89:1 January 2006
Truth 

Advisory Editor: J. C. Beall, University of Connecticut

The present issue of The Monist is devoted to the so-called robust theories of truth which have been advanced in recent years by philosophers who maintain that truth affords an illuminating philosophical analysis. Such philosophers are counterposed to the so-called deflationists, who maintain that truth is not the sort of property that affords an analysis at all. Rather, the deflationists maintain, the predicate ‘is true’ merely augments the expressive power of our language, for example by allowing us to express in convenient fashion generalizations like ‘A conjunction is true if and only if both its conjuncts are true’. Like Aristotle and his followers, contemporary robust truth theorists tend to invoke a view of truth as correspondence to reality. A recent trend invokes “truthmakers”, maintaining that all truths (or all truths of some specified kind) are true because there is something in the world that makes them true. Tasks for robust truth theorists then include the specification of the relata of correspondence and the formulation of the principles that govern them. A further set of tasks consists in addressing criticisms from those, such as Quine, Horwich, Field and David Lewis, who argue that any explanatory work achieved by correspondence theories is achieved equally well by the simpler deflationary theories.

Potential topics include: the motivation for robust truth theories, recent criticisms of such theories, the issue of negative truthmakers, the relation between correspondence truth and varieties of deflationary truth, and the perennial issues arising from truth-theoretic paradoxes.

Table of Contents:

Hartry Field

Compositional Principles Versus Schematic Reasoning.

Robert Barnard and Terence Horgan

Truth As Mediated Correspondence

Frank Jackson 

Representation, Truth, and Realism

Michael P. Lynch 

Rewrighting Pluralism

Alexander Miller 

Russell, Multiple Relations, and the Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Nikolaj Jang Pedersen 

What Can the Problem of Mixed Inferences Teach Us about Alethic Pluralism?

Roy T. Cook

There are Non-Circular Paradoxes (But Yablo’s isn’t One of Them!)

Douglas Eden Patterson 

Tarski, The Liar, and Inconsistent Languages

Nicholas J.J. Smith 

Semantic Regularity and the Liar Paradox