The Problem of Universals and the Limits of Conceptual Analysis (original) (raw)
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A Useful Ambiguity in Truthmaker Theory
Proponents and critics of truthmaker maximalism (the notion that for every true proposition, there is a necessary something as that proposition's truthmaker) often neglect an ambiguity about ontological commitments in the theory, which results in needless debates over metaphysical presuppositions instead of needful discussion of truthmaker theory per se. The aim of this paper is to account for this problem, and expose a more defensible version of truthmaker theory, which will accommodate diverse metaphysical views, with a less problematic notion of correspondence for the truthmaking relation of truthmaker theory.
An Observation about Truth (with Implications for Meaning and Language) [PhD dissertation]
This dissertation is a philosophical analysis of the concept of truth. It is a development and defense of the “stratified” or “language-level” conception of truth, first advanced in Alfred Tarski’s 1933 monograph The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Although Tarski’s paper had seminal influence both in philosophy and in more technical disciplines, its central philosophical claim has not been generally accepted. This work has two central goals: (a) to give a detailed and analytic presentation of Tarski’s theory and the problems it faces; (b) to offer a solution to these problems and assess the philosophical significance of this solution. The essay is divided in two parts. Part One contains a detailed and analytic presentation and interpretation of the stratified conception of truth. The analysis contains several steps: (a) Crucial basic assumptions, such as the limitation to formalized languages and the requirement of explicit definitions, are stated explicitly, motivated, and their philosophical significance discussed. (b) The main negative result of the stratified conception, the impossibility of semantic closure and of a universal language, is given in detail and interpreted. (c) Tarski’s criterion for adequate truth definitions, known as Convention T, is stated and motivated. (d) The deep structure of Tarski-style truth definitions and the necessary conditions for their availability are analyzed. In particular, the philosophical significance of Tarski’s notion of “essential richness” is discussed. (e) Finally, several problems are raised for the stratified conception, chief among them the unity objection, according to which the stratified conception is not a viable analysis of the concept of truth, since (by (a) above) an analysis should take the form of a definition, and on the stratified conception different languages have different definitions. There is therefore no one analysis of the concept. Part Two is a development of answers to the problems raised at the end of Part One. The crux of the answer to the unity objection is that Convention T, the adequacy criterion, connects the many definitions of truth into a single concept. However, in order to fulfill that role Convention T must apply universally, and a universal language was shown to be impossible ((c) above). The task of Part Two is therefore to develop a mode of expression that allows the universal applicability of Convention T without commitment to a universal metalanguage. The procedure is as follows. (a) Convention T is formalized in order to isolate the place in which universal applicability is required. (b) A new expressive resource of “abstract generality” is developed. To this purpose a digression into the semantics of natural language indexicals is undertaken. David Kaplan’s thesis of the direct reference of indexicals is analyzed and a new formal system is proposed that embodies it. It is shown that this formal system expresses abstract generality. (c) The notion of abstract generality is adapted to languages without indexicals and it isviii shown that Convention T can be expressed without assuming a universal language. (d) A reconstrual of the task of concept analysis is proposed, which is a generalization of the answer to the unity objection. It is often complained against Tarski’s stratified conception of truth that it is of limited philosophical significance. In this work I show that, on the contrary, the problems it faces and the solutions that can be advanced to answer these problems have substantive philosophical consequences. The notion of abstract generality gives rise to a distinction between two fundamentally different modes of discourse: a universal but merely abstract methodological discourse on the one hand, and a concrete but inevitably restricted theoretical discourse on the other. This distinction has many important implications for our understanding of the concepts of truth, meaning and language.
2015
Many mereological propositions are true contingently, so we are entitled to ask why they are true. One frequently given type of answer to such questions evokes truth-makers, that is, entities in virtue of whose existence the propositions in question are true. However, even without endorsing the extreme view that all contingent propositions have truth-makers, it turns out to be puzzlingly hard to provide intuitively convincing candidate truth-makers for even a core class of basic mereological propositions. Part of the problem is that the relation of part to whole is ontologically intimate in a way reminiscent of identity. Such intimacy bespeaks a formal or internal relation, which typically requires no truth-makers beyond its terms. But truth-makers are held to necessitate their truths, so whence the contingency when A is part of B but need not be, or B need not have A as part? This paper addresses and attempts to disentangle the conundrum.
Introduction: truth and truth-making
2009
The aim of this essay is to provide a detailed and critical overview of the main topics and problems of the current debate concerning truth-making. In §1 I give a brief outline of the history of the theory of truth-making and in §2 I identify three central goals of such a theory. In §3 I introduce the truth-maker principle and the doctrines of truth-maker maximalism and truth-maker purism. Section 4 contains a discussion and critique of several attempts to justify the truth-maker principle and §5 introduces some distinctions that concern diff erent possible formal and ontological properties of the truth-making relation. In §6 I argue for the thesis that propositions conceived as certain kinds of abstract objects are the best candidates to fi ll the role of primary truth-bearers. Section 7 is about the explication of the truth-maker relation; I shall discuss and criticize a considerable number of the attempts at explication that have been made. In §8 I introduce further principles that may be combined with the truth-maker principle. It will be shown that some of these principles imply implausible consequences if they are combined with certain explications of the truth-maker principle. Section 9 is concerned with so-called supervenience principles concerning truth. I shall assess the claim that these principles are plausible replacements for the truthmaker principle. Section 10 contains four arguments against the thesis that a truth-maker theory may be conceived of as a theory of truth. It will be shown that at least two of these arguments constitute a deep challenge for a truth-maker theory of truth.
On some aspects of the concept of truth
1975
Two aspects of truth constitute the subject of investigation in this thesis. These two aspects arise in the dependence of truth on language and fact. A statement is true or false, as the case may be, jointly in virtue of what it means and of how things are. This double dependence . of truth on meaning and reality establishes prima facie interconnections between these notions, which I am here concerned to analyse. Consideration of these interconnections with respect to individual sentences suggests that truth is dependent on meaning. After all, we cannot begin to assess a statement as to its veracity unless we first understand it, that is to say, grasp its meaning. This claim is unexceptionable, but only from a vantage point which precludes a general understanding of the concepts involved. It quite leaves out of account the evident consideration that it is only in the context of a language that a collocation of symbols or sounds is endowed with sense- While it must be that, to dete...
Oxford Scholarship Online
This chapter considers a number of different ways to develop a semantics in which statements are evaluated at partial possibilities rather than possible worlds. These include the exact version of truth-maker semantics in which truth-makers are wholly relevant to the statements they make true, the inexact version in which they are relevant, but not necessarily wholly relevant, to the statements they make true, and the loose version, in which they need only necessitate the statements they make true, regardless of relevance. The chapter explores the question of how these different semantical schemes are related; and it argues for the surprising conclusion that classical logic can only be properly accommodated within the ‘relevantist’ version of these approaches by allowing possible worlds to be among the partial possibilities. Thus, whatever reasons there might be for adopting such a semantics, they should not include a distaste for possible worlds.