| Truth and Its Nature (If Any) 1999 Edition Contributor(s): Peregrin, J. (Editor) |
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ISBN: 0792358651 ISBN-13: 9780792358657 Publisher: Springer OUR PRICE: $104.49 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: August 1999 Annotation: The nature of truth is one of the central philosophical problems of all time. Truth and Its Nature (if Any) draws together contributions from outstanding analytic philosophers who approach the problem within the context established by the results of Alfred Tarski. The main focus of the majority of the contributions is on the recent debate between the deflationist' denigration of the truth predicate into a mere contentless grammatical device and inflationists', who insist, on the contrary, that truth is a crucially deep and substantial concept. The book is divided into four parts. The first is devoted to a reconsideration of some of the classical ideas about truth (especially those of Frege, James and Carnap). The second concentrates on Tarski and on ways to interpret his achievements from our current perspective. The third discusses Donald Davidson's inflationist' approach to truth and on reasons for seeing truth as substantial. The fourth concentrates on the deflationist' approach of Paul Horwich. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Epistemology - Philosophy | Logic - Philosophy | History & Surveys - Modern |
| Dewey: 121 |
| LCCN: 99038082 |
| Series: Synthese Library (Hardcover) |
| Physical Information: 0.56" H x 6.14" W x 9.21" (1.11 lbs) 221 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth into an explicit definition (or explication) of the concept hence coalesced with the question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and ingenious move was to introduce a new concept, satisfaction, which could be, on the one hand, recursively defined, and which, on the other hand, straightforwardly yielded an explication of truth. A surprising 'by-product' of Tarski's effort to bring truth under control was the breathtaking finding that truth is in a precisely defined sense ineffable, that no non- trivial language can contain a truth-predicate which would be adequate for the very 4 language . This implied that truth (and consequently semantic concepts to which truth appeared to be reducible) proved itself to be strangely 'language-dependent': we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a concept of truth applicable to every language. In a sense, this means, as Quine (1969, p. 68) put it, that truth belongs to "transcendental metaphysics", and Tarski's 'scientific' investigations seem to lead us back towards a surprising proximity of some more traditional philosophical views on truth. 3. TARSKI'S THEORY AS A PARADIGM So far Tarski himself. Subsequent philosophers then had to find out what his considerations of the concept of truth really mean and what are their consequences; and this now seems to be an almost interminable task. |