Epistemology needs to account for the success of science. In True Enough, Catherine Elgin argues that a veritist epistemology is inadequate to this task. She advocates shifting epistemology’s focus away from true belief and toward understanding, and further, jettisoning truth from its privileged place in epistemological theorizing. Pace Elgin, I argue that epistemology’s accommodation of science does not require rejecting truth as the central epistemic value. Instead, it requires understanding veritism in an ecumenical way that acknowledges a rich (...) array of truth-oriented values. ¶ In place of veritism, Elgin offers a holistic epistemology that takes epistemic norms to have their genesis in our collective practice of deliberation. The acceptability of epistemic norms turns on epistemic responsibility, as opposed to reliability, and truth-conduciveness is rejected as the standard of evaluation for arguments and methods of inquiry. I argue, by way of an extended discussion of a high-profile and controversial criminal case, that this leaves epistemic practices and their products inadequately grounded. I offer an alternative, veritistic account of epistemic norms that retains a modified version of truth-conduciveness as a standard of evaluation. However, my alternative account of epistemic norms is congenial to Elgin’s holistic epistemology, and, I suggest, could be incorporated within it. (shrink)

The essay focuses on the rethinking of the conceptual circle normativity-truth-validity as regards its projection on the theory of law. Starting from the perspective of the “law in action”, that is to say by considering the experience/behaviour of the “common man”, the classical distinction between truth-validity can be rediscussed. This perspective is based on the concept of “common sense”: it is a very complex dimension composed by different strata and entails a new meditation on the pair “deontic-psychological” also (...) in light of some Edmund Husserl’s clues. Accordingly, it is possible to grasp the pair truth-validity “in action” (i.e. within the common legal experience), in order to propose some “open” conclusions concerning the dimensions of law as well as the legal theory. (shrink)

According to the practicality requirement, there could be truths about what people have reason to do only if people’s motivating states could be, in an appropriate sense, either correct or incorrect. Yet according to the Humean theory of motivation, people’s motivating states are a species of desire, and these desires are not a species of belief, being neither identical to nor entailed by them; and according to the standard view of desire, P’s desire to is, at bottom, a disposition to (...) act in whatever ways she believes will increase her chances of -ing. As there is no obvious sense in which such disposition are aiming to get P’s reasons right, they seem incapable of satisfying the practicality requirement and scepticism about normative truths seems to follow. I argue, first, that this sceptical conclusion is best avoided, not by rejecting either the practicality requirement or the Humean theory of motivation, but rather by rejecting the standard view of desire, and, second, that this is best done by endorsing a holistic view, according to which the contents of people’s desires depend importantly, though not essentially, on the contents of their normative beliefs. (shrink)

This paper raises a dilemma for Skorupski’s meta-normative outlook in The Domain of Reasons and explores some escape routes, recommending a more thoroughgoing Kantianism as the best option. §1 argues that we cannot plausibly combine Skorupski’s spontaneity-based epistemology of normativity with his cognition-independent view of normative truth. §§2–4 consider whether we should keep the epistemology and revise the metaphysics, opting for constructivism. While Skorupski’s negative case for his spontaneity-based epistemology is found wanting, it is suggested that a (...) better argument for keeping the epistemology and switching to Kantian constructivism can be given from a thesis he finds appealing—viz., ‘cognitive internalism’. While this premise is not, it is argued, obviously true, the view it supports does provide a good way to undergird Skorupski’s most interesting rationale for his reasons-first approach. (shrink)

Truth and Norms develops a novel pluralistic view of the normative role that truth exerts on judgements. This view, labeled normative alethic pluralism, provides the best explanation of the variable normative significance that disagreement exhibits in different areas of discourse and is fully compatible with a minimalist conception of truth.

It has been argued that deflationary theories of truth stumble over the normativity of truth. This paper maintains that the normativity objection does not pose problems to at least one version of deflationism, minimalism. The rest of the paper discusses truth-related norms, showing that either they do not hold or they are not troublesome for deflationism.

It is commonly believed that populist politics and social media pose a serious threat to our concept of truth. Philosophical pragmatists, who are typically thought to regard truth as merely that which is 'helpful' for us to believe, are sometimes blamed for providing the theoretical basis for the phenomenon of 'post-truth'. In this book, Sami Pihlström develops a pragmatist account of truth and truth-seeking based on the ideas of William James, and defends a thoroughly pragmatist (...) view of humanism which gives space for a sincere search for truth. By elaborating on James's pragmatism and the 'will to believe' strategy in the philosophy of religion, Pihlström argues for a Kantian-inspired transcendental articulation of pragmatism that recognizes irreducible normativity as a constitutive feature of our practices of pursuing the truth. James himself thereby emerges as a deeply Kantian thinker. (shrink)

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (shrink)

That truth provides the standard for believing appears to be a platitude, one which dovetails with the idea that in some sense belief aims only at the truth. In recent years, however, an increasing number of prominent philosophers have suggested that knowledge provides the standard for believing, and so that belief aims only at knowledge. In this paper, I examine the considerations which have been put forward in support of this suggestion, considerations relating to lottery beliefs, Moorean beliefs, (...) the criticism and defence of belief, and the value of knowledge. I argue that those considerations do not give us reason to give up the truth view in favour of the knowledge view and, moreover, that reflection on those considerations gives us some reason to reject the knowledge view. Thus, I conclude, we can continue to the take the apparent platitude at face value. (shrink)

We have claimed that truth norms cannot provide genuine guidance for belief formation. Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen argues that our ‘no guidance argument’ fails because it conflates certain psychological states an agent must have in order to apply the truth norm with the condition under which the norm prescribes forming certain beliefs. We spell out the no guidance argument in more detail and show that there is no such conflation.

Invited contribution to The Aim of Belief, a special issue of Teorema, guest-edited by J. Zalabardo.

Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss argue that any truth norm for belief, linking the correctness of believing p with the truth of p, is bound to be uninformative, since applying the norm to determine the correctness of a belief as to whether p, would itself require forming such a belief. I argue that this conflates the condition under which the norm deems beliefs correct, with the psychological state an agent must be in to apply the norm. I also (...) show that since the truth norm conflicts with other possible norms that clearly are informative, the truth norm must itself be informative. (shrink)

This paper advances our understanding of the norms of assertion in two ways. First, I evaluate recent studies claiming to discredit an important earlier finding which supports the hypothesis that assertion has a factive norm. In particular, I evaluate whether it was due to stimuli mentioning that a speaker’s evidence was fallible. Second, I evaluate the hypothesis that assertion has a truth-insensitive standard of justification. In particular, I evaluate the claim that switching an assertion from true to false, while (...) holding all else objectively constant, is irrelevant to attributions of justification. Two pre-registered experiments provide decisive evidence against each claim. In the first experiment, switching from mentioning to not mentioning fallibility made no difference to assertability attributions, thereby disproving the criticism concerning fallibility. By contrast, switching an assertion from true to false decreased the rate of assertability attribution from over 90% to less than 20%, thereby replicating and vindicating the original finding supporting a factive norm. In the second experiment, switching an assertion from true to false decreased the rate of justification attribution from over 80 to 10%, thereby undermining the hypothesis that assertion’s standard of justification is truth-insensitive. The second experiment also demonstrates that perspective-taking influences attributions of justification, and it provides initial evidence that the standard of justification for assertion is stricter than the standard for belief. (shrink)

In a paper in this journal, I defend the view that truth is the fundamental norm for assertion and, in doing so, reject the view that knowledge is the fundamental norm for assertion. In a recent response, Littlejohn raises a number of objections against my arguments. In this reply, I argue that Littlejohn’s objections are unsuccessful.

In our former works, for a given concept of reduction, we study the following hypothesis: “For a random oracle A, with probability one, the degree of the one-query tautologies with respect to A is strictly higher than the degree of A.” In our former works (Suzuki in Kobe J. Math. 15, 91–102, 1998; in Inf. Comput. 176, 66–87, 2002; in Arch. Math. Logic 44, 751–762), the following three results are shown: The hypothesis for p-T (polynomial-time Turing) reduction is equivalent to (...) the assertion that the probabilistic complexity class R is not equal to NP; The hypothesis for p-tt (polynomial-time truth-table) reduction implies that P is not NP; The hypothesis holds for each of the following: disjunctive reduction, conjunctive reduction, and p-btt (polynomial-time bounded-truth-table) reduction. In this paper, we show the following three results: (1) Let c be a positive real number. We consider a concept of truth-table reduction whose norm is at most c times size of input, where for a relativized propositional formula F, the size of F denotes the total number of occurrences of propositional variables, constants and propositional connectives. Then, our main result is that the hypothesis holds for such tt-reduction, provided that c is small enough. How small c can we take so that the above holds? It depends on our syntactic convention on one-query tautologies. In our setting, the statement holds for all c < 1. (2) The hypothesis holds for monotone truth-table reduction (also called positive reduction). (3) Dowd (in Inf. Comput. 96, 65–76, 1992) shows a polynomial upper bound for the minimum sizes of forcing conditions associated with a random oracle. We apply the above result (1), and get a linear lower bound for the sizes. (shrink)

It is widely held that the normativity of truth and meaning puts a severe constraint on acceptable theories of these phenomena. This constraint is so severe, some would say, as to rule out purely ‘naturalistic’ or ‘factual’ accounts of them. In particular, it is commonly supposed that the deflationary view of truth and the use conception of meaning, in so far as they are articulated in entirely non-normative terms, must for that reason be inadequate.

Although I agree with Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) criticisms of is-ought and ought-is fallacies, I criticize their rejection of normativism on two grounds: (1) Contrary to E&E's assumption, not every normative system of reasoning consists of formal rules. (2) E&E assume that norms of reasoning are grounded on intuition or authority, whereas in contemporary epistemology they have to be justified, primarily by their truth-conduciveness.

This paper tries to say in what sense truth is a norm, a thesis that Donald Davidson, whose view are examined, denies. After skteching his conception of rationality, it is argued that truth is a norm in only the sense that we ought to believe what we believe is true, not that we all to believe everything which is true. This minimal norm of truth is isolated and defended.

Attention to the conversational role of alethic terms seems to dominate, and even sometimes exhaust, many contemporary analyses of the nature of truth. Yet, because truth plays a role in judgment and assertion regardless of whether alethic terms are expressly used, such analyses cannot be comprehensive or fully adequate. A more general analysis of the nature of truth is therefore required – one which continues to explain the significance of truth independently of the role alethic terms (...) play in discourse. We undertake such an analysis in this paper; in particular, we start with certain elements from Kant and Frege, and develop a construct of truth as a normative modality of cognitive acts (e.g., thought, judgment, assertion). Using the various biconditional T-schemas to sanction the general passage from assertions to (equivalent) assertions of truth, we then suggest that an illocutionary analysis of truth can contribute to its locutionary analysis as well, including the analysis of diverse constructions involving alethic terms that have been largely overlooked in the philosophical literature. Finally, we briefly indicate the importance of distinguishing between alethic and epistemic modalities. (shrink)

Much contemporary thinking about language is animated by the idea that the core function of language is to represent how the world is and that therefore the notion of representation should play a fundamental explanatory role in any explanation of language and language use. Leading thinkers in the field explore various ways this idea may be challenged as well as obstacles to developing various forms of anti-representationalism. Particular attention is given to deflationary accounts of truth, the role of language (...) in expressing mental states, and the normative and the natural as they relate to issues of representation. The chapters further various fundamental debates in metaphysics--for example, concerning the question of finding a place for moral properties in a naturalistic world-view--and illuminate the relation of the recent neo-pragmatist revival to the expressivist stream in analytic philosophy of language. (shrink)

I argue that, if belief is subject to a norm of truth, then that norm is evaluative rather than prescriptive in character. No prescriptive norm of truth is both plausible as a norm that we are subject to, and also capable of explaining what the truth norm of belief is supposed to explain. Candidate prescriptive norms also have implausible consequences for the normative status of withholding belief. An evaluative norm fares better in all of these respects. (...) I propose an evaluative account according to which the goodness of true belief is, in Geach's sense, attributive rather than predicative. (shrink)

Ferrari's book takes on the commendable project of developing a systematic account of truth, normativity, and disagreement, according to which truth plays a var.

According to moderate truth pluralism, there is a single property that qualifies as truth for any domain whatsoever. However, propositions concerning different domains may possess this single truth property in virtue of different properties. Empirical propositions may be true in virtue of corresponding to reality while legal propositions may be true in virtue of cohering with the body of law. Moderate pluralists claim that truth is a completely general doxastic norm: for any p, the belief that (...) p is correct if and only if p is true—regardless of what domain p pertains to. Moderate pluralists additionally claim that domain-specific properties are local doxastic norms which serve as standards of correctness within their respective domains, and that they do so because they are ways of being true and truth is a general, doxastic norm. This paper offers a grounding-theoretic account of the metaphysics of moderate pluralism and uses it as platform for developing a criticism of the moderate pluralist’s account of doxastic normativity. Two strategies are explored as potential responses to the criticism, but are ultimately dismissed. (shrink)

Truth and meaning each have evaluative import. However, contrary to Dummett, Gibbard, Brandom, and many others, these notions are not constitutively normative — they are not themselves evaluative concepts. One element of this argument is a discussion of why true belief is desirable. Another element is a demonstration — in case meaning is a matter of implicitly following rules for the use of words — that such rule following can be analyzed in terms that are purely naturalistic.

Truth seems to be an indispensable element of authority which presents itself as being based on more than just power and efficiency. In the domain of law,there is not only and primarily the problem of establishing the truth about the facts which are to be judged; there is also the problem of norms—does their authority rest solely on the act of establishing them, or is there “something behind”, a truth which contributes to the strength of law, and (...) which provides legitimacy to both legislator and to the legal norms themselves. In theoretical reflection, the very possibility of talking about true norms or true evaluations is under challenge, and this view dominates in the academic education of lawyers and other professionals. At the basis of this project lies the conviction that the problem of true norms, and the more general problem of the place of truth in law, is worth re-examining. In the course of such a re-examination, it is also worth returning to certain points in the tradition of thinking about the foudations of law. In the tradition recalled by the papers presented here—by both Italian and Polish authors—a prominent place is occupied by Polish thinkers such as Leon Petrażycki, Czesław Znamierowski, and Zygmunt Ziembiński. The book consists of three major parts. The titles—Tradition, Theory, Practice mark important points of reference in the reflection on truth in the context of law. The contributions relate to these points in different degrees, and each, though placed in one of these parts, also refer to the others. (shrink)

If language and thought are to be taken as objective, they must respond to how the world is. I propose to explain this responsiveness in terms of conditions of correction, more precisely, by taking thoughts and linguistic utterances to be assessible as true or false. Furthermore, the paper is committed to a form of quietism according to which the very same thing that can be (truly) thought or expressed is the case: ‘soft facts’ as opposed to hard, free-standing facts, independent (...) of any possible rational activity of grasping them. (shrink)

Siamo ormai lontani dalla stagione in cui la forza propulsiva della “svolta linguistica” si impose come tendenza dominante nel dibattito filosofico. Da varie angolazioni si è potuto parlare negli ultimi anni di pictorial turn come antidoto all’egemonia del paradigma linguistico in filosofia. Il volume Verità, Immagine, Normatività. Truth, Image, and Normativity non si inserisce direttamente in questa nuova tendenza, ma ruota comunque intorno a questioni che derivano dal medesimo sfondo. I 24 saggi qui raccolti tengono conto dei diversi ruoli (...) che le immagini possono svolgere, a seconda che si focalizzi la loro dimensione descrittiva o normativa, e indagano alcuni aspetti del rapporto tra immagine e linguaggio. Questi problemi di filosofia dell’immagine, intesa sia come immagine cognitiva sia come immagine grafica, costituiscono il fil rouge di questo volume. Una tale riflessione sui linguaggi figurati e sulla comunicazione visiva non-linguistica costringe a riformulare in termini nuovi le grandi domande concernenti le tradizionali nozioni di verità, oggettività, normatività, consenso e persuasione. (shrink)

Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. Philosophers have recently built an impressive case that the norm of assertion is factive. That is, you should make an assertion only if it is true. Thus far the case for a factive norm of assertion been based on observational data. This paper adds experimental evidence in favor of a factive norm from six studies. In these studies, an assertion’s truth value dramatically affects whether people think it should (...) be made. Whereas nearly everyone agreed that a true assertion supported by good evidence should be made, most people judged that a false assertion supported by good evidence should not be made. The studies also suggest that people are consciously aware of criteria that guide their evaluation of assertions. Evidence is also presented that some intuitive support for a non-factive norm of assertion comes from a surprising tendency people have to misdescribe cases of blameless rule-breaking as cases where no rule is broken. (shrink)

My answer will be ‘no’. And I’ll defend it by: distinguishing a concept’s having normative import from its being functionally normative; sketching a method for telling whether or not a concept is of the latter sort; responding to the antideflationist, Dummettian argument in favor of the conclusion that truth is functionally normative; proceeding to address a less familiar route to that conclusion—one that’s consistent with deflationism about truth, but that depends on the further assumption that (...) meaning is intrinsically normative; and arguing that this further assumption is mistaken. (shrink)

An important challenge for non-naturalistic moral realism is that it seems hard to reconcile it with the (purported) fact of our reliability in forming correct moral beliefs. Some philosophers (including Cuneo and Shafer-Landau) have argued that we can appeal to conceptual truths about our moral concepts in order to respond to this challenge. Call this “the conceptual strategy”. The conceptual strategy faces a problem: it isn’t clear that the relevant moral concepts are “extension-revealing” in the way that the conceptual strategy (...) needs them to be. A further problem stems from the tradeoff between the “extension-revealing” and the “authority-revealing” aspects of normative concepts. To underscore the import of these issues, I discuss a version of the reliability challenge that concerns authoritative normative facts in ethics (rather than moral facts). The problems I identify for the conceptual strategy carry over to versions of it that are used in response to a range of epistemological arguments in ethics that (like the reliability challenge) are tied to Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma” argument. These problems also bear on the prospects of the conceptual strategy for explaining our (purported) reliability in other domains (e.g., in epistemology, law, and politics). (shrink)

The main goal in this paper is to outline and defend a form of Relativism, under which truth is absolute but assertibility is not. I dub such a view Norm-Relativism in contrast to the more familiar forms of Truth-Relativism. The key feature of this view is that just what norm of assertion, belief, and action is in play in some context is itself relative to a perspective. In slogan form: there is no fixed, single norm for assertion, belief, (...) and action. Upshot: 'knows' is neither context-sensitive nor perspectival. (shrink)

The choice of connectives for many valued propositional logics suitable for theoretical and applicational interests in most cases is an open problem up to now. We will not offer a general solution here, but support the point of view of some recent developments in fuzzy set theory that the triangular norms – t-norms for short – of Schweizer/Sklar [3] and the ϕ-operators of Pedrycz [2] represent quite general classes of connectives at least for many valued logics with truth value (...) set the real interval [0,1] . Special classes of t-norms and general properties of them have been discussed in some papers just recently, e.g. by Dombi [1], Weber [4], Yager [5] to mention only a few of them. (shrink)

The text examines the status of the truth in the legal norms, trying to answer the questions of whether they can be subject to a truth assessment and, if such an assessment is possible, how a truth value can be attributed to legal norms. To achieve this goal, first of all, the text discusses some basic linguistic conceptions concerning the nature and truth of legal norms and subsequently, a a complex approach is being proposed for attributing (...) truth-value to legal norms. On On the one hand, the latter’s being studied by the methods of deontic logic and theory of possible worlds, and on the other hand, their relation to truth is being explained by semantic anti-realism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the normativity of truth and logic. The paper has three objectives. First, I argue that logic is normative for thought in the sense of underwriting instrumental rationality. Logic is a good instrument for achieving truth, the goal of cognition. In recent work, Filippo Ferrari has argued that the normative nature of truth may vary across domains. My second aim is to extend this idea to logic, against the background of the idea that (...) logic serves to underwrite instrumental rationality. The third objective is to further develop Ferrari’s framework of normative alethic variability. I do so through a discussion of the normative problem of mixed compounds: the challenge of providing a principled account of the normativity of compounds with constituents whose respective normative profiles differ. I argue that the challenge can be met. Besides offering a solution to a major challenge, the response offered sheds new light on the normative variability framework: the truth of a single mixed compound may have different normative profiles across different ‘disagreement-realizers’. This feature of the view is rooted in a key commitment of the normative variability framework – namely, that disagreement and alethic normativity are intimately connected. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate how differences in approach to truth and logic (in particular, a deflationist vs. a substantivist approach to these fields) affect philosophers’ views concerning pluralism and normativity in these fields. My perspective on truth and logic is largely epistemic, focusing on the role of truth in knowledge (rather than on the use of the words “true” and “truth” in natural language), and my reference group includes Carnap (1934), Harman (1986), Horwich (1990), Wright (...) (1992), Beall and Restall (2006), Field (2009), Lynch (2009), and Sher (2016a).1 Whenever possible, I focus on positive rather than negative views on the issues involved, although in some cases this is not possible. (shrink)

By posing the question of what it is that marks the difference between something like terrorism and something like civil society, Brassington argues that commonsense moral arguments against terrorism or political violence imply that the modern democratic polis might also be morally unjustifiable. In exploring this problem, Brassington identifies a tension between the primary values of truth and normativity in the standard accounts of moral theory.

Through constructive arguments covering the principal topics and controversies in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, Autonomy and Normativity demonstrates how truth, right and beauty can retain universal validity without succumbing to the mistaken Enlightenment strategy of seeking foundations for rational autonomy. Presenting a compact, yet comprehensive statement of a powerful and provocative alternative to the reigning orthodoxies of current philosophical debate, Richard Winfield employs Hegelian techniques and presents a radical and systematic critique of the work of mainstream thinkers including: Kant, (...) Rawls, Husserl and Habermas. This book offers an invaluable resource for students of both analytic and continental philosophical traditions, and related areas of law, social theory and aesthetics. (shrink)

Many take the lesson of the paradoxes to be that we ought to impose some form of logical revision. It is argued here that this kind of move should not be taken lightly.

Crispin Wright has argued that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident but non-co-extensive norms of assertoric practice and that this fact tends to inflate deflationary theories of truth. Wright’s inflationary argument has generated much discussion in the literature. By contrast, relatively little has been said about the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms. This paper will examine that claim. Wright’s argument for the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms is first (...) clearly presented. It is then suggested that the argument trades on an ambiguity in ‘justified’ and ‘warrantedly assertible’. Finally, it is argued that, once the ambiguity is removed, there is reason to reject the claim that truth and epistemic warrant are coincident norms of assertoric practice. One important result is that no epistemic theory of truth can satisfy what Wright takes to be a platitude about assertion. (shrink)

Some generic generalizations have both a descriptive and a normative reading. The generic sentence “Philosophers care about the truth”, for instance, can be read as describing what philosophers in fact care about, but can also be read as prescribing philosophers to care about the truth. On Leslie’s account, this generic sentence has two readings due to the polysemy of the kind term “philosopher”. In this paper, I first argue against this polysemy account of descriptive/normative generics. In (...) response, a contextualist semantic theory for generic sentences is introduced. Based on this theory, I argue that descriptive/normative generics are contextually underspecified. (shrink)

A proposal to account for the objectivity of thought and language in terms of identity between facts, meanings and contents is offered. Furthermore, their normativity is related to their world involving character. Both proposals are jointly quietist: they avoid philosophical theorizing that explains thought in terms of world or viceversa.

Sophists and rhetoricians like Gorgias are often accused of disregarding truth and rationality: their speeches seem to aim only at effective persuasion, and be constrained by nothing but persuasiveness itself. In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates behavioural responses in people. It has been argued that this perspective erodes the possibility of rationally assessing speeches by making persuasiveness the only norm, and persuasive power the only virtue, (...) of speech. Against this view, I show how Gorgias’ texts support a robust normativity of language that goes well beyond persuasion while remaining non-representational. Gorgias’ claims that a speech can be persuasive and false, or true and unpersuasive, reveal pragmatic, epistemic, and agonistic constraints on the validity of speech that are neither representational nor reducible to sheer persuasiveness. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that a norm of truth governs the propositional attitude of belief. According to one popular construal of normativity, normativity is prescriptive in nature. The prescriptive norm can be formulated either in terms of obligation or permission: one ought to or may believe that p just in case p is true. It has been argued that the obligation norm is jointly incompatible with the maxim ought implies can and the assumption that there exists some truth that (...) we cannot believe. The problem of the incompatible triad has motivated some to adopt the permissible norm of truth. I argue that the permissible norm faces an analogous problem of the incompatible triad. (shrink)

That it can explain the phenomenon of transparency, namely the fact that if you resolve whether p, you have thereby resolved whether to believe that p, was originally put forward as a great virtue of normativist conceptions of belief. However, non-normativists have convincingly shown that the permissive version of the truth norm of belief, which is one of the most plausible and promising versions of it, cannot in fact accommodate this phenomenon. Alarmed by this situation, in this paper I (...) re-assess the transparency phenomenon and its relation to different versions of the truth norm of belief. I argue that, contrary to how it appears, it is not even clear that the most tenable injunctive versions of the truth norm explain this phenomenon. I then argue that the transparency phenomenon consists of two distinct aspects which should be, but have not been, distinguished. What I call the ‘question-shifting’ aspect is explained by the truth norm, irrespective of how it is formulated, while what I call the ‘answer-shifting’ aspect is explanatorily empty and does not require any explanation, be it normative or otherwise. Therefore, understood properly, explaining transparency does remain a strength of normativist accounts of belief, and has no implications for which particular formulation of the truth norm we may adopt. (shrink)