Formal Theories of Truth

Formal Theories of Truth

Author: J. C. Beall

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 0198815670

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Truth is one of the oldest and most central topics in philosophy. Formal theories explore the connections between truth and logic, and they address truth-theoretic paradoxes such as the Liar. Three leading philosopher-logicians now present a concise overview of the main issues and ideas in formal theories of truth. Beall, Glanzberg, and Ripley explain key logical techniques on which such formal theories rely, providing the formal and logical background needed to develop formal theories of truth. They examine the most important truth-theoretic paradoxes, including the Liar paradoxes. They explore approaches that keep principles of truth simple while relying on nonclassical logic; approaches that preserve classical logic but do so by complicating the principles of truth; and approaches based on substructural logics that change the shape of the target consequence relation itself. Finally, inconsistency and revision theories are reviewed, and contrasted with the approaches previously discussed. For any reader who has a basic grounding in logic, this book offers an ideal guide to formal theories of truth.


Axiomatic Theories of Truth

Axiomatic Theories of Truth

Author: Volker Halbach

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-02-27

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1316584232

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At the centre of the traditional discussion of truth is the question of how truth is defined. Recent research, especially with the development of deflationist accounts of truth, has tended to take truth as an undefined primitive notion governed by axioms, while the liar paradox and cognate paradoxes pose problems for certain seemingly natural axioms for truth. In this book, Volker Halbach examines the most important axiomatizations of truth, explores their properties and shows how the logical results impinge on the philosophical topics related to truth. In particular, he shows that the discussion on topics such as deflationism about truth depends on the solution of the paradoxes. His book is an invaluable survey of the logical background to the philosophical discussion of truth, and will be indispensable reading for any graduate or professional philosopher in theories of truth.


The Revision Theory of Truth

The Revision Theory of Truth

Author: Anil Gupta

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780262071444

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In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological contexts. The latter include, for instance, contexts that generate Liar Paradox. Their central claim is that truth is a circular concept. In support of this claim they provide a widely applicable theory (the "revision theory") of circular concepts. Under the revision theory, when truth is seen as circular both its ordinary features and its pathological features fall into a simple understandable pattern. The Revision Theory of Truth is unique in placing truth in the context of a general theory of definitions. This theory makes sense of arbitrary systems of mutually interdependent concepts, of which circular concepts, such as truth, are but a special case.


A Prosentential Theory of Truth

A Prosentential Theory of Truth

Author: Dorothy Grover

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 140086268X

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In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth predicate and asserts that "it is true" is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the "nature of truth" as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


The Epistemic Lightness of Truth

The Epistemic Lightness of Truth

Author: Cezary Cieśliński

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-12-07

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1107197651

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This volume explores the deflationary claim of the innocence of truth, taking into account recent results on axiomatic truth theories.


Theories of Truth

Theories of Truth

Author: Richard L. Kirkham

Publisher: Bradford Book

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780262277198

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Surveys all of the major theories of truth, presenting the crux of the issues involved at a level accessible to nonexperts yet in a manner sufficiently detailed and original to be of value to professional scholars.


The Tarskian Turn

The Tarskian Turn

Author: Leon Horsten

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-07-15

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0262297760

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A philosopher proposes a new deflationist view of truth, based on contemporary proof-theoretic approaches. In The Tarskian Turn, Leon Horsten investigates the relationship between formal theories of truth and contemporary philosophical approaches to truth. The work of mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) marks the transition from substantial to deflationary views about truth. Deflationism—which holds that the notion of truth is light and insubstantial—can be and has been made more precise in multiple ways. Crucial in making the deflationary intuition precise is its relation to formal or logical aspects of the notion of truth. Allowing that semantical theories of truth may have heuristic value, in The Tarskian Turn Horsten focuses on axiomatic theories of truth developed since Tarski and their connection to deflationism. Arguing that the insubstantiality of truth has been misunderstood in the literature, Horsten proposes and defends a new kind of deflationism, inferential deflationism, according to which truth is a concept without a nature or essence. He argues that this way of viewing the concept of truth, inspired by a formalization of Kripke's theory of truth, flows naturally from the best formal theories of truth that are currently available. Alternating between logical and philosophical chapters, the book steadily progresses toward stronger theories of truth. Technicality cannot be altogether avoided in the subject under discussion, but Horsten attempts to strike a balance between the need for logical precision on the one hand and the need to make his argument accessible to philosophers.


Formal Epistemology and Cartesian Skepticism

Formal Epistemology and Cartesian Skepticism

Author: Tomoji Shogenji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 135133655X

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This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji shows that the former lends support to Cartesian skepticism, but the latter allows us to defeat Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, Shogenji addresses a number of related issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, including epistemic circularity, epistemic closure, and inductive skepticism.


Truth as One and Many

Truth as One and Many

Author: Michael P. Lynch

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-03-31

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0191615765

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What is truth? Michael Lynch defends a bold new answer to this question. Traditional theories of truth hold that truth has only a single uniform nature. All truths are true in the same way. More recent deflationary theories claim that truth has no nature at all; the concept of truth is of no real philosophical importance. In this concise and clearly written book, Lynch argues that we should reject both these extremes and hold that truth is a functional property. To understand truth we must understand what it does, its function in our cognitive economy. Once we understand that, we'll see that this function can be performed in more than one way. And that in turn opens the door to an appealing pluralism: beliefs about the concrete physical world needn't be true in the same way as our thoughts about matters — like morality — where the human stain is deepest.


Aristotle on Truth

Aristotle on Truth

Author: Paolo Crivelli

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-09-30

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1139455664

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Aristotle's theory of truth, which has been the most influential account of the concept of truth from Antiquity onwards, spans several areas of philosophy: philosophy of language, logic, ontology and epistemology. In this 2004 book, Paolo Crivelli discusses all the main aspects of Aristotle's views on truth and falsehood. He analyses in detail the main relevant passages, addresses some well-known problems of Aristotelian semantics, and assesses Aristotle's theory from the point of view of modern analytic philosophy. In the process he discusses most of the literature on Aristotle's semantic theory to have appeared in the last two centuries. His book vindicates and clarifies the often repeated claim that Aristotle's is a correspondence theory of truth. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in both ancient philosophy and modern philosophy of language.