Understanding truth
This book discusses truth-bearers (arguing that propositions should play this role), skepticism about truth, Tarski's and Kripke's theories, the Liar paradox (arguing that we should reject that the sentence is true and also that it is not true), vagueness and the Sorites (as another example of truth-value gappiness) and finally some of the work on deflationism (whether truth is a property). What it does, it does very well indeed. It presupposes almost no knowledge of logic, mathematics, or philosophy, and it is a model of clarity and carefulness. The presentation of Kripke's theory of truth in particular is splendid. So is the criticism of \textit{P. A. Boghossian}'s [``Status of content, Philos. Rev. 99, 157-184 (1990)] arguments against deflationism.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe book does not, however, live up to its main aim, which it says is ``to integrate and extend the most important insights on truth from a variety of sources (p. 4). It omits far too many important discussions: Skyrms, Barwise and Etchemendy, Yablo, Priest and paraconsistency, \dots . (The last is crucial, since a consistency requirement is frequently appealed to; but if truth-value gaps, why not gluts?) \textit{D. L. Grover, J. L. Camp} and \textit{N. D. Belnap}'s, ``A prosentential theory of truth [Philos. Stud. 27, 73-125 (1975)] and its ``descendants (presumably including \textit{R. Brandom}, Making it explicit (Cambridge MA, Harvard Univ. Press) (1994)) are dismissed in a single footnote, p. 256 n. 7.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEWhat it does, it does very well, but it omits too much to be considered an adequate guide to current thinking on truth.
- Reasoning with slippery predicates
- Indiscriminability as indiscernibility by default
- Two types of deflationism
- One true logic?
- Truth and reflection
- The nature of truth. An updated approach to the meaning of truth ascriptions
- Paradox and logical revision. A short introduction
- Self-referential propositions
- This is not an instance of (E)
- Tarski's 1944 polemical remarks and Naess' ``experimental philosophy
- Propositions, representation, and truth
- Unity through truth
- Paradoxical hypodoxes
- Minimalism, supervaluations and fixed points
- Non-reflexivity and revenge
- Why ramify?
- Truth, reflection and hierarchies
- Truth and disquotation
- Adding a conditional to Kripke's theory of truth
- Formulating deflationism
- Probability, fuzziness and borderline cases
- Against stepping back: A critique of contextualist approaches to the semantic paradoxes
- Formal theories of truth
- What truth is
- Numbers and propositions versus nominalists: yellow cards for Salmon \& Soames
- Exceptional logic
- Classical logic and the liar
- Length-scale competition in the parametrically driven nonlinear Dirac equation with a spatially periodic force
- Conceptions of truth.
- A note on formality and logical consequence
- The concept of truth
- Truth via anaphorically unrestricted quantifiers
- Substantive perspectivism. An essay on philosophical concern with truth
- On the fundamental role of `means that' in semantic theorizing
- Alethic undecidability and alethic indeterminacy
- Assertions and future tense semantics
- Contingent a priori truths. Metaphysics, semantics, epistemology and pragmatics
- Towards a relational treating of language and logical systems
- In defence of PKF
- These degrees go to eleven: fuzzy logics and gradable predicates
- Future and negation
- On the costs of classical logic
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