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Explicating Truth: Minimalism and Primitivism

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Abstract

This paper pursues two goals. The first is to show that Horwich's anti-primitivist version of minimalism must be rejected because, already for formal reasons, the truth-schema does not achieve a positive explication of any property of propositions. The second goal is to develop a more moderate primitivist version of minimalism according to which the truth-schema is admittedly powerless to underpin truth with something more basic but it still succeeds in giving a complete account of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition to be true.

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Greimann, D. Explicating Truth: Minimalism and Primitivism. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 31, 133–155 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008379518681

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