The Nature of Truth

697 Pages·2001·41.47 MB·English

by  Michael P. Lynch

(cid:0)
Acknowledgments
Realism and the CorrespondenceT heory
Bertrand Russell. "Truth and Falsehood." Chapter 12 of The Problems
of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912. Reprinted with
permission of the publisher.
J. L. Austin. "Truth." Proceedingso f the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol.
24. Reprinted by courtesy of the editor of the Aristotelian Society.
Copyright 1950.
Coherence Theories
Brand Blanshard. "Coherencea s the Nature of Truth." From The Nature
of Thought, vol. 2, pp. 260-279. 1939. Reprinted with the permission of
HarperCo llins Publishers.
Ralph C. S. Walker. "The Coherence Theory." From The Coherence
Theory of Truth, pp. 1-6 and 25-40. Copyright 1989 by Routledge
Press. Reprinted with the permission of Taylor and Francis Books. Sec-
tion III contains new material added by the author.
Pragmatism and Verificationism
Charles SandersP eirce. "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." Popular
ScienceM onthly 12 (1878): 286-302.
William James. "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth." From Pragmatism:
A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, pp. 197-236. New York:
Longmans, 1907.
.
XlV Acknowledgments
MichaeDl umme. t"tTruth." Proceedinogf sth eA ristoteliaSno ciet5y9 .
Copyrigh1t9 5-8195.9 Reprintebdy courtesoyf thee ditoro f theA ris-
totelianS ocie.ty
HilaryP utna.m "TwoP hilosophicPaelr specti."v eFsromR easo, Tnruth,
andH istor,y pp. 49-56. Copyrigh1t9 81b yC ambridgUen iversiPtyr es.s
Reprintewdi tht hep ermissioonf C ambridgUen iversiPtyr es.s
RichardR orty. "Is Trutha Goalo f Inquir?y DonaldD avidsovne rsus
CrispinW righ."t PhilosophicQaul arterl4y 5 (1995): 281-300. Cop-y
right1 995b y thee ditorso f TheP hilosophQyu arter.l yReprintewdi th
. .
permISS.Ion
Phenomenological and Postmodernist Conceptions
Martin Heidegge.r "On the Essenceo f Truth." From Basic Writingsb y
Martin Heidegge. rEnglisht ranslation copyright 1977 by Harper and
Row Publisher.s GeneraIl ntroductiona nd the introductionst o eachp art
copyright by D. F. Krell. Reprinted by permissiono f HarperCollins
Publisher.s
Michel Foucaul.t "Truth and Powe.r" FromP owe/rKnowledg,e pp. 131-
133. Copyright 1972, 1975, 1976, 1977 by Michel Foucaul.t Powe/r
Knowledgec opyright 1980 by the HarvesterP res.s Reprintedb y per-
missiono f PantheonB ooks, a divisiono f RandomH ouse.
T arski ' s Theory and Its Importance
Alfred Tarski . " The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations
of Semantics ." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944 ).
Copyright 1992 by the Estate of Alfred Tarski . Reprinted by permission
of J an T arski .
Hartry Field . " Tarski 's Theory of Truth ." Journal of Philosophy 69 ,
no . 13 : 347 - 375 . Reprinted with the permission of the author and The
Journal of Philosophy .
Scott Soames . "What Is a Theory of Truth?" Journal of Philosophy8 1,
no. 8: 411-429. Reprintedw ith the permissiono f the author and The
Journal of Phi loso ph y.
Acknowledgments xv
DeflationaryV iewsa nd Their Critics
Frank Plumpton Ramsey . "The Nature of Truth ." Episteme 16: 6- 16 .
Copyright 1990 . Reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers .
P. F. StrawSOll . "Truth ." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , suppl .
vol . 24 . Copyright 1950 . Reprinted by courtesy of the editor of the
Aristotelian Society .
W . V . O. Quine . "Truth ." From The Pursuit of Truth , pp . 77 - 88 .
Cambridge : Harvard University Press . Copyright 1990 , 1992 , by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College . Reprinted by permission of
the author and the publisher .
Hartry Field . "Correspondence Truth , Disquotational Truth , and
Deflationism ." Excerpted from "The Deflationary Conception of Truth ,"
in Fact , Science , and Morality : Essays on A . J. Ayer 's Language , Truth ,
and Logic , edited by G. Macdonald and C. Wright . Oxford : Blackwell ,
1986 . Reprinted , with changes by the author , with permission of the
author and the publisher .
Anil Gupta . "A Critique of Deflationism ." Philosophical Topics 21
(1993 ), no . 2: 57 - 81 . Reprinted by permission of the author and the
editor of Philosophical Topics .
Michael Devitt . "The Metaphysics of Truth ." This essay is also appear -
ing in What Is Truth ? edited by Richard Schantz . Berlin and New York :
Walter de Gruyter , 2000 . It is printed here with the permission of
Richard Schantz and the author .
Primitivism , Identity Theory , and Alethic Pluralism
Donald Davidson . "The Folly of Trying to Define Truth ." Journal of
Philosophy 93 , no . 6: 263 - 279 . Copyright 1999 by Donald Davidson .
Reprinted with permission of the author .
Jennifer Hornsby . "Truth : The Identity Theory ." Reprinted with omis -
sions from Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 . Copyright 1997 .
Reprinted by courtesy of the author and the editor of the Aristotelian
Society .
XVt Acknowledgments
Hilary Putnam. "The Faceo f Cognition." Presenteda s part of the Dewey
Lectures of 1994, "Sense, Nonsense, and the Sense:s An Inquiry into the
Powers of the Human Mind," lecture 3: "The Face of Cognition." Pub-
lished in The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9: 488-504 and 510-517.
Reprinted with permission of the author and The Journal of Philosophy.
Note: In preparing previously published essaysf or this volume, I have
engagedi n minor editing.
Contributors
Linda Martin Alcoff is Merideth Professor and Associate Professor of Philoso -
phy at SyracuseU niversity. She is most recently the author of Real Knowing:
New Versions of the CoherenceT heory and the editor of Epistemology: The Big
Questions .
W. P. Alston is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at SyracuseU niversity. Pro-
fessor Alston has made important contributions to epistemology, the philosophy
of religion and the philosophy of language. His most recent books include The
Reliability of SenseP erception and A Realist Conception of Truth.
J. L. Austin , the author of Sense and Sensibilia and How to Do Things with
Words and was a leading figure in the "ordinary language" movement of phi-
losophy prominent in the mid twentieth century.
Brand Blanshard, American absolute idealist, spent much of his distinguished
career teaching at Yale Uni'Tersity. His many books include Reasona nd Analysis
and the multivolume The Nature of Thought.
Marian David is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre
Dame, working in metaphysicsa nd the philosophy of mind. He is the author of
Correspondencea nd Disquotation.
Donald Davidson is Willis S. and Marion SlusserP rofessor of Philosophy at the
University of California at Berkeley. He is author of widely influential articles on
language and mind, many of which are included in Actions and Events and
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation .
Michael Devitt is Professoro f Philosophy at the City University of New York. He
is the author of many important articles on language and realism and of Realism
and Truth (2nd ed.) and Coming to Our Senses.
Michael Dummett is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Oxford , where he was W)Tkeham Professor of Logic from 1972 to 1992. His
influential work in the philosophy of language and mathematics includes Frege:
Philosophy of Language, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, The Origins of
Analytical Philosophy, and The Seaso f Language.
Hartry Field, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, has made
numerous contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of
790 Contributors
language. He is the author of Sciencew ithout Numbers: A Defense of Nomina/-
ism and Realism-, Mathematics-, and Modality.
Michel Foucault was the leading philosopher of postmodernism. His many in-
fluential works include The Archaeology of Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic,
and the multivolume History of Sexuality.
Dorothy Grover, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has
contributed extensivelyt o the philosophy of logic and language. Shei s the author
of The Prosentential Theory of Truth.
Anil Gupta is Rudy Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University. He has been
a leading figure for years in the field of philosophical logic. He is the author of
The Logic of Count Nouns and (with N. Belnap) of The Revision Theory of
Truth .
Martin Heideggerw as the most influential and controversial German philosopher
of the twentieth century. His books include Being and Time, Discourse on
Thinking, and The End of Philosophy.
Terence Horgan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, is the
author (with J. Tienson) of Connectionisma nd the Philosophy of Psychologya nd
of numerous articles on metaphysicsa nd on the philosophy of mind. A collection
of hi.s papers, Making Materialism: Mind and Its Place in Nature, is forthcoming
from Oxford University Press.
Jennifer Hornsby is Professor and Head of the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck
College, University of London. Her publications include Actions, Simple Mind-
edness: A Defence of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind, Ethics: A
Feminist Reader (coedited with E. Frazer and S. Lovibond), and The Cambridge
Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (coedited with M. Fricker).
Paul Horwich is Professoro f Philosophy at the City University of New York. He
is the author of Probability and Evidence, Asymmetries in Time, the much dis-
cussedd efenseo f de lationism Truth (2nd ed.), and its companion Meaning.
William James, psychologist and philosopher, was one of the most influential
American intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His
works include The Principles of Pscyhology-, The Will to Believe-, Pragmatism: A
New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, and The Meaning of Truth.
Michael P. Lynch teachesp hilosophy at Connecticut College. He is most recently
the author of Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity.
Charles Peirce, brilliant logician and founder of pragmatism, never held an aca-
demic post. His many papers are included in the eight-volume Collected Paperso f
Charles Sanders Peirce .
Hilary Putnam, Cogan University Professor at Harvard University, has made
many important contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of
mind , and the field of mathematics . He is the author of Reason , Truth , and His -
tory, Realism with a Human Face-, Renewing Philosophy, and Pragmatism.
Contributors 791
w . V. o. Quine is ProfessorE meritus at Harvard University. His many seminal
contributions to the philosophy of language and logic include From a Logical
Point of View, Word and Object, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, and
The Pursuit of Truth.
F. P. Ramsey was a Cambridge mathematician and philosopher who, before his
untimely death at the age of twenty-seven, made important contributions to the
philosophy of sciencea nd logic.
Richard Rorty is Professoro f Comparative Literature at Stanford University and
Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Virginia. His many
books include Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Truth and Progress, and
most recently, Philosophy and Social Hope.
Bertrand Russellw on the Nobel Prize for Literature for his many contributions to
philosophy and social criticism. One of the founders of analytic philosophy, his
groundbreaking works includes Principia Mathematica (coauthored with A. N.
Whitehead), The Analysis of Mind, and Knowledge: Its Scopea nd Limits.
Scott Soames is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. His books
include Understanding Truth, Propositions and Attitudes (coedited with Nathan
Salmon), and Syntactic Argumentation and the Structure of English (coauthored
with David Perlmutter).
Ernest Sosai s the Romeo Elton Professoro f Natural Theology and Professor of
Philosophy at Brown University and Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers Univer-
sity. He is the author of many important articles in epistemology, and his books
include Knowledge in Perspective: SelectedE ssaysi n Epistemology and A Com-
panion to Epistemology (coedited with J. Dancy), and A Companion to Meta-
physics (coedited with J. Kim).
Peter Strawson, Emeritus Professoro f Philosophy at Oxford University, has made
important contributions to the philosophy of language and metaphysics. His
books include The Bounds of Sense, Individuals: An Essay on Descriptive Meta-
physics, and Analysis and Metaphysics.
Alfred Tarski, mathematician, logician, and philosopher, spent the latter half of
his life at the University of Berkeley, having emigrated from his native Poland. He
is the author of numerous papers on logic and algebra, the more philosophical of
which are included in Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics.
Ralph Walker, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, is the editor of Kant
on Pure Reason and The Real in the Ideal, and is the author of Kant and The
CoherenceT heory of Truth.
Crispin Wright is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Philosophy at the University of
St. Andrews and regular Visiting Professor at Columbia University. His books
include Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics; Realism, Meaning, and
Truth (2nd ed.); and the widely discussedT ruth and Objectivity.
Preface
The deepestp hilosophical questions are not isolated; they sit at the center
of our broader cultural concerns. This is certainly the case with the
problem of truth. An increasing philosophical preoccupation with truth
over the last hundred years is deeply intertwined with two larger issues.
The first issue is pluralism. The sheer number and variety of viewpoints
we encounter on any question is forcing us, on both the political and
philosophical fronts, to think about how objectivity is possible. The
second issue is our increasing technological sophistication at both pur-
suing and distorting the truth . There is little prospect that we will slow
down in either respect at the beginning of this century. In a world where
things move so fast that the real can be difficult to tell from the virtual,
understanding truth seems more relevant than ever.
This volume is a comprehensives urvey of the various attempts to solve
this problem. Roughly speaking, the essaysc enter around two questions:
Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature
does it have? The book is therefore concerned with the question of truth
itself, as opposed to the relation of truth to other issueso f philosophical
interest, such as knowledge, meaning, and logic. This is the first of the
ways in which I've attempted to make the territory more manageablef or
a single volume. The second is by limiting the essaysi ncluded to those
written during the twentieth century.
The problem of truth is complex, and my hope is that this book will
act as a map not only for undergraduate and graduate students of phi-
losophy but also for anyone who finds himself lost in the thickets of
the contemporary debate . To this end, the introductions to each part are
intended to help the reader locate the most important concepts and issues