Truth and Its Nature (if Any)

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Past Masters on Truth

   1. Frege: Assertion, Truth and Meaning

      • Gary Kemp

      Pages 1-14

   2. Carnap, Syntax, and Truth

      • A. W. Carus

      Pages 15-35

   3. James’s Conception of Truth

      • Majeda Omar

      Pages 37-50

3. Tarski and Correspondence

   1. Semantic Conception of Truth as a Philosophical Theory

      • Jan Woleński

      Pages 51-65

   2. Truth, Correspondence, Satisfaction

      • Petr Kolář

      Pages 67-79

   3. Do We Need Correspondence Truth?

      • Frederick Stoutland

      Pages 81-90

   4. Tarskian Truth as Correspondence — Replies to Some Objections

      • Ilkka Niiniluoto

      Pages 91-104

4. The Substantiality of Truth

   1. The Centrality of Truth

      • Donald Davidson

      Pages 105-115

   2. Mapping the Structure of Truth: Davidson Contra Rorty

      • Jeff Malpas

      Pages 117-127

   3. The Explanatory Value of Truth Theories Embodying the Semantic Conception

      • Manuel García-Carpintero

      Pages 129-148

   4. Negative Truth and Knowledge

      • Vladimír Svoboda

      Pages 149-161

5. The Insubstantiality of Truth: The Pros and Cons of Deflationism

   1. Deflationary Truth, Aboutness and Meaning

      • Paul Horwich

      Pages 163-171

   2. The Substance of Deflation

      • Jerry Seligman

      Pages 173-186

   3. Does the Strategy of Austerity Work?

      • Edo Pivcevic

      Pages 187-201

   4. Rethinking the Concept of Truth: A Critique of Deflationism

      • Predrag Cicovacki

      Pages 203-221

The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth into an explicit definition (or explication) of the concept hence coalesced with the question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and ingenious move was to introduce a new concept, satisfaction, which could be, on the one hand, recursively defined, and which, on the other hand, straightforwardly yielded an explication of truth. A surprising 'by-product' of Tarski's effort to bring truth under control was the breathtaking finding that truth is in a precisely defined sense ineffable, that no non­ trivial language can contain a truth-predicate which would be adequate for the very 4 language . This implied that truth (and consequently semantic concepts to which truth appeared to be reducible) proved itself to be strangely 'language-dependent': we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a concept of truth applicable to every language. In a sense, this means, as Quine (1969, p. 68) put it, that truth belongs to "transcendental metaphysics", and Tarski's 'scientific' investigations seem to lead us back towards a surprising proximity of some more traditional philosophical views on truth. 3. TARSKI'S THEORY AS A PARADIGM So far Tarski himself. Subsequent philosophers then had to find out what his considerations of the concept of truth really mean and what are their consequences; and this now seems to be an almost interminable task.

• Donald Davidson
• Gottlob Frege
• Rudolf Carnap
• idea
• knowledge
• reason
• semantic

• Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic

  Jaroslav Peregrin

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