Truth and Words
Gary Ebbs
Abstract
This book explains how to define a disquotational truth predicate that we are directly licensed to apply not only to our own sentences as we use them now, but also to other speakers' sentences and our own sentences as we used them in the past. The conventional wisdom is that there can be no such truth predicate. For it appears that the only instances of the disquotational pattern that we are directly licensed to accept are those that define ‘is true’ for our own sentences as we use them now. This book argues that this appearance is illusory. It constructs an account of words that licenses us t ... More
This book explains how to define a disquotational truth predicate that we are directly licensed to apply not only to our own sentences as we use them now, but also to other speakers' sentences and our own sentences as we used them in the past. The conventional wisdom is that there can be no such truth predicate. For it appears that the only instances of the disquotational pattern that we are directly licensed to accept are those that define ‘is true’ for our own sentences as we use them now. This book argues that this appearance is illusory. It constructs an account of words that licenses us to rely not only on formal (spelling-based) identifications of our own words, but also on our non-deliberative practical identifications of other speakers' words and of our own words as we used them in the past. To overturn the conventional wisdom about disquotational truth, this book argues, we need only combine this account of words with our disquotational definitions of truth for sentences as we use them now. The result radically transforms our understanding of truth and related topics, including anti-individualism, self-knowledge, and the intersubjectivity of logic.
Keywords:
anti-individualism,
definitions of truth,
disquotation,
inter-subjectivity,
logic,
self-knowledge,
sentences,
truth,
truth predicate,
words
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199557936 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2009 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557936.001.0001 |
