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Pluralisms in Truth and Logic pp 131–144Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Methodological Pluralism About Truth

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Abstract

This chapter analyses various truth pluralist views in the literature by their methodological commitments. I argue that truth pluralism is best interpreted as a combination of (semantic) realism and anti-realism, and as the spiritual successor to Michael Dummett’s global anti-realist programme. I introduce two ways of characterising pluralisms by how realist/anti-realist they are. I close by introducing and offering arguments in favour of what I call methodological pluralism about truth, which privileges neither its realist nor anti-realist forebears.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Barring the truth of some fully reductive moral naturalism, that is.

  2. 2.

    This is similar to what (Beall 2013, p. 324) calls “language-relative truth pluralism”.

  3. 3.

    The only exception I am aware of is Beall (2013), if one accepts that his deflated truth pluralism is a pluralism about truth as opposed to a pluralism about truth-predicates which may be unrelated to the actual philosophically robust concept of truth. Note also that Beall’s pluralism does not accept DOMAIN-VARIABILITY, which again sets it far apart from other views in the literature.

  4. 4.

    This includes the most developed accounts of truth pluralism in Wright (1992) and Lynch (2009), as well as, for example Cotnoir and Edwards (2015), Edwards (2011), Pedersen (2006). Cotnoir (2013), who does not explicitly call for dividing domains by realism/anti-realism but provides a semantic framework for truth pluralisms which have certain domains which maintain classical logic and others which have paracomplete logics, a conclusion commonly held to follow from adopting realism and anti-realism respectively. Another potential outlier is Gamester (2017), who does divide up his truth pluralism into realist and anti-realist parts, but the anti-realist parts are motivated by expressivism rather than the traditional metaphysical/semantic debates which the other pluralists are concerned with.

  5. 5.

    See, for example, Burgess and Burgess (2014) and Künne (2005).

  6. 6.

    Wright (1992, p. 174).

  7. 7.

    It is not even clear that Wright (1992) is truly a pluralist account, insofar as he never explicitly calls for more than one truth predicate. He notes ways in which we may work our way up from a superassertibility as the truth predicate of a given domain to a more realist truth predicate, for example, some form of correspondence, but never explicitly adopts a second truth predicate. Wright is a pluralist because he believes the concept of truth does not rule out the possibility of plurality of predicates; as he notes: “Minimalism is thus at least in principle open to the possibility of a pluralist view of truth” (Wright 1992, p. 25, emph. original).

  8. 8.

    Lynch (2009, p. 173).

  9. 9.

    Edwards does not suggest any particular theory of truth to be contrasted with correspondence, although he mentions some candidates which have previously been advocated as monistic views of truth (Edwards 2011, p. 32).

  10. 10.

    Cotnoir (2013) reads Wright (1992) as a strong truth pluralist. It is not clear that this is the only reading of the text, and Wright’s later work is explicitly a form of moderate pluralism. However, the reading is supported enough to worth including here.

  11. 11.

    As I note in the previous footnote, the placement of Wright (1992) is contentious . I prefer to read Wright as a moderate pluralist, who would thus end up in the same camp as Lynch (2009). This is despite their views being quite different when it comes down to methodology and motivations; nearly complete opposites in fact. On either way of interpreting Wright I do not believe that the strong/moderate distinction best captures the disagreement between these views.

  12. 12.

    This is analogous to the way in which Field’s (1994) methodological deflationism is compatible with inflationism about meaning or content.

  13. 13.

    Thanks to audiences at the University of Connecticut and Yonsei University for helpful feedback on this chapter. Thanks especially to Dorit Bar-On, Douglas Edwards, Filippo Ferrari, Will Gamester, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, Joe Ulatowski , Cory Wright, Crispin Wright, Jeremy Wyatt and Andy Yu. Thanks most of all to Michael Lynch for countless discussion and feedback.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Nathan Kellen

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  1. Nathan Kellen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Incheon, Korea (Republic of)

    Jeremy Wyatt

  2. Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Incheon, Korea (Republic of)

    Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen

  3. University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Nathan Kellen

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Kellen, N. (2018). Methodological Pluralism About Truth. 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_6

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