truth as one and many may 2009

[...]... of truth is like trying to get a full picture of the world; it is only possible from very far away 1 Truisms If a person shows that such things as wood, stones, and the like, being many are also one, we admit that he shows the coexistence of the one and the many, but he does not show that the many are one or the one many; he is uttering not a paradox but a truism Plato, Parmenides 1 Truisms about Truth. .. Objectivity, and truth and belief, the connection between truth and inquiry has often been highlighted by philosophers, most famously by Charles Peirce, who simply reduced truth to the aim of inquiry or to ‘‘the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate’’.¹⁰ But one needn’t go so far as Peirce to see the obvious relation between inquiry and truth Nor must one have a specialized... of Truth and Falsehood’’ reprinted in his Philosophical Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966) truth as one 23 Contemporary representationlists tend to be wary of positing facts as metaphysically distinct entities over and above objects and properties There are good reasons for this Facts are either constituted by objects and properties (and relations) or they are not If they are, then for reasons... take the components of those beliefs—concepts—to represent objects and properties Many of the core elements of what I’m calling the representational theory of truth were initially developed to understand how sentences and their component words represent, or refer to the world But the basic elements can, and have been adapted to mental representations, to beliefs and their component concepts And whether... belief that I call a core truism about truth One can easily deny this principle (many philosophers do deny it) without changing the subject or accepting a deep theoretical 16 truisms consequence Nonetheless, the belief is widely shared and is worth calling a folk belief about truth It is worth emphasizing that one can grant that there are core truisms about truth and still hold that there can be some... Horgan, ‘‘Contextual Semantics and Metaphysical Realism: Truth as Indirect Correspondence’’, in M Lynch (ed.), The Nature of Truth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 67–96 See also T Horgan and R Barnard, ‘ Truth as Mediated Correspondence’’, The Monist, 89 (2006), 28–49 Horgan’s approach, however, is contextualist and allows for different kinds of correspondence 24 truth as one (what I will here call... introduction as theories of truth itself They are better seen as theories of the properties that make beliefs true—or manifest truth In sum, the view I’ll be defending can be thought of as having two components The first is a functionalist analysis of both the ordinary concept of truth and the property that concept is a concept of The second is the thesis that this one property can be manifested in more than one. .. Independence and others such as Only true propositions can be known illustrate the connection between truth and epistemic concepts Still other platitudes connect truth to logical properties Thus for example, we endorse that Truth is what is preserved in valid inference Still others with moral principles, such as True propositions are what honest people typically intend to assert The core truisms about truth. .. can be both diverse in kind and yet cognitively unified 2 A Sketch of the Territory A second motivation for adopting a functionalist theory of truth is more direct It has benefits that other theories of truth lack Many contemporary philosophers—like most philosophers over the course of Western philosophical history—are monists about truth; they assume that there is one and only one explanation of what makes... Objectivity and truth without knowing anything about metaphysics, correspondence, ‘‘states of affairs’’, or the like Likewise with End of Inquiry and Norm of Belief: one can grant that truth is an aim of the process of asking and answering questions without having any particular view about why it is an aim Those are further questions.¹² Moreover, we should allow that some truisms and therefore the features and . 1 1.Truisms 7 2. Truth as One 21 3. Truth as Many 51 4. Truth as One and Many 69 5. Truth, Consequence, and the Universality of Reason 85 6. Deflationism and Explanation 105 7. Expanding the View:.