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This study deals with the early theory of truth presented by Walter Burley (ca. 1275–1344) in his so­‑called middle commentary on Aristotle’s Perihermeneias. The issue of truth is raised in the context of Aristotle’s claim that truth and falsity imply combination and separation. Burley’s dissatisfaction with this purely logical concept of truth leads him to the introduction of a structured definition of truth which allows him to clearly distinguish between truth taken as theological, ontological, epistemological or logical. The first part of this study will present Burley’s understanding of truth in the first three of these meanings of truth. The second part will then focus on truth in the logical sense which is also in the center of Burley’s own focus of interest. There will also be a discussion of what function his propositional semantics and his theory of so­‑called real propositions (propositiones in re) have in this theory of truth.

The paper addresses three main issues drawing on Husserl’s writings on logic. First, what gives the logical objects their objective status, given the fact that these are intimately connected with human mental processes? Second, if logical objects are objective then how is logical knowledge at all possible? The answer to this question leads to a transcendental foundation of formal logic. Third, how do the principles of logic apply to the real world? This question can be addressed by positing a formal ontology. Against Russell and Whitehead, it has been pointed out that even if logical implication does not in any way depend on human mind, inference is definitely mind-dependent. But this thesis does not necessarily lead to psychologism, as has been pointed out by contemporary Indian logicians. Indian theories of inference deal with the question of truth and falsity but lack a formal ontology. Both pure logic and modern physics claim to be independent of human existence. This claim becomes evident in the conversation between Heisenberg and Tagore. Husserl had distinguished between logical grammar and logic of consequences. The notions of truth and falsity are relevant only in the context of logic of consequences. However, none of the well-known theories of truth, correspondence, coherence or pragmatic theory is free from defects. Following in the footprints of the Advaita Vedantins, it has been maintained that falsity is more fundamental than truth. In the process of cognitive history, a proposition is taken to be true, unless its falsity is proven. Hence the conclusion: since Philosophy is search for the truth, all Philosophy—infinitely—is a gradual rejection of all claims to truth and finally, destroys itself.

In this paper I investigate the claim that truth is a relational property. What does this claim really mean? What is its import?—Is it a basic feature of the concept of truth; or a distinctive feature of the correspondence theory of truth; or even both? After introducing some general ideas about truth, I begin by highlighting an ambiguity in current uses of the term ‘relational property’ in the truth debate, and show that we need to distinguish two separate ideas: that truth is a relational property, and that truth is an extrinsic property. I go on to examine what both of these ideas are in more detail, and consider what would need to hold for truth to be in either of these categories. I then discern where all the main competitors in the truth debate stand on these issues. In doing so we learn more about these views and what they entail, and build a general picture of what stances different theories of truth take on whether truth is extrinsic or relational. Moreover, in doing this we will be able to answer one of the questions with which we began: whether truth’s being extrinsic or relational is something that, if accepted, lends support to the correspondence theory of truth. We will see that this is not so, and discern some interesting variations between various theories of truth on the issues of whether truth is extrinsic or relational. Following this we will be in a better position to judge whether the notions of extrinsicality or relationality are basic features of the concept of truth. In the final part of the paper I argue that, even if we are not in a position to conclude that they are basic features, they are features that any prospective theory of truth needs to take seriously.

Science advances by means of argument and debate. Based on a formal model of complex argumentation, this article assesses the interplay between evidential and inferential drivers in scientific cont...

In this paper, I raise some interconnected concerns for Paul Horwich’s minimal theory of truth, framed by these three questions: How should the minimal theory be formulated? How does the minimal theory address the liar paradox? What is the explanatory role of the concept of truth? I conclude that we cannot be linguistic or conceptual deflationists about truth.

We argue that distinct conditionals—conditionals that are governed by different logics—are needed to formalize the rules of Truth Introduction and Truth Elimination. We show that revision theory, when enriched with the new conditionals, yields an attractive theory of truth. We go on to compare this theory with one recently proposed by Hartry Field.

First published in 1997, this volume advances the view that the nature of truth, in so far as truth has a ‘nature’, lies in the manner of its occurrence. Edo Pivcevici argues that truth is an vent, i.e. it does not exist until it occurs, and survives only as long as the requisite conditions for its occurrence are in place. Positing that language sets traps for the unwary, Pivcevici states that calling ‘x’ true involves a property ascription does so only in the sense that ‘x’ enters into truth and is part of a ‘truth event’.

This chapter sketches the motivations for treating truth as a primitive notion and developing axiomatic theories of truth. Then the main axiomatic systems of typed and type-free truth are surveyed.

Protagoras and his pupil Euthalos argued against one another in paradoxical fashion regarding the fulfilment of a contract. Protagoras was a Sophist, the first European inventors of logical puzzles who also argued that there cannot be false thinking. A paradox, however, does not say anything, and there is no solution to the question as to who is right in the exchange between Protagoras and Euthalos. On the other hand there is a real question as to how it is that a false proposition makes sense, and the Sophists were right in as much as a false proposition, while it does say something does not, being believed, tell its believer anything. The exclusion of paradoxical propositions is not to be achieved, as Russell supposed, by applying some general principle; rather matters need arguing through in particular cases as they arise.

Different formal tools are useful for different purposes. For example, when it comes to modelling degrees of belief, probability theory is a better tool than classical logic; when it comes to modelling the truth of mathematical claims, classical logic is a better tool than probability theory. In this paper I focus on a widely used formal tool and argue that it does not provide a good model of a phenomenon of which many think it does provide a good model: I shall argue that while supervaluationism may provide a model of probability of truth, or of assertability, it cannot provide a good model of truth—supertruth cannot be truth. The core of the argument is that an adequate model of truth must render certain connectives truth-functional (at least in certain circumstances)—and supervaluationism does not do so (in those circumstances).

We provide infinitary proof theories for three common semantic theories of truth: strong Kleene, van Fraassen supervaluation and Cantini supervaluation. The value of these systems is that they provide an easy method of proving simple facts about semantic theories. Moreover we shall show that they also give us a simpler understanding of the computational complexity of these definitions and provide a direct proof that the closure ordinal for Kripke’s definition is $\omega _1^{CK}$. This work can be understood as an effort to provide a proof-theoretic counterpart to Welch’s game-theoretic (Welch, 2009).

In the paper we investigate typed (mainly compositional) axiomatizations of the truth predicate in which the axioms of truth come with a built-in, minimal and self-sufficient machinery to talk about syntactic aspects of an arbitrary base theory. Expanding previous works of the author and building on recent works of Albert Visser and Richard Heck, we give a precise characterization of these systems by investigating the strict relationships occurring between them, arithmetized model constructions in weak arithmetical systems and suitable set existence axioms. The framework considered will give rise to some methodological remarks on the construction of truth theories and provide us with a privileged point of view to analyze the notion of truth arising from compositional principles in a typed setting.

There are two complementary paradoxes about logic. The first arises from the following fact. We can talk about the formal properties of a sentence—those aspects of the sentence that have to do with...

One of the main logical functions of the truth predicate is to enable us to express so-called `infi nite conjunctions'. Several authors claim that the truth predicate can serve this function only if it is fully disquotational (transparent), which leads to triviality in classical logic. As a consequence, many have concluded that classical logic should be rejected. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we consider two accounts available in the literature of what it means to express infi nite conjunctions with a truth predicate and argue that they fail to support the necessity of trans- parency for that purpose. Second, we show that, with the aid of some regimentation, many expressive functions of the truth predicate can actually be performed using truth principles that are consistent in classical logic. Finally, we suggest a reconceptualisation of deflationism, according to which the principles that govern the use of the truth predicate in natural language are largely irrelevant for the question of what formal theory of truth we should adopt. Many philosophers think that the paradoxes pose a special problem for deflationists; we will argue, on the contrary, that deflationists are in a much better position to deal with the paradoxes than their opponents.

John MacFarlane’s truth relativism (2005, 2007, 2011, 2014) makes use of two notions of propositional truth: a monadic assessment sensitive one taken to be our ordinary truth notion, and a non-monadic one that is meant to account for the assessment sensitivity of the former notion. Some authors (Cappelen and Hawthorne, 2009, 2011; Montminy, 2009; Soames, 2011) contend that any theory introducing a technical non-monadic truth notion has to make sense of it (i.e. show that it is a truth notion) by defining or characterizing it in terms of ordinary monadic truth. First, I give some reasons why the relativist should not discard this approach to make sense of the notion of truth relative to a context of assessment. Second, I argue that an illuminating characterization of this notion must provide an answer to a dilemma Paul Boghossian (2011) poses to the relativist. Third, I single out the characterization that can answer this dilemma. Finally, I contend that the relativist still needs to show that this solution works for each case subject to a relativist treatment.

Many-valued logic allows to reason with partial truth measured by degrees on a discrete scale, but it suffers from an ambiguous interpretation of the middle truth level, considered as intermediate truth or as ignorance, i.e. inability to assess truth. The LM extension introduces an additional value, outside the truth scale, to distinguish between these two notions. This paper studies LM from a logical perspective, examining how to reason in this framework: it discusses the definition of appropriate semantics for the logical connectives and it considers an inference task, proposing a Modus Ponens variant for LM.

There are two perspectives from which formal theories can be viewed. On the one hand, one can take a theory to be about some privileged models. On the other hand, one can take all models of a theory to be on a par. In contrast with what is usually done in philosophical debates, we adopt the latter viewpoint. Suppose that from this perspective we want to add an adequate truth predicate to a background theory. Then on the one hand the truth theory ought to be semantically conservative over the background theory. At the same time, it is generally recognised that the central function of a truth predicate is an expressive one. A truth predicate ought to allow us to express propositions that we could not express before. In this article we argue that there are indeed natural truth theories which satisfy both the demand of semantical conservativeness and the demand of adequately extending the expressive power of our language.

The aim of this paper is to connect the current debate on relative truth to the discussions of theories of truth in general, in which the so-called platitudes about truth have recently played a prominent role. Truth-relativists propose adding to the standard truth predicate an argument-place for an extra parameter over and above a possible world and they presume that the predicate that results from this relativization is a truth predicate. Yet this relativization arguably isn't just an innocuous extrapolation of the Lewis-Kaplan line in semantics that naturally conserves the predicate's status as a truth predicate. This status has to be specifically established. I'll discuss arguments to the effect that truth-relativists fail on that score since relative truth doesn't satisfy certain basic platitudes about truth, in particular the Equivalence Schema and the normativity of truth. This suggests that a relativized truth predicate cannot play the role required of a truth predicate. I shall discuss the relativist's defensive strategies in detail, the most promising of which is to claim that it is legitimate to deny the Equivalence Schema by arguing that relativism introduces a revisionary concept of truth and so fundamentally revises semantics. However, I'll point out that solely invoking semantic revision doesn't suffice to justify a denial of the Equivalence Schema and that any further justification of such a denial is ad hoc or question begging. Moreover, I suggest that with respect to the normativity of truth the prospects of truth-relativism are equally dim.

In this article, the authors propose a theory of the truth value of propositions from a logic-mathematical point of view. The work that the authors present is an attempt to address this question from an epistemological, linguistic, and logical-mathematical point of view. What is it to exist and how do we define existence? The main objective of this work is an approach to the first of these questions. We leave a more thorough treatment of the problem of existence for future works. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 20: 58-67, 2015

Aristotle’s notion of practical truth is fundamentally important to both the rationality and the practicality of practical reasoning. But what is practical truth? I argue for an original interpretation according to which practical truth is the truth about what is unqualifiedly good for a particular person when all of her particular circumstances are taken into account. In contrast to other current interpretations, this one allows practical truth to fall within Aristotle’s standard account of truth, and it explains the sense in which practical truth is nonetheless distinctly practical, using Aristotle’s so-called Guise of the Good account of motivation.

This article deals with supervaluationism and the failure of truth-functionality. It draws some distinctions that may contribute to a better understanding of this semantic framework.

We explore a possibility of generalization of classical truth values by distinguishing between their ontological and epistemic aspects and combining these aspects within a joint semantical framework. The outcome is four generalized classical truth values implemented by Cartesian product of two sets of classical truth values, where each generalized value comprises both ontological and epistemic components. This allows one to define two unary twin connectives that can be called "semi-classical negations". Each of these negations deals only with one of the above mentioned components, and they may be of use for a logical reconstruction of argumentative reasoning.

We axiomatize Leitgeb’s (2005) theory of truth and show that this theory proves all arithmetical sentences of the system of ramified analysis up to ε0. We also give alternative axiomatizations of Kripke’s (1975) theory of truth (Strong Kleene and supervaluational version) and show that they are at least as strong as the Kripke-Feferman system KF and Cantini’s VF, respectively.

This paper analyzes the concept of truth in terms of an account of Fregean sense as cognitive value. The account highlights the importance of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference for the individuation of senses. Explicit truth attributions, like ‘that I smell the scent of violets is true’ involve an inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in the that-clause concepts of thoughts that they employ: one cannot understand the that-clause concept of the thought in the truth attribution without understanding the thought the that-clause concept is a concept of. This is not a redundancy that eliminates or deflates cognitive value, but an exploitation, by the concept of truth, of the inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in critical reflective thinking. The cognitive value of the concept of truth is to combine semantically with explicit ways of thinking of thoughts tomake critical reflective thinking possible. This account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth assigns cognitive value not by construing the concept of truth as a way of thinking about some thing, but by articulating its broader cognitive role. This paper analyzes the concept of truth in terms of an account of Fregean sense as cognitive value.1 In §1, I explain the account of sense as cognitive value. In §2 I explain the cognitive value of the concept of truth as allowing for the possibility of critical reflective thinking. §3 elaborates the role of the concept of truth, and in * Thanks to audiences at the 2012 meetings of the Society for the Study of History of Analytic Philosophy, the Society of Exact Philosophy, and the Western Canadian Philosophical Association for helpful feedback, and to David Boutillier, Michael Caie, Ben Caplan, Robin Jeshion, Michael Kremer, Sandra Lapointe, Chris Pincock, and Chris Tillman for questions and conversation. Special thanks toMichael Arsenault for detailed feedback, and toDaniel Harris, who acted as commentator for the paper at theWCPA. 1 Sowhat is presented here is a Frege-inspired account of the concept of truth, in terms of cognitive value, and an not an account of Frege’s view of truth. For that kind of account, see Richard G. Heck and Robert May, ‘Truth in Frege’ (manuscript). 1 doi:10.1017/S003181911300034X © The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2013 Philosophy; Page 1 of 18 2013 particular, of explicit truth attributions in critical reflective thinking. §4 concludes the paper by locating my account in the larger debate on truth. Here is an outline of the main line of argument in the paper. The account of sense as cognitive value highlights the importance of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference for the individuation of senses, and even more specifically, of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference making for the possibility of some distinctive kind of cognitive achievement for the individuation of senses. Explicit truth attributions, like that that I smell the scent of violets is true2 involve an inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in the that-clause concepts of thoughts that they employ: one cannot understand the that-clause concept of the thought in the truth attribution without understanding the very thought to which truth is being attributed. From the perspective provided by the account of sense as cognitive value, this is not a redundancy that eliminates or deflates cognitive value, but an exploitation by the concept of truth of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference to make possible a distinctive kind of cognitive achievement: to make possible critical reflective thinking. Critical reflective thinking involves as a constitutive matter the explicit conceptualization of the norm of truth. The cognitive value of the concept of truth is to combine semantically with explicit ways of thinking of thoughts to make critical reflective thinking possible. This account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth assigns cognitive value not by construing the concept of truth as a way of thinking of some thing, but by articulating its broader cognitive role. 2 From this point on, I use both that-clauses and an italicization convention to make reference to thoughts. When a thought is an attribution of truth to a thought, I use both methods at once. This fixes an expressive inadequacy in the italicization convention and avoids what would otherwise be a confusing repetition of ‘that’s. So instead of ‘I smell the scent of violets is true’ which is strictly speaking nonsense, or the confusing but more fundamental and correct ‘that that I smell the scent of violets is true’, I will use ‘that I smell the scent of violets is true’ to refer to the thought that I smell the scent of violets is true. This use of italicization is easily distinguished from italicization for emphasis and italicization to indicate the introduction of a technical notion, both of which I also use. I also do not pause to address niceties about the context-sensitive ‘I’ in ‘I smell the scent of violets’. I use the example despite the ‘I’ to connect with Frege’s discussion below.

This paper is concerned with the notion of the truth of objective judgements referring to the external world. It does not deal with the judgements which are ‘true’ in the everyday sense of the word, but with the requirements which are fulfilled by propositions apt to meet a most severe criticism.

We outline some of Feferman’s main contributions to the theory of truth and the motivations behind them. In particular, we sketch the role truth can play in the foundations of mathematics and in the formulation of reflection principles, systems of ramified truth, several variants of the Kripke–Feferman theory, a deflationist theory in an extension of classical logic, and the system for determinate truth.

The prevailing view among scholars is that Aristotle’s remarks on truth at Metaphysics Γ.7, 1011b26–27 express a correspondence conception of truth. However, although Aristotle thinks that truth depends on the world, his conception of truth does not require that either (a) there be some truthmaker such as a fact or a state of affairs that obtains to which truthbearers correspond, or (b) there be a some universal dependence relation that holds between truths and ontological entities. Aristotle’s conception of truth is more minimal. I focus on Aristotle’s semantic views and their relation to his ontology and psychology.

This article focuses on the distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths (i.e. every truth that isn’t analytic), and between a priori truths and a posteriori truths (i.e. every truth that isn’t a priori) in philosophy, beginning with a brief historical survey of work on the two distinctions, their relationship to each other, and to the necessary/contingent distinction. Four important stops in the history are considered: two involving Kant and W. V. O. Quine, and two relating to logical positivism and semantic externalism. The article then examines questions that have been raised about the analytic–synthetic and a priori–a posteriori distinctions, such as whether all distinctively philosophical truths fall on one side of the line and whether the distinction is relevant to philosophy. It also discusses the argument that there is a lot more a priori knowledge than we ever thought, and concludes by describing epistemological accounts of analyticity.

Truth, Reference and Realism Zsolt Novak and Andras Simonyi (Eds) Budapest, Central European University Press, 2011 xxxv + 278 pp., ISBN 9789639776869, €33.00, £30.00, US$45.00 (hardback) This volu...

Martin Heidegger: Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010, pp. 356. $44.95 (hb.). ISBN 9780253354662. Martin Heidegger: Bein...

Knowledge requires truth, and truth, we suppose, involves unflawed representation. Science does not provide knowledge in this sense but rather provides models, representations that are limited in their accuracy, precision, or, most often, both. Truth as we usually think of it is an idealization, one that serves wonderfully in most ordinary applications, but one that can terribly mislead for certain issues in philosophy. This article sketches how this happens for five important issues, thereby showing how philosophical method must take into account the idealized nature of our familiar conception of truth.