New Waves in Truth, edited by Cory D. Wright and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) - Book Preview

New Waves in Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) contains eighteen recent essays by twenty young researchers doing work in the theory of truth. The editors’ introduction shows significant diversity in the positions and directions taken by these 21^st century philosophers. One theme which runs throughout most of the volume is deflationism about truth. As the editors mention, “truth theorists have offered up a dizzying array of characterizations of deflationism” (3). The reader who wishes better to understand the current discussion of deflationism must realize the discussion is not simply comprised of the advocates and the critics of deflationism, arrayed in opposition to one another; each advocate and each critic may be talking about something rather different when they talk about deflationism. As a beginning, however, the reader may understand deflationism as the position that speakers predicate truth to statements for linguistic convenience and that truth is not a substantive property of propositions.

In addition to discussing deflationism, the contributors to this volume have written essays considering: the value of truth (i.e., What is truth good for? What makes the goal of believing what is true worthwhile?), different notions of what falsity is, whether truth is bivalent (i.e., Are true and false the only two truth values?), pluralist and monist theories of truth, truth in the domain of moral judgments and in the domain of color judgments, and the relationship between necessity and analyticity.

I anticipate the readings in this volume to be challenging and rather technical. I am somewhat interested in better understanding what deflationism is (and whether some form of “inflationism” might be superior after all), but I am particularly interested in the relevance of contemporary philosophical discussion about truth to ethics, theory of value, and to realist-pragmatist dialogue in epistemology and metaphysics.

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Editors’ Bios

Cory D. Wright received his Ph.D. in Philosophy & Cognitive Science from University of California San Diego in 2007, and teaches philosophy at California State University Long Beach. His research interests are primarily in Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Psychology. He has published recent articles on pluralism about truth.

Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews in 2006, and does research at the University of California Los Angeles and at københavns universitet in Denmark. His research interests are primarily in Epistemology, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Logic, and Metaphysics. He has also published recent articles on pluralism about truth.[1]

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[1] New Waves, x.

convoluted writing in academic philosophy: an illustration

This is why academic philosophy is so hard to read: writers get lazy / used to writing in unnecessarily convoluted ways. For example:

"terms like 'true' and 'false' are merely linguistic devices whose necessity resides in enabling the performance of certain logically expressive tasks"....

!!!?

"whose necessity resides in enabling the performance of..."

!!!?

Write this instead:

"...mere linguistic devices that we need to perform..."

Seriously!

(This example taken from New Waves in Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3.)

Truth, by Alexis G. Burgess & John P. Burgess - Book Preview

Alexis G. Burgess’ & John P. Burgess’ book Truth (Princeton University Press, 2011) surveys the current (early 21^st century) discussion of theory of truth in English-speaking analytic philosophy for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in philosophy. The authors take a particular interest in what interesting qualities all truths might have in common (besides being true), and what is (and what might explain) the practical utility of truth.[1]

In the Introduction, the authors explain how 20^th century philosophy of truth centered on a three-cornered debate between (1) realists’ metaphysical conception of truth (correspondence), (2) idealists’ epistemological conception of truth (coherence), and (3) pragmatists’ ethical or utilitarian conception of truth. At the turn of the beginning of the present century, the central debate is between (1) contemporary realism, (2) antirealism, and (3) deflationism about truth. Each of these “isms” has many different versions.

After a chapter on Alfred Tarski’s (1901-1983) contribution to the current discussion which is divided into nontechnical and more technical sections, chapters three through six survey the field of this contemporary debate. The authors express sympathy with the general idea behind deflationism, but dissatisfaction with any of the deflationisms on offer. They consider objections that deflationism cannot explain why truths are useful and that both deflationism and realism neglect the evaluative role of truth. In the chapter on antirealism, the authors attempt to disentangle difference uses of the label “realism”, and present the work of antirealist as opposing “realist” truth-conditional semantics to “antirealist” verification-conditional semantics. They also discuss the pluralist view that realism is appropriate to some domains of discourse while antirealism is appropriate to others.

Burgess & Burgess regard it impossible (or at least unhelpful) to keep separate discussions of the (in)solvability of paradoxes attached to truth and related alethic notions (such as the liar paradox and Russell’s paradox in set theory), on the one hand, from discussions of the nature of truth, on the other hand. The final two chapters of the book provide an account of the work of Saul Kripke (b.1940), and a survey of some proposals seeking to improve upon Tarski and Kripke. They consider, among other proposals, the defeatist view that the intuitive notion of truth is incoherent and so the paradoxes are ultimately unresolvable. They also point out the connection between the (in)solvability of the paradoxes and the debate between deflationist and inflationist accounts of truth.

I hope to find in this relatively short and accessible text a framework for understanding and interacting with the current discussion on theory of truth represented by the articles published in New Waves in Truth (eds. Cory D. Wright and Nikolaj J.L.L. Pedersen, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). I have felt sympathies with both realism and pragmatism for a long time, and have some curiosity about antirealism and deflationism, but have often felt confused by discussions of theory of truth that I have encountered, mostly while reading about expressivism, realism, and antirealism in metaethics. I anticipate this study will better equip me to participate in discussions of metaethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of language.

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Authors’ Bios

Alexis George Papantonopoulos Burgess (A.B., Harvard ’02, Ph.D., Princeton ’06) teaches at Stanford University. He writes on fictionalism and nonfactualism, and teaches courses in metaphysics.[2] John Patton Burgess (Ph.D., Berkeley ’74) teaches at Princeton. He does technical work in philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics.[3]

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[1] Burgess & Burgess, Truth, p. xi.

[2] http://www.academicroom.com/users/alexis-burgess

[3] http://philosophy.princeton.edu/components/com_faculty/documents/burgess-cv.pdf

Burgess & Burgess on Truth (Princeton, 2011): the 20th century debate between realism-idealism-pragmatism has been supplanted by a 21st century debate between realism-antirealism-deflationism, each with several versions (and there are other views as well). (pp 2-5)

I find myself wishing I'd read this book when I started grad school, but maybe it wouldn't have made quite as much sense then -- and it wasn't written yet, anyway.