The Taming of the True
Neil Tennant
Abstract
This book poses a broad challenge to the realist views of meaning and truth that have been prominent in recent philosophy. The book starts with a careful critical survey of the realism debate, guiding the reader through its complexities; it then presents a sustained defence of the anti-realist view that every truth is knowable in principle, and that grasp of meaning must be able to be made manifest. Sceptical arguments for the indeterminacy or non-factuality of meaning are countered; and the much-maligned notion of analyticity is reinvestigated and rehabilitated. The book goes on to show that ... More
This book poses a broad challenge to the realist views of meaning and truth that have been prominent in recent philosophy. The book starts with a careful critical survey of the realism debate, guiding the reader through its complexities; it then presents a sustained defence of the anti-realist view that every truth is knowable in principle, and that grasp of meaning must be able to be made manifest. Sceptical arguments for the indeterminacy or non-factuality of meaning are countered; and the much-maligned notion of analyticity is reinvestigated and rehabilitated. The book goes on to show that an effective logical system can be based on an anti-realist view; the logical system that he advocates is justified as a body of analytic truths and inferential principles. Having laid the foundations for global semantic anti-realism, the book moves to the world of empirical understanding, and gives an account of the cognitive credentials of natural scientific discourse. The book shows that the same canon of constructive and relevant inference suffices both for intuitionistic mathematics and for empirical science.
Keywords:
realism,
meaning and truth,
realism debate,
anti-realist views,
anti-realist view,
natural scientific discourse
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2002 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199251605 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199251605.001.0001 |
