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.
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.
We extend trust to those we deem trustworthy. Trustworthiness involves both a competence component and a motivation component. Insofar as we aim to trust only those who are trustworthy, we have reason not to extend our trust when the target is either incompetent or not properly motivated. However, of these two ways that trust can be violated, the latter tends to elicit much stronger reactive attitudes: here we speak of resentment and betrayal, modulated perhaps by whether the violation of trust was out of ill will (when we think they weren't truthful) or insufficient care and attentiveness. In this paper I explore whether the desire to avoid situations that might elicit these stronger reactive attitudes -- especially those having to do with being deemed untruthful -- may have a significant effect on our epistemic lives. I venture that this desire may partly explain our tribalistic tendencies and our tendency to seek out and remain in epistemic bubbles. If this is correct, it might also explain why generating fear – in particular, fear that others do not share our values – is one of the most effective ways to sow the seeds of polarization.
The question whether truth is correspondence, coherence, pragmatic utility, or something else is a perennial philosophical question for which there has so far been no decision procedure. In this talk I propose a decision procedure for this question. The basis for this decision procedure is the consideration of what we lose and what we don’t lose when we lose truth in a “post-truth” crisis. “Post-truth crisis” can be understood, in this context, either as the actual crisis taking place today or as a thought experiment.
This paper examines why we intuitively regard truth as valuable. Philosophical theories of truth are traditionally divided into normativism (e.g., coherence theory, pragmatism), which treat truth as a normative property, and non-normativism (e.g., correspondence theory, deflationism), which do not (Wrenn, 2023). While normativism can account for truth’s value directly, non-normativist theories require additional explanation. Within non-normativism, object-given views attribute value directly to truth, whereas state-given views locate value in truth-oriented states or activities (Ferrari, 2018; Lynch, 2004; Motiva, 2021; Wrenn, 2023). Although state-given accounts avoid problems faced by object-given approaches, they struggle to explain why we intuitively see truth itself as valuable—a phenomenon termed the object-given intuition. This paper offers a game-based model to address this. Drawing on Nguyen (2019)’s notion of “striving-play” games, truth-seeking is treated as a provisional, goal-directed activity analogous to a game, where the apparent aim (i.e., truth) is pursued for a deeper purpose (i.e., understanding). The object-given intuition arises because agents overgeneralize the temporary value of truth within inquiry to the value of truth itself. This framework preserves the strengths of state-given accounts while explaining the object-given intuition, contributing to debates on truth’s value without positing truth as independently valuable.
