spandrels of truth may 2009

[...]... out—important features of our language is for debate to tell For present purposes, I raise the issues of vagueness and other ‘factually defective’ phenomena to set them aside Spandrels of ttruth 1.3 5 Spandrels of ttruth Spandrels of x are inevitable, and frequently unintended, by-products of introducing x into some environment Originally, the term applied chiefly to architectural spandrels, those inevitable... issue of ttruth-theoretic paradox and what to make of it given the above conception of transparent truth Part of the answer turns on our ‘base language’, the ‘ttrue’free language into which our device ‘ttrue’ was introduced, and in particular the behavior of negation « Parenthetical remark Let me note, on a slightly technical issue, that I do not see the fundamental role of ttruth to be that of mathematical... Maximum Leader (to whom I’m also grateful for lll archives), the Boss of Bloomington, the late Lady Plumwood, the late Peer of Plumwood, the Prince of Paradox, the One True Believer, the Prince of Darkness, the Protector of Oz, the Dominator of Something Vague, the Identity of Relevance, and Saint Alasdair I am grateful for the work of all of these people, and hope that they see some value in the philosophical... throughout (and is certainly standard), is that falsity is truth of negation (i.e., tfalsity is ttruth of negation): α is false just if its negation ¬α is true This is why biv is put as it is, instead of explicitly in terms of the (derived) ‘falsity’ predicate With some (many?) philosophers, I accept both of these principles Indeed, given ttruth, the principles are equivalent By transparency, T r(... particular conception of truth, combined with features of our base language (the fragment free of ‘true’ and related notions) The principal aim of this chapter is to sketch the basic philosophical position, leaving further issues and defense to subsequent chapters The chapter is structured as follows §1.1 sketches the target conception of truth §1.2 discusses relevant features of our base language,... are briefly discussed) Transparent truth theorists who reject lem are generally led to recognize (or posit) some stronger notion of truth than ttruth, say, ‘determinate truth or the like (See Chapter 4 for some discussion of this.) This is unnecessary in the present context Given lem, all sentences—including the ‘factually defective’ ones (whatever, if anything, they may be)—are ttrue or tfalse Whether... purposes, the device ttruth—or the purely transparent notion of truth is fundamental With Hartry Field (1994) I embrace disquotationalism as a methodological stance The basic argument for methodological disquotationalism invokes Ockham: if, as it (so far) appears, our relevant truth- talk can be explained (or, in some cases, explained away) in terms of ttruth, then we ought to recognize only ttruth and its... Chapter 2) The result is a known ttruth theory, notably, the dual of Kripke’s familiar Strong Kleene truth theory,6 but a truth theory that, as far as I know, has been insufficiently appreciated, let alone endorsed 5 As far as I know, Mares 2004b is the first use of the term ‘semantic dialetheism’ in print The truth theory that I advocate in this book certainly counts as a version of ‘semantic dialetheism’ in... to the familiar non-empty set W of ‘worlds’ or points and ‘actual world’ or ‘base world’ @, we also have N , our so-called ‘normal worlds’, which is a non-empty subset of W such that @ ∈ N 7 In turn, we call W − N the set of abnormal points, which may 7 For purposes of giving the logic, which, though not belabored here, is of chief concern (at least as concerns our ttruth theory), having @ in the picture... (and merely extensional) negation, which conflicts with having transparent truth, at least given other assumptions about other connectives in the language (e.g., disjunction, ‘reasoning by cases’, and so on) What the spandrels of ttruth teach us is that, sometimes, our star mates come apart If, as I’ve suggested, the spandrels of ttruth are both ttrue and tfalse, then we have some α such that both α and . defective’ phenomena to set them aside. Spandrels of ttruth 5 1.3 Spandrels of ttruth Spandrels of x are inevitable, and frequently unintended, by-products of introduc- ing x into some environment limited. In Spandrels of Truth, Beall concisely presents and defends a modest, so-called dialetheic theory of transparent truth. Jc Beall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. This. the Boss of Bloomington, the late Lady Plumwood, the late Peer of Plumwood, the Prince of Paradox, the One True Believer, the Prince of Darkness, the Protector of Oz, the Dominator of Something