Conceptions of Truth

Abstract

The book is organized around a flowchart comprising 16 key questions concerning truth, ranging from 'Is truth a property?' to 'Is truth epistemically constrained?'. It expounds and engages with the ideas of many thinkers, from Aristotle and the Stoics, to Continental analytic philosophers like Bolzano, Brentano, Frege, and Kotarbinski, to such leading figures in contemporary debates as Dummett, Putnam, Wright, and Horwich. In the course of this discussion, many important distinctions (between varieties of correspondence, for example, between different readings of 'making true', between various kinds of eternalism and temporalism) are emphasized that have so far been neglected in the literature.According to our workaday concept of truth, what we think is true if and only if things are as we think they are. A 'modest account' of truth-apt thinkables and of truth, in terms of higher-order quantification over propositions, can spell out this platitude without invoking notions like correspondence, fact, or meaning. This account offers common ground to all parties in the realism/anti-realism controversy concerning truth. In the final chapter, an argument from blind spots in the field of justification is used to support the alethic-realist claim that truth outruns justifiability.