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Minimalists about Truth can (and should) be Epistemicists, and it helps if they are revision theorists too

“Minimalists about Truth can (and should) be Epistemicists, and it helps if they are revision theorists too,” pages 97–106 in JC Beall and Bradley Armour-Garb, Deflationism and Paradox, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Minimalists about truth say that the important properties of the truth predicate are revealed in the class of T-biconditionals. Most minimalists demur from taking all of the T-biconditionals of the form “<p> is true if and only if p”, to be true, because to do so leads to paradox. But exactly which biconditionals turn out to be true? I take a leaf out of the epistemic account of vagueness to show how the minimalist can avoid giving a comprehensive answer to that question. I also show that this response is entailed by taking minimalism seriously, and that objections to this position may be usefully aided and abetted by Gupta and Belnap’s revision theory of truth.

Details

Author: Greg Restall
Status: Published in 2005

Local file: minitrue.pdf (156KB)

Subjects: meaning truth

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 is for photos, archived on the occasional photos page. The right 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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Thought

Contrariwise, if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic!
— Lewis Carroll.