The paper presents a truth-maker semantics for Strict/Tolerant Logic (ST), which is the currently most popular logic among advocates of the non-transitive approach to paradoxes. Besides being interesting in itself, the truth-maker presentation of ST offers a new perspective on the recently discovered hierarchy of meta-inferences that, according to some, generalizes the idea behind ST. While fascinating from a mathematical perspective, there is no agreement on the philosophical significance of this hierarchy. I aim to show that there is (...) no clear philosophical significance of meta-inferences above the first level. (shrink)

The relationship between truth and politics has rarely seemed more vexed. Worries about misinformation and disinformation abound, and the value of expertise for democratic decision-making dismissed. Whom can we trust to provide us with reliable testimony? In Truth and Evidence, the latest in the NOMOS series, Melissa Schwartzberg and Philip Kitcher present nine timely essays shedding light on practices of inquiry. These essays address urgent questions including what it means to #BelieveWomen; what factual knowledge we require to confront (...) challenges like COVID-19; and how white supremacy shapes the law of evidence. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

A theory of truth is usually demanded to be consistent, but -consistency is less frequently requested. Recently, Yatabe has argued in favour of -inconsistent first-order theories of truth, minimising their odd consequences. In view of this fact, in this paper, we present five arguments against -inconsistent theories of truth. In order to bring out this point, we will focus on two very well-known -inconsistent theories of truth: the classical theory of symmetric truth FS and the (...) non-classical theory of naïve truth based on ᴌukasiewicz infinitely valued logic: PAᴌT. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth generally regard the contribution that ‘true’ makes to utterances to be purely logical or expressive: it exists to facilitate communication, and remedy our expressive deficiencies that are due to ignorance or finitude. This paper presents a challenge to that view by considering alethic desires. Alethic desires are desires for one’s beliefs to be true. Such desires, I argue, do not admit of any deflationarily acceptable analysis, and so challenge the deflationist’s austere view about the semantic role (...) of ‘true’. I consider a number of deflationist proposals for analyzing alethic desires, and find them all problematic. (shrink)

The study examines how truth-tellers and truth-telling can be cultivated in the context of post-truth politics in the U.S. Following Foucault, it is not concerned with examining the problem of truth, with the philosophical question of how truth is determined, but with the problem of truth-tellers or truth-telling as a practical activity of self-improvement. To this end, the study traces the emergence and nature of post-truth politics in the U.S. and analyzes its (...) relation to patterns of fascist propaganda and the psychological appeal of authoritarian leaders through a psycho-social perspective. To counter the nature and ubiquity of post-truth politics, the unrelenting flow of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories disseminated by the far-right news and information ecosystem, the author argues that educators can help students recognize truth-tellers and become truth-tellers themselves by employing certain pedagogical strategies, informed by Foucault’s analysis of parrhesia, that can equip them to criticize and resist post-truth propaganda and demagogues. (shrink)

This article considers why truth-telling is so difficult in institutions, and deceit and paltering are so common. Drawing on recent examples of churches and charities exposed for covering up the truth about abuse, the article explores the institutional barriers to truthfulness and considers how they might be removed.

What does truth have to do with freedom? That is, what is the relationship between our political and epistemic principles? In this paper, I grapple and reject Rorty's reasons for thinking that the former can't be based on the latter, but offer an alternative argument that supports his over-all conclusion that our epistemic and political values are ultimately intertwined.

This article is about truth and relevance. It first discusses the concept of truth in formal semantics and pragmatics, mainly the Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean approaches to meaning. What is particularly crucial is the relationship between pragmatic meaning and truth, since, from a Gricean perspective, meaning is defined as non-truth-conditional, which in turn raises the question of how truth can be a pragmatic issue. A second issue is the relationship between truth and relevance, as (...) developed in relevance theory. A third key point is how truth matters as regards the common ground. In order to illustrate how truth is connected to the common ground,bullshit, post-truth, fake newsandliesare discussed, which raise the issue of how truth can be defeated in verbal communication, and mainly how false assumptions can be entertained as true. (shrink)

People expect that the truth can be revealed in a trial and the decision then is made based on the truth. However, such expectation is a fantasy because the truth has disappeared since the moment when an incident occurred. What are left about this incident are merely fragments (witnesses and evidences) that need further interpretations. Interpretations are open to possibilities; possibilities mean different stories. That is to say: there is no truth (or there are many truths) (...) but stories; truth actually does not matter in law. Law is asked to re-construct the truth logically, based on facts, and without being affected by what outside the law, and then a fair and just legal decision can be made. The idea of storytelling, from the perspective of literature—literary narrative, on the other end is opposite to legal narrative that: a story does not need to be true or real; a story can be as bizarre as it can get as long as it is explainable and acceptable when the story comes to law. In a Japanese drama “Legal High 2” a black widow spider woman is accused of murdering her fiancée and his daughter. Since this woman is the only suspect and has been involved in many marriage fraudulent cases, the prosecutor proves that she is the murder based on the motivation and evidences found (the poison she bought from internet) in the crime scene. However, the defense attorney for getting this woman acquitted tells a story absolutely different from the prosecutor’s based on the same evidences. Therefore, in this present paper I am going to discuss that: how literary narrative and legal narrative in a law drama create both legit but opposite stories that challenges the idea that law and its language is a tool used to pursue the truth based on logics and facts. And, I will compare the similarity and the difference between literary narrative and legal narrative, from the both sides of legal theory and literary theory about language, to examine the idea of “truth” in law and in literature about law. (shrink)

Two types of truth table tasks are used investigating mental representations of conditionals: a possibilities-based and a truth-based one. In possibilities tasks, participants indicate whether a situation is possible or impossible according to the conditional rule. In truth tasks participants evaluate whether a situation makes the rule true or false, or is irrelevant with respect to the truth of the rule. Comparing the two-option version of the possibilities task with the truth task in Experiment 1, (...) the possibilities task yields logical answer patterns whereas the truth task yields defective patterns. Adding the irrelevant option to the possibilities task in Experiment 2 leads to a considerable amount of defective patterns in the possibilities task, but still to more logical patterns in the possibilities task than in the truth task. Experiment 3 shows that directionality matters since rule-to-situation tasks yield more logical answer patterns than do situation-to-rule tasks. We conclude that both task types are not comparable as such since wording, number of options and directionality influence the results. (shrink)

According to alethic functionalism, truth is a generic alethic property related to lower level alethic properties through the manifestation relation. The manifestation relation is reflexive; thus, a proposition’s truth-manifesting property may be a lower level property or truth itself, depending on the subject matter properties of the proposition. A true proposition whose truth-manifesting property is truth itself, rather than a lower level alethic property, is plainly true. Alethic functionalism relies on plain truth to account (...) for the truth of propositions with challenging subject matter properties, such as logically complex propositions and truth attributions. In this paper, it is argued that plain truth leads to a number of serious problems for alethic functionalism. First: Shapiro (in Analysis 71:38–44, 2011) argues that plain truth threatens alethic functionalism with collapse to strong alethic monism; it is argued here that collapse is not merely threatened, but that, on pain of contradiction, collapse is immediate. Second, alethic functionalism’s commitment to alethic pluralism requires lower level alethic properties to be ways of being truth, where one property’s being a way of being the other property is irreflexive; thus, alethic functionalism is incoherent due to the conflicting commitments to a manifestation relation which is both reflexive and irreflexive. Third, it is argued that a reflexive manifestation relation leads to the contradiction that a lower level alethic property which manifests truth is both identical to and distinct from truth itself. Fourth, careful examination of the notion of a core truism shows that Objectivity and the correspondence intuition are the only core truisms. Finally, it is argued that the first and fourth problems jointly entail a collapse of alethic functionalism to strong correspondence monism. (shrink)

How can truth be used to fight disinformation without reproducing the “reveal”—oriented or secret-constituting epistemology of the closet, as Eve Sedgwick described it in the Epistemology of the Closet (1990)? and how does her reading of the Book of Esther in that text help illuminate aspects of today’s Trumpism?

The concept of truth is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy, but also of, for example, semiotics and law. The article analyses the concept (predicate) of truth in judicial fact-finding and the concept (predicate) of truth in legal interpretation from the perspective of the pluralist theory of truth. The concept of an unordered concept of truth is introduced in the paper, which is formed by pairs of opposing meaning postulates concerning a specific (...) aspect of truth, such as “correspondency” vs. “correspondency-independence” or “transcendence” vs. “immanence”. Individual concepts of truth are ordered sets of congruent meaning postulates. The analysis aims to reconstruct the meaning of the truth predicate in judicial fact-finding and legal interpretation from the point of view of meaning postulates. The conducted analysis shows that the predicate of substantive truth, the predicate of formal truth and the truth predicate in interpretation of law can be characterized by means of the same meaning postulates. In this light one may say that despite crucial differences between the indicated predicates, they belong to the same family of predicates of truth and represent the same way of “being true”. As a result, one may say the pluralist perspective reveals (in a certain sense - quite surprisingly) the essential unity of truth in judicial application of the law. (shrink)

The question of truth is perhaps a perennial question of philosophy. Is truth “merely” epistemological, a function of contingent human practices and conventions, or should we adopt a stonger, metaphysical conception of truth along realist lines, understood as correspondence with objectively existing reality? In this paper I examine a famous debate in the analytic philosophy of language that hinges on the status of truth – specifically, the challenge to traditional or metaphysical realism posed by Hilary Putnam’s (...) model-theoretic argument and the “paradox” that David Lewis derived from it. In the end, I will argue that metaphysical realism is a theoretically excessive position with regards to truth, and that a pragmatic or epistemological understanding of realism is, in Putnam’s words, “all the realism we want or need.”. (shrink)

The article reconceptualizes truth not as a direct property of statements but as a metatheoretical construct for interpreting diverse theoretical frameworks. The author examines the main truth theories—coherence, correspondence, and pragmatic—demonstrating how each relies on distinct criteria tied to interpretive schemas. Problematic cases such as semantic paradoxes and self-referential statements are discussed to reveal the limitations of classical truth theories. Special emphasis is placed on how the metatheoretical perspective enables flexible reconfiguration of the notion of truth (...) depending on research objectives, for instance in empirical sciences or philosophical text analysis. In conclusion, the author highlights the constructivist nature of truth and recommends treating it as an interpretive tool rather than an objective and immutable entity. (shrink)

We study the weak truth table degree spectra of first-order relational structures. We prove a dichotomy among the possible wtt degree spectra along the lines of Knight’s upward-closure theorem for Turing degree spectra. We prove new results contrasting the wtt degree spectra of finite- and infinite-signature structures. We show that, as a method of defining classes of reals, the wtt degree spectrum is, except for some trivial cases, strictly more expressive than the Turing degree spectrum.

This article reflects on Truth and Method , the seminal work of Hans Georg Gadamer. The main argument developed here justifies why the work has become a classic in the philosophical literature. Further arguments survey the thematic aspects that make up the book and the importance that Truth and Method grants to humanism as a horizon from which the status of the humanities and humanistic knowledge is justified. The article also presents a smooth approach to the main categories (...) of Gadamer's hermeneutics and is an open invitation to re-read this classic. Resumen En este artículo se reflexiona sobre “ Verdad y Método ”, la obra fundamental de Hans Georg Gadamer. El argumento principal desarrollado justifica por qué la obra ha llegado a ser un clásico de la literatura filosófica. Los argumentos secundarios se detienen en los aspectos temáticos que componen el libro y en la importancia que “ Verdad y Método ” concede al humanismo como horizonte desde el cual se justifica el status de las humanidades y los saberes humanísticos. El artículo presenta también una fluida aproximación a las principales categorías de la hermenéutica gadameriana y es una invitación abierta a la relectura de este clásico. (shrink)

Saltman and Goodman show how corporate-produced curricula, films, and corporate-promoted books often use depictions of family love, childhood innocence, and compassion in order to sell the public on policies that ironically put the profit of multinational corporations over the well-being of people. In doing so, the authors reveal the extent to which globalization depends upon education and also show how battles over culture, language, and the control of information are matters of life, death, and democracy.

This chapter is about Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s 1965 play The Road as a play about commuting. In particular, I argue that The Road takes up commuting as a moment of transition between the working day and the day without work, between the hope of progress and the despair of deindustrialization, between production and anti-production, or the break-down of the machine in the space of reproduction. The play is critical of the postcolonial state for its failures to deliver (...) on the road to prosperity, and, at the same time, it presents the coming-apart of old paradigms of progress through work and gives a sense of their replacement by a metaphysics of indebtedness, or sacrifice to the gods. The Road magnifies the marginal social situation of Nigeria’s drivers (touts) that becomes the dominant paradigm of global labor under a later era financial globalization. The Road thus stands at the crux between local and global culture, between nostalgia for old class alliances and archaic ritualistic practices on the one hand and, on the other, a recognition of new forms of global accumulation. (shrink)