Abstract
‘Meaning finitism’ is a theory of linguistic meaning that has been developed since the late seventies by Barry Barnes and David Bloor.2 Barnes and Bloor are the two founding fathers of the ‘Edinburgh School’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. In this paper I seek to reconstruct and defend meaning finitism by exploring its consequences for our understanding of truth.3 Given the constraints of time, I will here only be able to scratch the surface of the issue. I hope to convince you that I am at least scratching in the right places, and in the right direction. (I dig deeper in a recently published book.4)
A much earlier version of this paper was discussed at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge in 1998. I am grateful to Anjan Chakravartty, Michael Esfeld, Anandi Hattiangadi, Jane Heal, Susan James, Tim Lewens, Peter Lipton and Hugh Mellor for many objections and suggestions on that occasion. I have also profited from comments by David Bloor, David Chart, Jeremy Gray, Matthias Hild, Matthew Ratcliffe and Paul Teller.
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© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kusch, M. (2004). Meaning Finitism and Truth. In: Korta, K., Larrazabal, J.M. (eds) Truth, Rationality, Cognition, and Music. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 102. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0548-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0548-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6543-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0548-6
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