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Unanswered Questions

61 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
8 votes
1 answer
227 views

Did any philosopher promote a “pure” pragmatic conception of truth?

William James often associated truth with usefulness (utility), but overall his conception of truth was not pure in this regard. It shares some elements of the correspondence and coherence theory. For ...
4 votes
0 answers
57 views

Contradictory unprovable statements in Tarski's "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages"

In Tarski's "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages", he glosses over the proof of a difficult lemma. I am looking for help writing a proof of it. In Tarski's notation, it is: In ...
4 votes
0 answers
162 views

Truth/actuality as an operator

Frege claimed that "it is true that" adds nothing to the actual meaning of an assertion, and following him along this line are prosentential theories of truth. However, I wonder if this is ...
3 votes
0 answers
92 views

What does it mean for T-biconditionals to be derivable unrestrictedly?

I have been reading Leitgeb's What Theories of Truth Should be Like, and one of the desiderata for a theory of truth, he argues, is to have unrestricted derivable T-biconditionals. But I am having ...
3 votes
0 answers
86 views

A Paradox for Anti-Realism?

Semantic Anti-Realists hold that a claim has a (constructive) proof if the claim is true. I wonder whether this position runs into a version of Yablo's supposedly non-circular version of the liar ...
3 votes
0 answers
243 views

What's the difference between deflationism and correspondence theories of truth?

To my knowledge, the correspondence theory of truth posits that a proposition is true iff there are states of affairs that reflect what the proposition indicates. E.g. "Snow is white" is true iff snow ...
2 votes
0 answers
75 views

Are truth-theoretic functions discretely or continuously separate?

The obtainment relation for states-of-affairs (SoA's) is very similar to the truth relation for assertions. The SEP goes so far as to ask: Pollock (1984a: 53) correctly observes that “obtaining and ...
2 votes
0 answers
33 views

Is this a problem with verisimilitude talk, many-valued-logic talk, or something/nothing else?

A perhaps naive characterization of verisimilitude is "closeness to truth," the proximity coming from the similarity. At least, the SEP article uses, "The number of planets is 9," ...
2 votes
0 answers
61 views

"Truth" as a description of our cognition versus "truth" as a description of reality

In reading about the feud of foundationalism, infinitism and coherentism, there seems to be some arguments based on how cognition/reasoning works. However, an argument of the form (vaguely put by me) ...
2 votes
0 answers
127 views

How does Yablo's paradox affect the theory of truth?

Question: What does Yablo's paradox tell us about what a theory of truth should look like? I have been reading Leitgeb's What Theories of Truth Should be Like, and he discusses what a 'good' theory of ...
2 votes
0 answers
69 views

Citation regarding a quote having to do with "truth" and what "an animal needs to believe"

I'm trying to run down a quote from (I think) Hegel which I read several years ago and have not been able to find since. The gist of it is this... "What an animal, for the sake of its own survival,...
2 votes
0 answers
245 views

Language confusion; necessary/nomological/true in all worlds

I got confused by the way different people use language in the context of physicalism. In particular, Kripke seems to equate "necessary truths" with something that is true in all possible worlds. Is ...
2 votes
0 answers
64 views

Circularity between truth and meaning?

These two common claims are equally appealing: (1) the meaning of a ( declarative) sentence consists in its truth conditions (2) the truth of a sentence depends on its meaning But are we moving ...
1 vote
0 answers
61 views

Is there a common first thing we all know as a fetus?

Is there a common first truth known to any fetus, and if there is what is it? I was thinking of Descartes' methodological doubt, wherein he arrived at the indubitable truth "I think therefore I ...
1 vote
0 answers
26 views

What are some arguments prominent philosophers have made for alethic relativism?

Alethic relativism is the view that truth is relative. I wonder, what are some arguments that prominent philosophers, both currently living and also those now dead, have made for that position? ...

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