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Truth Tellers in Bradwardine’s Theory of Truth

“Truth Tellers in Bradwardine’s Theory of Truth,” submitted to Modern Views of Medieval Logic, the Proceedings of the First GPMR Workshop on Logic & Semantics.

Stephen Read’s work on Bradwardine’s theory of truth is some of the most exciting work on truth and insolubilia in recent years. Read brings together modern tools of formal logic and Bradwardine’s theory of signification to show that medieval distinctions can give great insight into the behaviour of semantic concepts such as truth. In a number of papers, I have developed a model theory for Bradwardine’s account of truth. This model theory has distinctive features: it serves up models in which every declarative object (any object signifying anything) signifies its own truth. This leads to a puzzle: there are good arguments to the effect that if anything is a truth-teller, it is false. This is a puzzle. What distinguishes paradoxical truth-tellers from benign truth tellers? It is my task in this paper to explain this distinction, and to clarify the behaviour of truth-tellers, given Bradwardine’s account of signification.

Details

Author: Greg Restall
Status: In Progress

Local file: bradwardine-truth-tellers.pdf (221KB)

Subjects: Bradwardine mathematics models paradox

About

I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.

Start at the home page—a summary of the site. The left column is news, archived on the news archive page. The central column contains recent items from the writing page, which lists my publications. These are also categorised by topic. You can follow my links at my account on delicious and occasional short snarky remarks at @consequently on twitter.

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This site is handcoded: I write text in Textmate, and Webby files things in the right place and uploads them to the server. This page was last modified on 2008-12-31 at 10:26PM.

Thought

I make no secret of changing my mind on one or two important issues … I’ve never thought it a virtue to adopt a position and try to get famous as a person who defends that position, like a purveyor of a brand name, like you’re selling cornflakes.
— Hilary Putnam The Philosophers’ Magazine, Summer 2001.