and a paradox about extensions (related to Russell’s paradox). However, unlike the familiar definability paradoxes and Russell’s paradox, these new paradoxes involve no self-reference or circularity.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Semantic Paradoxes: Some Proposals Sets and Extensions Three Paradoxes A Contextual Approach A Singularity Proposal Universality.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The lecture that we have heard consists of excerpts from Professor Stanley’s forthcoming book Knowledge and Interest, and it consists of two parts, a messy part and a clean part; the messy part is from the book’s introduction, which describes the “central data that is at issue in this debate,” and the clean part is from Chapter 7, which presents an interesting criticism of a semantical theory of knowledge-attribution sentences that makes their truth-conditions relative to non-time-world circumstances of evaluation, e.g. (...) to a judgment-maker at a time. There is a nice discussion of Peter Lasersohn’s semantical views, with kudos, bricks, and bats to Mark Richard, Jeff King, Gareth Evans, John Hawthorne, David Kaplan, and David Lewis. Though I found this discussion of great interest and would have welcomed more discussion of an earlier view of Jason Stanley’s in which “what is said” and “what is believed” can be used to refer to entities that are not propositional, e.g. semantic values that are neutral with respect to time and place, a view of Stanley’s of which I am a fan, I was more provoked by the messy part: the appeal to intuitive linguistic data employed by supporters of epistemological contextualism, e.g. Stewart Cohen, Keith De Rose, a time-slice of David Lewis, among others. I will focus on what Professor Stanley says about the data in his paper and not worry the scholarly question about their relation to other views. (shrink)

Description: Since its inception, the discussion surrounding Open Theism has been dominated by polemics. On crucial philosophical issues, Openness proponents have largely been devoted to explicating the underlying framework and logical arguments supporting their perspective against competing theological and philosophical perspectives. As a result, very little constructive work has been done on the interconnections between Open Theism and the natural sciences. Given the central place of sciences in today's world, any perspective that hopes to have a broad impact must necessarily (...) address such disciplines in a sustained and constructive manner. To date such engagements from the Openness perspective have been rare. God in an Open Universe addresses this deficiency. This book demonstrates that Open Theism makes a distinctive and highly fruitful contribution to the conversation and constructive work occurring between philosophy, theology, and the sciences. The various essays explore subjects ranging from physics to prayer, from special relativity to divine providence, from metaphysics to evolution, and from space-time to God. All who work at the intersection of theology and the sciences will benefit greatly from these essays that break new ground in this important conversation. Endorsements: ""These essays present what is, in my view, the most promising development in theological thinking in our time, and they do so in a way that is both scholarly and accessible. The book is a must for anyone interested in Christian faith and in science."" -Keith Ward University of Oxford ""Open theists affirm the same openness of the future that religious believers assume when they pray and almost all humans assume when they act. The open future is intuitive; but can it be rigorously defended? God in an Open Universe shows that it can. Open theism has always been an attractive view of God; now it becomes a philosophically rigorous one as well. -Philip Clayton Claremont School of Theology About the Contributor(s): William Hasker is Profesor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington University. He is the author of numerous articles and five books, including The Emergent Self and The Triumph of God Over Evil. Thomas Jay Oord is Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Defining Love and Creation Made Free. Dean Zimmerman is Professor in the philosophy department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is editor or co-editor of several books, including (with Peter van Inwagen) Persons: Human and Divine. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

Keith Ward is right in Christ and the Cosmos that “the idea of God as a sort of society is a bad idea”. Christian theology would make better sense if Christians did not say God is comprised of three persons, each with distinct centers of consciousness, distinct relations, distinct wills, and so on. This formulation of the Trinity is more tritheistic than monotheistic. I argue that for a host of reasons, Christians should conceive of the Trinity as one God (...) who instantiates in three forms. I also suggest Christians would be wise to say God is essentially loving and essentially related to creation. (shrink)

_ Semantic Singularities: Paradoxes of Reference, Predication and Truth _ By SimmonsKeithOxford University Press, 2018. x + 250 pp.

Anarchist political philosophers normally include in their theories (or implicitly rely upon) a vision of a social life very different than the life experienced by most persons today. Theirs is a vision of autonomous, noncoercive, productive interaction among equals, liberated from and without need for distinctively political institutions, such as formal legal systems or governments or the state. This "positive" part of anarchist theories, this vision of the good social life, will be discussed only indirectly in this essay. Rather, I (...) want to focus here on the "negative" side of anarchism, on its general critique of the state or its more limited critique of the specific kinds of political arrangements within which most residents of modern political societies live. Even more specifically, I will center my discussion on one particular version of this anarchist critique - the version that is part of the theory now commonly referred to as "philosophical anarchism". Philosophical anarchism has been much discussed by political philosophers in recent years. But it has not, I think, been very carefully defined or adequately understood. My object here will be to clear the ground for a fair evaluation of philosophical anarchism, by offering a more systematic account of the nature of the theory and of possible variants of the theory, and by responding to the most frequent objections to the theory. I hope by this effort to present philosophical anarchism as a more attractive, or at least a less obviously flawed, political philosophy. (shrink)

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust -- despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing a growing (...) need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides. In a new foreword to this edition of The Silent World of Doctor and Patient , Alexander Morgan Capron outlines the changes in medical ethics practice that have occurred since the book was first published in 1984, paying particular attention to the hotly debated issues of physician-assisted suicide and informed consent in managed care. (shrink)

In this impressive second edition of Theory of Knowledge, Keith Lehrer introduces students to the major traditional and contemporary accounts of knowing. Beginning with the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Lehrer explores the truth, belief, and justification conditions on the way to a thorough examination of foundation theories of knowledge,the work of Platinga, externalism and naturalized epistemologies, internalism and modern coherence theories, contextualism, and recent reliabilist and causal theories. Lehrer gives all views careful examination and concludes (...) that external factors must be matched by appropriate internal factors to yield knowledge. This match of internal and external factors follows from Lehrer’s new coherence theory of undefeated justification. In addition to doing justice to the living epistemological traditions, the text smoothly integrates several new lines that will interest scholars. Also, a feature of special interest is Lehrer’s concept of a justification game.This second edition of Theory of Knowledge is a thoroughly revised and updated version that contains several completely new chapters. Written by a well-known scholar and contributor to modern epistemology, this text is distinguished by clarity of structure, accessible writing, and an elegant mix of traditional material, contemporary ideas, and well-motivated innovation. (shrink)

Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different fundamental ways of being. Trenton Merricks has recently raised three objections to combining pluralism with a generic way of being enjoyed by absolutely everything there is: first, that the resulting view contradicts the pluralist’s core intuition; second, that it is especially vulnerable to the charge—due to Peter van Inwagen—that it posits a difference in being where there is simply a difference in kind; and, third, that it is in tension with various (...) historically influential motivations for pluralism. I reply to each of these objections in turn. My replies will help to bring out the true nature of the pluralist’s basic commitments. (shrink)

Pessimism is, roughly, the view that life is not worth living. In chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer provides an oft-neglected argument for this view. The argument is that a life is worth living only if it does not contain any uncompensated evils; but since all our lives happen to contain such evils, none of them are worth living. The now standard interpretation of this argument (endorsed by Kuno Fischer and Christopher (...) Janaway) proceeds from the claim that the value—or rather valuelessness—of life’s goods makes compensation impossible. But this interpretation is neither philosophically attractive nor faithful to the text. In this paper, I develop and defend an alternative interpretation (suggested by Wilhelm Windelband and Mark Migotti) according to which it is instead the actual temporal arrangement of life’s goods and evils that makes compensation impossible. (shrink)

The eminent philosopher Keith Lehrer offers an original and distinctively personal view of central aspects of the human condition, such as reason, knowledge, wisdom, autonomy, love, consensus, and consciousness. He argues that what is uniquely human is our capacity for evaluating our own mental states (such as beliefs and desires), and suggests that we have a system for such evaluation which allows the resolution of personal and interpersonal conflict. The keystone in this system is self-trust, on which reason, knowledge, (...) and wisdom are grounded. (shrink)

Examines the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience behind visual experience. Chapters on attention, illusions, aftereffects, binocular rivalry, hemispheric differences, attentional blink, agnosias and other disorders. Particular attention paid to consciouseness. The systematic review of key topics and the multitude of perspectives make this book an ideal primary or ancillary text for graduate courses in perception, vision, consciousness, or philosophy of mind.

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gansta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black (...) Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender. (shrink)

While moral arguments for vegetarianism have been explored in great depth, the arguments for veganism seem less clear. Although many animals used for milk and eggs are forced to live miserable lives on factory farms, it’s possible to raise animals as food resources on farms where the animals are treated more humanely and never slaughtered. Under more humane conditions, do we harm animals to use them for food? I argue that, even under humane conditions, using animals for food typically harms (...) animals by restricting their freedom. My argument raises an important question about the extent to which animals are harmed when their freedom is restricted. On one view, it is possible to restrict animals’ freedom without harming them so long as we don’t make them suffer. This view underestimates the value of freedom for animals. Even if animals aren’t made to suffer, restricting their freedom can harm them insofar as it deprives them of freely pursuing their enjoyments in life. My argument has implications for not only the ethics of using animals as food resources but also the ethics of using animals in zoos and circuses. I examine these implications and also consider what we should do with farm animals if we cease using them for food. (shrink)

The distinction between qualitative and non-qualitative properties should be familiar from discussions of the principle of the identity of indiscernibles: two otherwise exactly similar individuals, Castor and Pollux, might share all their qualitative properties yet differ with respect to their non-qualitative properties—for while Castor has the property being identical to Castor, Pollux does not. But while this distinction is familiar, there has not been much critical attention devoted to spelling out its precise nature. I argue that the class of non-qualitative (...) properties is broader than it is often taken to be. When properly construed, it will not only include properties such as being identical to Castor, which somehow make reference to particular individuals, it will also include more general properties such as identity, composition, set membership, as well as various peculiarly ontological properties. Given that some of these more general properties help to explain objective similarity, we have reason to believe that there are fundamental non-qualitative properties. (shrink)