Truth is mysterious. Some have identified it with God, some with Goodness and some with Being. Some have claimed there is no such thing and others that that claim is self-refuting. Truth borders on paradox: if there is no Truth are there truths and is that the claim that there could b none one of them? Some have claimed that if there is a World there is a totality of truths and others that there can be no such totality and no such World. This paper examines some of these issues with a weather eye to how they were raised and discussed by Augustine, Anselm, and Buridan in the medieval Latin tradition and by some of our contemporaries.
In Language Animal and Cosmic Connections, Charles Taylor advances a theory of constitutive-expressive language. Taylor argues that this model developed in the 1790s, following Johann Herder’s theorisation of Besonnenheit ("reflective-awareness") in his Ursprung der Sprache ("Origin of Language") (1772) essay. Despite Herder’s dominant influence, Taylor names his theory after three contributors, labelling it the ‘HHH’ (Hamann-Herder-Humboldt) language model. Building on analysis of J.G. Hamann’s early essay, Socratic Memorabilia (1759), this article argues that the constitutive-expressive approach to language, attributed by Taylor to a post-Enlightenment language turn, was already operative, if unacknowledged, within Enlightenment philosophy itself. Taylor does not recognise that Hamann’s mimetic technique—labelled here ‘philosophical portraiture’—catches the period’s leading philosophers relying on constitutive-expressive language in the founding documents of the French Encyclopédie project, against their professed ideal of a transparent language that unveils “Truth.” Two implications follow from this correction: (I) the transitional period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism should be reevaluated, and (II) the longstanding debate about poetry as untruth and philosophy as truth should be revisited in light of philosophy’s unacknowledged ‘poetic’ practice.
According to Truth Primitivism, truth is an unanalysable concept or property. Proponents of the view, especially Jamin Asay, have argued that the GE Moore and Bertrand Russell were early adopters of primitivism until they both abandoned the view in favour of the correspondence theory because neither one of them were able to reconcile how a proposition as a state of affairs could be false if truth is a primitive and unanalysable. In this paper, my focus will be Russell, and I will challenge the view that early Russell was a primitivist about truth; instead, once we have a clearer appreciation of how he understood propositions and the connection between truth and fact, it becomes clear that even early Russell was a correspondence theorist—albeit a special, unique form of correspondence not otherwise in the literature then or now.
Long ago I tried to rescue No-Ought-From-Is from Prior’s counterexamples by reformulating it as the thesis that you can’t get a non-vacuous Ought from an Is. But (replies Nelson) once we help ourselves to the notion of truth we can construct logically valid arguments from non-moral premises to (non-vacuous) moral conclusions. Is Nelson’s counterexample logically valid? This depends on the nature of truth. If truth is transparent then his inference is valid but it is not a counterexample to No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. The ‘ought’ in his premises appears non-vacuously and is used as well as mentioned. Suppose we adopt a non-transparent theory of truth according to which we don’t officially know what the quoted statements mean? Taking my cue from Ramsey and Buridan I develop a formal theory of truth that relies on the notion of representing that. On this conception, Nelson’s argument is invalid but can be restored to validity by adding an extra premise; a premise, however in which ‘ought’ appears non-vacuously. So whether we adopt a transparent or a non-transparent theory of truth, No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is still stands which means that you can’t use truth to break down the barrier between substantively non-X premises and substantively X-conclusions.
The attention economy is often blamed for the severe deterioration of credible, high-quality content on social media. This is a bit perplexing. I give my attention to some platforms in exchange for some entertaining content. The exchange itself seems perfectly innocuous, sounds like a textbook win-win situation. Where did everything go wrong? Contrary to public opinion, I argue that the credibility crisis does not stem from the game of maximizing attention per se. Instead, the underlying problem comes from a market failure that plagues the attention market. A risk of using attention as currency is that it must be ‘paid’ before a consumer can evaluate the content's quality. You cannot determine if a post is entertaining or credible until you have seen it. Yet, once your attention is spent, the transaction is complete; you cannot claw it back even if the content is sloppy or false. This is a kind of information asymmetry. Economic theories show that information asymmetry often lead to adverse selection, a situation where low-quality goods inevitably squeeze out high-quality ones. This presentation will demonstrate how such market failure happens on social media, and how it ultimately fosters the rampant spread of misinformation and fake news online.
