Truth

Building Legality: Between Truthmaking and Constitution

by triantafyllos gkouvas

Presented at the 2012 McMaster Graduate Conference for Legal Theory
This is still a draft under development. Please do not cite without permission.

Building relations like making a proposition true or constituting a statue are shortcuts for an impressively nuanced... more Building relations like making a proposition true or constituting a statue are shortcuts for an impressively nuanced class of relations pertaining to the creation of less fundamental entities by more fundamental ones. Building relations are not metaphysical bedrock like universals, states of affairs or tropes but they do perform a salvaging task at least for those philosophers who are less willing to resort too quickly to reductive explanations of less fundamental phenomena. As I aspire to demonstrate building metaphors are no less frequent in debates about the nature of law and that’s not a matter of making one’s philosophical prose more illustrative. The argument I aim to bring forward is that no concerted effort has been made so far to explore the nature of the building relation that generates legal content. My target relation will be that of truth-making whose application to the grounds of legal propositions I will try to illuminate. My final argument will be that it is not just the case that there are legal propositions awaiting to be made true but propositions sortally identified as structural parts of the law of a legal system and it is qua structural parts that they are constituted (rather than simply made true) by what content the law practices of that system actually contribute.

"The Loneliest Desert": Science and the Ascetic Ideal in Nietzsche's Genealogy

by Nicholas Smyth

Draft, all comments welcome!

This paper is my attempt to make sense of Nietzsche's claim, made in the final few sections of the Genealogy of... more This paper is my attempt to make sense of Nietzsche's claim, made in the final few sections of the Genealogy of Morals, that scientific practise and the Christian 'ascetic ideal' share the same foundation. This is a puzzling and counterintuitive claim, yet, I shall attempt to elucidate and defend Nietzsche on this score, arguing that the scientist's attempt to eliminate pretense-like mental states from inquiry is a paradigm case of ascetic activity. Nietzsche's fundamental insight is that science, qua ascetic practise, cannot stand as the required counter-ideal that might banish the ascetic ideal from human life.

Misyurov D.A. Dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas // Credo New. 2012. №2

by Dmitry Misyurov

The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with... more The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with dominant and the non-dominant elements; universal formula; formula with symbolic weight of elements; tautological formula. For example, it suggests an opportunity to use the dialectical formulas for modeling and artificial intelligence creation, etc.

Uncorrected Insight: Metaphor and Transcendence "After Truth" in Qualitative Inquiry

by Timothy McGettigan

T-EQUIVALENCES FOR POSITIVE SENTENCES

by Cezary Cieslinski

published The Review of Symbolic Logic 2011, volume 4, issue 02, pp. 319-325. Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2011

Answering a question formulated by Halbach (2009), I show that a disquotational truth theory, which takes as axioms... more Answering a question formulated by Halbach (2009), I show that a disquotational truth theory, which takes as axioms all positive substitutions of the sentential T-schema, together with all instances of induction in the language with the truth predicate, is conservative over its syntactical base.

Médiation et énigme dans la pensée musicale d'Adorno

by João Pedro Cachopo

Published in in Présents musicaux, ed. Jean-Paul Olive (Paris, L’Harmattan – Collection Arts 8, 2009), pp. 171-192 [in French].

Truthiness, Self-Deception, and Intuitive Knowledge

by Amber Griffioen

Published in The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News, ed. by Jason  Holt (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing 2007).

An article for the layperson, introducing the philosophical problems regarding self-deception by appealing to Stephen... more An article for the layperson, introducing the philosophical problems regarding self-deception by appealing to Stephen Colbert's notion of 'truthiness'.

What symbols

by Dmitry Misyurov

This article contains 12 questions about the symbols. What are your thoughts in response? This article contains 12 questions about the symbols. What are your thoughts in response?

Truth and Justice When Fear and Repression Remain: An Open Letter to Dr Kanit Na Nakorn

by Tyrell Haberkorn

Published in _Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand_. Edited by Michael J. Montesano, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, and Aekapol Chongvilaivan. Singapore: ISEAS, 2011. Pages 42-54.

„Adorno und Descartes, programmatisch versöhnt: Der wissenschaftliche Essay als Form“

by Anne Sophie Spann

published in: Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 63, 11, (2009), 1077-1081.

Reducing Truth Through Meaning

by Robert Trueman

Forthcoming in 'Erkenntnis'

Horwich has attempted to combine an anti-reductionist deflationism about sentential truth with a reductionist theory... more Horwich has attempted to combine an anti-reductionist deflationism about sentential truth with a reductionist theory of meaning. Price has argued that this combination is inconsistent, but his argument is fallacious. In this paper I attempt to repair Price’s argument.

Distinguishing What is True and true: Toward a Postmodern Understanding of Revelation and Authority in Scripture

by Joel Harrison

Algumas considerações sobre o conceito de Verdade no Postscriptum de S. Kierkegaard

by Gabriel Ferreira

Revista Filosofia Capital - vol. 6 - 2011

"Some remarks on the concept of Truth in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript" "Some remarks on the concept of Truth in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript"

Truth as Mediated Correspondence

by Robert Barnard

R. Barnard and T. Horgan, ''Truth as Mediated Correspondence'', The Monist, 89 (2006), 28–49

Synthetic Unity of Truth

by Robert Barnard

R. Barnard and T. Horgan, "The Synthetic Unity of Truth," in C. Wright and N. Pederson (eds.) Truth Pluralism: Current Debates, Oxford University Press. (forthcoming)

What is Absolute Truth? (in English) 2012

by François-Igor Pris

Comments and notes

This paper was inspired by criticism of pluralism and relativism about truth, offered by Pascal Engel in (Engel 2011).... more This paper was inspired by criticism of pluralism and relativism about truth, offered by Pascal Engel in (Engel 2011). We discuss the main points of his talk in terms of our understanding of the later Wittgenstein. We share the essence of Engel’s absolutist thesis about truth and give it our interpretation in terms of the notion of family resemblance.

Managing the Tensions of Essentialism - draft (with Sue Lampitt)

by Robbie Duschinsky

Draft only; forthcoming in Sociology

This article will propose a new interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu, as a theorist of purity and impurity. Bourdieu’s... more This article will propose a new interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu, as a theorist of purity and impurity. Bourdieu’s writings indicate that through the adjudication of things or people as relatively impure or pure an image is constructed of their essential truth. Building from Bourdieu, we will show how themes of purity and impurity can be used to manage the tensions associated with attempts to impute an essence to human nature or to reality, ensuring that moral and epistemological significance of complexity is masked. This is the reason why themes of purity and impurity so often attend polarised worldviews, and why they are frequently mobilised for justifying and operating biopolitical processes of social stratification and regulation.

Semantic Conception of Truth. What It Is and What It Is Not

by Ladislav Koren

This is a slightly corrected and revised version of the thesis for PhD degree: "Truth and Meaning: the Dialectics of Theory and Practice".

Alfred Tarski’s semantic conception of truth is arguably the most influential – certainly, most discussed - modern... more Alfred Tarski’s semantic conception of truth is arguably the most influential – certainly, most discussed - modern conception of truth. It has provoked many different interpretations and reactions, some thinkers celebrating it for successfully explicating the notion of truth, whereas others have argued that it is no good as a philosophical account of truth. The aim of this work is to offer a systematic and critical investigation of its nature and significance, based on the thorough explanation of its conceptual, technical as well as historical underpinnings.

The methodological strategy adopted in the thesis reflects the author’s belief that in order to evaluate the import of Tarski’s conception we need to understand what logical, mathematical and philosophical aspects it has, what role they play in his project of theoretical semantics, which of them hang in together, and which should be kept separate. Chapter 2 therefore starts with a detailed exposition of the conceptual and historical background of Tarski’s semantic conception of truth and his method of truth definition for formalized languages, situating it within his project of theoretical semantics, and Chapter 3 explains the formal machinery of Tarski’s truth definitions for increasingly more complex languages. Chapters 4 - 7 form the core of the thesis, all being concerned with the problem of significance of Tarski’s conception. Chapter 4 explains its logico-mathematical import, connecting it to the related works of Gödel and Carnap. Having explained the seminal ideas of the model-theoretic approach to semantics, Chapter 5 tackles the question to what extent Tarski’s ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’ (and related articles from the 1930s) anticipates this approach, and what elements might be missing from it. Chapter 6 then deals with the vexed question of its philosophical import and value as a theory of truth, reviewing a number of objections and arguments that purport to show that the method fails as an explanation (explication) of the ordinary notion of truth, and, in particular, that it is a confusion to think that Tarski’s truth definitions have semantic import. Finally, Chapter 7 is devoted to the question whether Tarski’s theory of truth is a robust or rather a deflationary theory of truth.

On the basis of a careful analysis, the thesis aims to substantiate the following view. [A] Tarski’s theory with its associated method of truth definition was primarily designed to serve logico-mathematical purposes. [B] It can be regarded a deflationary theory of a sort, since it completely abstracts from meta- semantical issues concerning the metaphysical or epistemological basis or status of semantic properties. Indeed, [C] this can be interpreted as its laudable feature, since by separating formal (or logico-mathematical) from meta-semantical (or foundational) aspects it usefully divides the theoretical labour to be done in the area of meaning and semantic properties in general. [D] In spite of the fact that Tarski’s conception of truth has this deflationary flavour, the formal structure of its method of truth-definition is quite neutral in that it can be interpreted and employed in several different ways, some of them deflationary, others more robust.

Must We Do What We Say? Truth, Responsibility and the Ordinary in Ancient and Modern Perfectionism

by Daniele Lorenzini

Published in the European journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 2, n. 2 (2010), pp. 16-34

Foucault, il cinismo e la "vera vita"

by Daniele Lorenzini

Published in "Michel Foucault, gli antichi e i moderni", a cura di Lorenzo Bernini, Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2011, pp. 75-99