真之多元论的混合合取难题

真之多元论认为不同的领域有不同的真性质。混合合取的合取支由不同领域的命题所构成,从而具有不同的真性质。多元论需要解释混合合取具有何种真性质。尽管多元论有若干解决办法,如假设逻辑领域特有的真性质、假设合取命题特有的真性质、假设某种普遍的真性质,但都存在一定的问题。混合合取仍旧对多元论构成挑战。另外,强一元论面临辖域问题,即,适真性的范围较窄。相比较而言,弱一元论优于多元论和强一元论。     

Quine's truth

W. V. Quine has made statements about truth which are not obviously compatible, and his statements have been interpreted in more than one way. For example, Donald Davidson claims that Quine has an epistemic theory of truth, but Quine himself often says that truth is just disquotational. This paper argues that Quine should recognize two different notions of truth. One of these is disquotational, the other is empiricist. There is nothing wrong with recognizing two different notions of truth. Both may be perfectly legitimate, even though, to some extent, they may be applicable in different contexts. Roughly speaking, a sentence is true in the empiricist sense if it belongs to a theory which entails all observation sentences which would be assented to by the speakers of the language in question (and no observation sentences which would be dissented from by these speakers). Various objections to this idea are discussed and rejected.     

On Moderate Pluralism About Truth and Logic

According to moderate truth pluralism, truth is both One and Many. There is a single truth property that applies across all truth-apt domains of discourse, but instances of this property are grounded in different ways. Propositions concerning medium-sized dry goods might be true in virtue of corresponding with reality while propositions pertaining to the law might be true in virtue of cohering with the body of law. Moderate truth pluralists must answer two questions concerning logic: (Q1) Which logic governs inferences concerning each truth-apt domain considered separately? (Q2) Which logic governs inferences that involve several truth-apt domains? This paper has three objectives. The first objective is to present and explain the moderate pluralist’s answers to (Q1) and (Q2). The second objective is to argue that there is a tension between these answers. The answer to (Q1) involves a commitment to a form of logical pluralism. However, reflection on the moderate truth pluralist’s answer to (Q2) shows that they are committed to taking logic to be topic neutrality. This, in turn, forces a commitment to logical monism. It would seem that the moderate truth pluralist cannot have it both ways. The third objective is constructive in nature. I offer an account of what moderate truth pluralists should say about logic and how they might resolve the tension in their view. I suggest that, just like moderate truth pluralists distinguish truth proper and “quasi-truth,” they should endorse a distinction between logic proper and “quasi-logic.” Quasi-truth is truth-like in the sense that instances of quasi-truth ground instances of truth. Quasi-logic is logic-like in the sense that it concerns arguments that are necessarily truth-preserving but are not generally so in a topic neutral way. I suggest that moderate truth pluralists should be monists about truth proper and logic proper but pluralists about quasi-truth and quasi-logic. This allows them to say that logic proper is topic neutral while still accommodating the idea that, for different domains, different arguments may be necessarily truth-preserving.     

Kreisel,the continuum hypothesis and second order set theory

Summary The major point of contention among the philosophers and mathematicians who have written about the independence results for the continuum hypothesis (CH) and related questions in set theory has been the question of whether these results give reason to doubt that the independent statements have definite truth values. This paper concerns the views of G. Kreisel, who gives arguments based on second order logic that the CH does have a truth value. The view defended here is that although Kreisel's conclusion is correct, his arguments are unsatisfactory. Later sections of the paper advance a different argument that the independence results do not show lack of truth values.     

Reasoning with Truth

The aim of the paper is to formulate rules of inference for the predicate 'is true' applied to sentences. A distinction is recognised between (ordinary) truth and definite truth and consequently between two notions of validity, depending on whether truth or definite truth is the property preserved in valid arguments. Appropriate sets of rules of inference governing the two predicates are devised. In each case the consequence relation is in harmony with the respective predicate. Particularly appealing is a set of ND rules for ordinary truth in which premises and assumptions play different roles, premises being taken to assert definite truth, assumptions to suppose truth. This set of rules can be said to capture everyday reasoning with truth. Also presented are formal characterisations, in the meta-language and in the object language, of paradoxical and 'truth teller'-like sentences.     

What Can Austin Tell Us about Truth?

In recent discussions of the problem of truth, Austin's views have been largely overlooked. This is unfortunate, since many of his criticisms aimed at Strawson's redundancy theory carry over to more recent incarnations of deflationism. And unlike contemporary versions of the correspondence theory of truth, Austin's manages properly to situate truth in its conceptual neighbourhood wherein it belongs to “a whole dimension of different appraisals which have something or other to do with the relation between what we say and the facts.” A proper analysis of truth cannot be given apart from a broader study of speech acts.     

On Value‐Attributions: Semantics and Beyond

This paper is driven by the idea that the contextualism‐relativism debate regarding the semantics of value‐attributions turns on certain extra‐semantic assumptions that are unwarranted. One is the assumption that the many‐place predicate of truth, deployed by compositional semantics, cannot be directly appealed to in theorizing about people's assessments of truth value but must be supplemented (if not replaced) by a different truth‐predicate, obtained through certain “postsemantic” principles. Another is the assumption that semantics assigns to sentences not only truth values (as a function of various parameters, such as contexts, worlds and times), but also semantic contents, and that what context‐sensitive expressions contribute to content are contextually determined elements. My first aim in this paper will be to show how the two assumptions have shaped two ways of understanding the debate between contextualism and relativism. My second aim will be to show that both assumptions belong outside semantics and are, moreover, questionable.     

NTV观点引发的逻辑哲学问题——直陈条件句能嵌套吗

NTV观点的核心思想是直陈条件句不是命题,它没有真值条件并且无真值,其既不为真也不为假,而只表现为一个相应的概率值。这就引发了一个有争论的逻辑哲学问题——直陈条件句能否嵌套。如果把直陈条件句视为无真值的,那么嵌套后的复合条件句就不能判断其真假（真值表不能使用）。对于直陈条件句能否嵌套的问题,学界有不同的观点,我们认为要完全解决真之条件主义与条件概率主义两者之间的矛盾是非常困难的,然而,完全接受条件概率论题的哲学后果是非常危险的,同样,暗示放弃真之语义观也是非常危险的。     

Knowledge,Truth and Plausibility

From antiquity several philosophers have claimed that the goal of natural science is truth. In particular, this is a basic tenet of contemporary scientific realism. However, all concepts of truth that have been put forward are inadequate to modern science because they do not provide a criterion of truth. This means that we will generally be unable to recognize a scientific truth when we reach it. As an alternative, this paper argues that the goal of natural science is plausibility and considers some characters of plausibility.     

Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of changing stakes

One of the many ways that ‘deflationary’ and ‘inflationary’ theories of truth are said to differ is in their attitude towards truth qua property. This difference used to be very easy to delineate, with deflationists denying, and inflationists asserting, that truth is a property, but more recently the debate has become a lot more complicated, owing primarily to the fact that many contemporary deflationists often do allow for truth to be considered a property. Anxious to avoid inflation, however, these deflationists are at pains to point out that the truth property, on their view, is not a property of any significant interest. Correspondingly, inflationists have seen this as an opportunity to refine what kind of property they think truth is, which—according to them—moves their views beyond deflationism. The upshot of this is that there are number of different accounts in the literature of what distinguishes an inflationary truth property from a deflationary one, or—as it is sometimes put—what distinguishes a ‘substantive’ property from an ‘insubstantive’ one. This has made it hard to pin down exactly what is at issue at the metaphysical level between deflationists and inflationists, which makes it increasingly hard to see how debates between them are properly phrased. Given that these positions represent the two central attitudes towards truth in contemporary debates, this makes for a serious obstacle for the project of discerning the correct theory of truth. The aim of this paper is to discern the best way to distinguish between substantive and insubstantive properties, and thus to restore some focus to these debates. I argue that the three central distinctions in the literature fail, and offer what I take to be a more promising distinction in terms of a graded distinction between abundant and sparse properties.     

Bradley and the impossibility of absolute truth

Bradley thought that there is a connexion between the theory of reality and the theory of truth. The theory of reality to which he subscribed, Monism, rules out a correspondence theory of truth, he thought, since it denies the existence of a plurality of facts, or things, in virtue of correspondence to which a judgment could be true. But though he rejects the correspondence theory he insists on the independence of truth from belief, wish and hope. For him the test of truth is coherence, which has two aspects, system and comprehensiveness. However, he does not think that this test yields ‘absolute’ truth. This, he maintains, for at least three different reasons, is unobtainable. Judgments can only be partially true. However, since there are degrees of truth, some judgments are closer to the truth than others, even though none are, or could be, unconditionally true.     

Emotivism and Deflationary Truth

The paper investigates different ways to understand the claim that non–cognitivists theories of morality are incoherent. According to the claim, this is so because, on one theory of truth, non–cognitivists are not able to deny objective truth to moral judgments without taking a substantive normative position. I argue that emotivism is not self–defeating in this way. The charge of incoherence actually only amounts to a claim that emotivism is incompatible with deflationary truth, but this claim is based upon a mistake. It relies upon a problematic understanding of both emotivism and the deflationary theory of truth.     

The three faces of overconfidence

Overconfidence has been studied in 3 distinct ways. Overestimation is thinking that you are better than you are. Overplacement is the exaggerated belief that you are better than others. Overprecision is the excessive faith that you know the truth. These 3 forms of overconfidence manifest themselves under different conditions, have different causes, and have widely varying consequences. It is a mistake to treat them as if they were the same or to assume that they have the same psychological origins.     

Spinoza on Friendship

Friendships have always been one of the most valuable assets in the lives of human beings, and friendships were of utmost importance to Spinoza. There are different kinds of friendship but for Spinoza genuine friendship can only occur among those who pursue the truth. In this paper I will (1) point out what Spinoza means by the truth, (2) show how friendships are possible even though there is tension in our lives between our desire to preserve ourselves and our desire to preserve others, (3) differentiate two kinds of friendship, and (4) see what if anything is missing from his account of friendship.     

Stabilizing Knowledge

If epistemic contextualism is correct, then knowledge attributions do not have stable truth‐conditions across different contexts. John Hawthorne, Timothy Williamson, and Patrick Rysiew argue that this unstable picture of knowledge attributions undermines the role that knowledge reports play in storing, retrieving, and transmitting useful information. Contrary to this view, I argue that the truth‐conditions of knowledge attributions are more stable than critics have claimed, and that contextualism is compatible with the role knowledge attributions play in storing, retrieving, and transmitting information across contexts. In particular, I discuss a social dimension of ‘knowledge’ that limits contextual variability. This indicates a new way of characterizing contextualism.     

论弗雷格的“真之收缩”思想

弗雷格运用逻辑分析的方法,提出了自己独特的"真"之思想,形成了关于"真"的完整理论。在他看来,"真"不具有实体属性,不存在与客体在存在方式或存在状况的符合与对应,"真"只用来表达断定句形式中的断定力。当"5是素数"这个句子带有断定力时,真也就被表达出来,它与"5是素数是真的"表达了同样的内容。另外,他将"真"作为初始概念,认为真是不可定义的。如果对"真"进行定义,将走入"定义的循环"。因为要知道什么是"真",就需要论证表象与现实的一致性,而二者的一致又依赖于"真"的定义。这种思路与做法必将导致循环定义,故弗雷格认为"真"是不可定义的。基于以上两点的分析,他再次对符合论提出批评。他认为,如果符合论对"真"的理解是正确的话,那么结论是"事实比真更为基本,应该在事实的基础上定义真",但这显然是错误的,因为我们总是通过真来确定事实,而不是通过事实来确定真。我们似乎可以在弗雷格思想中找到收缩论的雏型,因为他关于"真"的认识与收缩论在很大程度上是一致的。收缩论最重要的观点在于说"P是真的"和说"P"有相同的涵义,谓词"是真的"是多余的。"真"本身是可收缩的,不带有实体性质。于是,我们可把弗雷格作为表达真之收缩观点的第一位哲学家,虽然他并不是坚定的收缩论者。     

高血压诊断标准的相对与绝对

血压高低与并发症发生是一种线形关系.没有这样一条分界线,将高血压产生的并发症截然分开.相同血压对年龄不同的正常人有不相同的意义,相同的血压对存在不同合并症患者产生的结果也不一样.制定科学合理的血压标准并且又不断予以修订就是从相对真理向绝对真理发展的过程.     

Truth and Reduction

The proof-theoretic results on axiomatic theories oftruth obtained by different authors in recent years are surveyed.In particular, the theories of truth are related to subsystems ofsecond-order analysis. On the basis of these results, thesuitability of axiomatic theories of truth for ontologicalreduction is evaluated.     

真值条件内容非实在论

错误论和非事实论是用语义方式表述的两种不同形态的非实在论,当中涉及"真"、"假"、"指称"、"真值条件"这样的语义概念。布高西昂认为,针对真值条件内容概念的错误论和非事实论是内在地不一致的,从而可以先验地予以拒绝。本文详细分析布高西昂的论证,揭示其论证的缺陷,以及分析布高西昂与其批评者达维特之间的争议,消除他们对用于表述非实在论的语义概念的误解,尝试为真值条件内容非实在论给出一致的表述。