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There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich’s minimalism, stands out because it accepts as axiomatic practical variants of the equivalence schema: 〈p〉 is true if and only if p. The equivalence schema is epistemologically fundamental. In this paper, I call upon empirical studies to show that practical variants of the equivalence schema are widely accepted by non-philosophers. While in the empirical data there is variation in how non-philosophers and philosophers talk about truth and how they judge that a proposition is true, a significant amount of data collected over the years reveal that the ordinary or folk view of truth is compatible with the epistemological fundamentality of alethic minimalism. This, I take it, suggests that people share in the same intuitions that form the bedrock of Horwich’s minimalism.

ABSTRACTGlen Pettigrove addresses the proportionality principle in ethics, the principle that ‘our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the object or events to which they are responding’. He argues this is inconsistent with some familiar features of common-sense morality. In response, he brings virtuous character into the picture, a move we support but wish to modify. We show that certain helping actions should be guided by whether one has the virtue profile most suited to the situation from among a surrounding network of people.

ABSTRACTThis commentary on Stephen Yablo's ‘If-Thenism’ challenges whether the remainder, ρ, is an inaccurate representation of the conditions that are supposed to complete the enthymeme from ϕ to ψ. Whilst inaccuracies shouldn't set off any alarm bells, the truth of ρ is too inexact. The content of ρ, a partial truth, must be sensitive to contextual background conditions for subtraction to work properly in Yablo's view. Using a toy example, I argue that Yablo's subtraction model may yield partial truths as remainders that fail to rule out inaccurate expressions that may prove to be problematic for it.

Philosophical theorizing about truth manifests a desire to conform to the ordinary or folk notion of truth. This practice often involves attempts to accommodate some form of correspondence. We discuss this accommodation project in light of two empirical projects intended to describe the content of the ordinary conception of truth. One, due to Arne Naess, claims that the ordinary conception of truth is not correspondence. Our more recent study is consistent with Naess’ result. Our findings suggest that contextual factors and respondent gender affect whether the folk accept that correspondence is sufficient for truth. These findings seem to show that the project of accommodating the ordinary notion of truth is more difficult than philosophers had anticipated because it is fragmentary.

An artist describes how he became convinced that a vegetarian diet was right for him after he viewed a documentary on the slaughter of animals. He also was influenced by co-workers at Vegetarian Times. After he gave up animal products, he lost 35 lbs and felt more in tune with his body., Back when I was an art student, I would have been shocked if someone told me I'd eventually become a vegetarian. At the time, I paid little attention to what [...]

Abstract: Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuation to experimentation. The data indicate that people distinguish between actions differently depending upon the moral valence of the outcomes. Thus, the assumption that a single account of act individuation applies invariantly seems mistaken.