- Title Pages
- Other volumes of collected essays by Donald Davidson
- Dedication
- Provenance of the Essays and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Truth Rehabilitated
- 2 The Folly of Trying to Define Truth
- 3 Method and Metaphysics
- 4 Meaning, Truth, and Evidence
- 5 Pursuit of the Concept of Truth
- 6 What is Quine's View of Truth?
- 7 A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
- 8 The Social Aspect of Language
- 9 Seeing Through Language
- 10 James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty
- 11 The Third Man
- 12 Locating Literary Language
- 13 Thinking Causes
- 14 Laws and Cause
- 15 Plato's Philosopher
- 16 The Socratic Concept of Truth
- 17 Dialectic and Dialogue
- 18 Gadamer and Plato's Philebus
- 19 Aristotle's Action
- 20 Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects
- Appendix: Replies to Rorty, Stroud, McDowell, and Pereda
- Contents List of Volumes of Essays
- Bibliography References
- Index
The Folly of Trying to Define Truth
The Folly of Trying to Define Truth
- Chapter:
- (p.19) 2 The Folly of Trying to Define Truth
- Source:
- Truth, Language, and History
- Author(s):
Donald Davidson
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This essay argues that the concept of truth as well as related subjects of philosophical inquiry such as knowledge, belief, intention, and memory cannot be reduced to more elementary concepts, since these are the most elementary ones available. Tarski’s truth theory is examined, and a radical alternative to the truth theories considered in the preceding essay is proposed to identify the empirical connections between the concept of truth and observable human behaviour. A methodological model for this project is Frank Ramsey’s decision theory for constructing subjective probability.
Keywords: concept of truth, Tarski, Aristotle, human behaviour, Frank Ramsey, decision theory, subjective probability
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
- Title Pages
- Other volumes of collected essays by Donald Davidson
- Dedication
- Provenance of the Essays and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Truth Rehabilitated
- 2 The Folly of Trying to Define Truth
- 3 Method and Metaphysics
- 4 Meaning, Truth, and Evidence
- 5 Pursuit of the Concept of Truth
- 6 What is Quine's View of Truth?
- 7 A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
- 8 The Social Aspect of Language
- 9 Seeing Through Language
- 10 James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty
- 11 The Third Man
- 12 Locating Literary Language
- 13 Thinking Causes
- 14 Laws and Cause
- 15 Plato's Philosopher
- 16 The Socratic Concept of Truth
- 17 Dialectic and Dialogue
- 18 Gadamer and Plato's Philebus
- 19 Aristotle's Action
- 20 Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects
- Appendix: Replies to Rorty, Stroud, McDowell, and Pereda
- Contents List of Volumes of Essays
- Bibliography References
- Index
