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Aletheic and Logical Pluralism

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Pluralisms in Truth and Logic

Part of the book series: Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy ((PIIP))

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Abstract

Aletheic pluralism is the view that there is more than one truth property, and logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. Usually the truth properties described by the aletheic pluralist are familiar ones advocated by parties debating the nature of truth (e.g., the correspondence property, the pragmatic property, and coherence property). Likewise, the logics described by the logical pluralist are familiar ones advocated by parties debating the nature of logic (e.g., classical, intuitionistic, and relevant). However, one can be an aletheic pluralist by focusing on properties of truth that result from different approaches to the aletheic paradoxes instead. And one can be a logical pluralist by focusing on logics that result from different approaches to the aletheic paradoxes. Moreover, one could combine these two alternative pluralisms into a single view according to which the logic and the truth property differ depending on the context, but they are coordinated so that in contexts with stronger logics, the truth property is weaker, and in contexts with weaker logics, the truth property is stronger. I first formulate this coordinated pluralism about truth and logic and then evaluate it as a competitor with more traditional approaches to the aletheic paradoxes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Cook (2002), Beall and Restall (2006), Shapiro (2006, 2014), Russell (2008), and Field (2009).

  2. 2.

    Cr. Wright (1992, 2003), Lynch (2009), Pedersen (2010), Edwards (2011), Ulatowski (2017), and the papers in Pedersen and Wright (2013).

  3. 3.

    See Pedersen (2006), Cotnoir (2013b), Caret (2017), Yu (2017), and Strollo (2018) for discussion.

  4. 4.

    However, see Berto (2015).

  5. 5.

    See Cr. Wright (1992) and Lynch (2009) for examples of aletheic pluralists appealing to domains, and see Beall and Restall (2006) and Shaprio (2014) for examples of logical pluralists appealing to contexts. Note that Beall and Restall are inconsistent on this matter: at (2006: 88) they deny that they appeal to contexts as part of their pluralism, but they explicitly do so throughout the book (2005, 69, 91, 94, 99, 116, 118). They also say that there are multiple ‘senses’ of words like ‘valid’ (2005, 29), which would suggest an ambiguity or context-dependence. See Hjortland (2015) and Caret (2017) for discussion.

  6. 6.

    See Pedersen (2014) and Kouri and Shapiro (2017) for example.

  7. 7.

    See Fantl and McGrath (2002), Hawthorne (2003) and Stanley (2005).

  8. 8.

    See Cohen (1986), DeRose (1992), and Lewis (1996).

  9. 9.

    See Tappolet (1997).

  10. 10.

    See Scharp (2013).

  11. 11.

    Beall (2009).

  12. 12.

    Scharp (2013).

  13. 13.

    See Beall (2013b) and Cotnoir (2013a) for other examples.

  14. 14.

    For example, the T-Schema is inconsistent in intuitionistic logic (I) and in the logic of relevant implication (R).

  15. 15.

    See Scharp (2013) for assessment-sensitive, Ripley (2014) for non-transitive, and Zardini (2011) for non-contractive. See Field (2008) for the rest.

  16. 16.

    Remember that the deflationary truth predicates will have different extensions in different logics. Each one will have exactly the logical truths of that logic in its extension.

  17. 17.

    See MacFarlane (2014) on assessment sensitivity, Shapiro (2014) on assessment-sensitive logical expressions and Scharp (2014) on assessment-sensitive truth predicates.

  18. 18.

    See Cotnoir (2013a) for discussion.

  19. 19.

    Some combination views might include a classical glut property according to which (T-Out) fails; that is, in which the move from <P is true> to P fails. If so, we could stick a whole bunch of logical principles under that glut property without any of them being released. If we really want a context in which we could say that those logical principles are true, we could do that.

  20. 20.

    See Cappelen (2018) and Scharp (2013) for discussion.

  21. 21.

    See Beall (2008), Scharp (2013, 2014), and Bacon (2015) for discussion.

  22. 22.

    See Beall (2009, 2013a) and Scharp (2018).

  23. 23.

    See Scharp (2013: chap. 9).

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Scharp, K. (2018). Aletheic and Logical Pluralism. In: Wyatt, J., Pedersen, N., Kellen, N. (eds) Pluralisms in Truth and Logic. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98346-2_19

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