Getting it right

Truth monism is the idea that only true beliefs are of fundamental epistemic value. The present paper considers three objections to truth monism, and argues that, while the truth monist has plausible responses to the first two objections, the third objection suggests that truth monism should be reformulated. On this reformulation, which we refer to as accuracy monism, the fundamental epistemic goal is accuracy, where accuracy is a matter of “getting it right.” The idea then developed is that accuracy is a genus with several species. Believing truly is a prominent species, but it is not the only one. Finally, it is argued that accuracy monism is equally good or better than both traditional truth monism and its main dialectical rival, value pluralism, when it comes to satisfying three important axiological desiderata.     

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。     

A multinomial modeling approach to dissociate different components of the truth effect

The subjective impression that statements are true increases when statements are presented repeatedly. There are two sources for this truth effect: An increase in validity based on recollection (a controlled process) and increase in processing fluency due to repeated exposure (an automatic process). Using multinomial processing trees (MPT), we present a comprehensive model of the truth effect. Furthermore, we show that whilst the increase in processing fluency is indeed automatic, the interpretation and use of that experience is not. Experiment 1 demonstrates the standard use of the fluency experience and Experiment 2 demonstrates that people can change the interpretation of the experience according to its ecological validity. By implication, the truth effect represents the adaptive usage of feedback received from internal processes.     

Conceptualism and Truth

Truth implies mind because falsity does and the same analysis must be given of each. Some philosophers (Aristotle, Brentano) express this by saying that 'true' and 'false' apply strictly speaking to judgments and derivatively to everything else. A consequence of this is that all non-judgmental senses of 'true' and 'false' include some relation to a judgment. But counterexamples to this occur. So an alternative assay must be sought which both covers all cases and retains the idea that truth is mind-dependent. Under this correction, something is true if and only if it conforms to an ideal standard or measure.
This broader view of truth is compatible with realism and conceptualism but not with nominalism. If there are independent reasons for rejecting realism, it follows that conceptualism is true and universals exist only in minds.     

Two French Variations on Truth: Ricoeur's Attestation and Foucault's “Parrhesiastic” Attitude

Both Ricoeur and Foucault, apparently independently of each other, dedicated much effort to provide an account of truth that goes far beyond the truth of sentences, propositions, or judgments. While well aware of the speech act theory and pragmatics, they want to go beyond a formalism of rules of speech or arguments and integrate the attitude of the one who speaks in the very notion of truth. They see truth not merely as a property of statements, but as an existential process in such a way that the truth of statements is linked to the historically situated speaker. Truth as a property of statements is related to truth as an event. However, both reject any form of historicism or relativism.

I examine Ricoeur's notion of attestation and Foucault's notion of parrhesia, showing how both notions represent a kind of “poetics of truth”, which combines the existential position of the speaker and the historical circumstances of utterance. I show the extent to which both poetics of truth are political and ethical and how successful each poetics is: Ricoeur believes that he can maintain a claim to universality whereas Foucault abandons such a claim and instead subscribes to a radical singularity of the event of speech in a mode of truth that is, as he says, “polemic”.     

If I imagine it,then it happened: The Implicit Truth Value of imaginary representations

Imagination sometimes leads people to behave, feel, and think as though imagined events were real even when they know they were not. In this paper, we suggest that some understanding of these phenomena can be achieved by differentiating between Implicit Truth Value (ITV), a spontaneous truth evaluation, and Explicit Truth Value (ETV), a self-reported truth judgment. In three experiments, we measure ITV using the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (Sartori, Agosta, Zogmaister, Ferrara, & Castiello, 2008), which has been used to assess which of two autobiographical events is true. Our findings demonstrate that imagining an event, like experiencing an event, increases its ITV, even when people explicitly acknowledge the imagined event as false (Experiments 1a and 1b). Furthermore, we show that imagined representations generated from a first-person perspective have higher ITV than imagined representations generated from a third-person perspective (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures of truth differ in their sensitivity to properties underlying truth judgment. We discuss the contribution of characterizing events according to both ITV and ETV to the understanding of various psychological phenomena, such as lying and self-deception.     

Does Truth Matter? Introduction to Papers by Jody Davies,Shlomit Gadot,and Donnel Stern

Each of these three essays touches on the universal meaning and relevance of truth. Yet all are dealing with the relational truths that survive and hold us after the 2016 election amounted to a loss of certain assumed truths of everyday life.

Donnel Stern asks, If relational truth is constructed, dialogical, multiple, how does this belief survive when we find ourselves outraged, by what seem like cavalier untruths—lies, some kind of runaway, twittered, subjective truth? He argues that a credible, measurable, objectivity about certain truths indeed survives perfectly well within our overall relational worldview.

Shlomit Gadot adds that truth, relational truth, does and can exist most stably in our essential recognition of the multiplicity of (often relationally shaped) premises, frameworks, perspectives on truth. What “matters” when truth becomes threatened with serious shattering (here in a clash with love) is that she begins with an effort at genuine openness to the truth of the other.

Jody Davies implies that relational truth at virtually in all levels is embedded with the trauma narrative of truth, its meanings, and motivated hiding as we know it clinically. Truth survives its subjective shattering by recognizing that within the sociopolitical realm, we are being abused and traumatized by political authority and an abusive father.

The complexity of relational truth may involve creatively grieving certain certainties about truth that we may have experienced as lost. Truth in these three essays may lie in our overall effort to be equal to the full complexity of that loss and, paradoxically, to become expanded and more deeply connected through that experience.     

Modeling,Truth, and Philosophy

Knowledge requires truth, and truth, we suppose, involves unflawed representation. Science does not provide knowledge in this sense but rather provides models, representations that are limited in their accuracy, precision, or, most often, both. Truth as we usually think of it is an idealization, one that serves wonderfully in most ordinary applications, but one that can terribly mislead for certain issues in philosophy. This article sketches how this happens for five important issues, thereby showing how philosophical method must take into account the idealized nature of our familiar conception of truth.     

科学心理学的观念与人文科学的逻辑奠基

科学心理学观念的普遍兴起,是19世纪中叶错综复杂的思想史背景的产物。只有在人类思想及其历史作为整体的关系背景中,才能澄清这个观念的内在本性。也只有在系统地接受这个背景的制约关系中,这个观念才能获得其真理的实现。能否在人类思想作为整体中胜任并执行其理论职能,成为我们检验一种心理学体系之真理性的途径之一:科学心理学观念只有实现为现象学心理学,才能执行其为人文科学奠基的逻辑职能; 反之亦然。这个关系还从否定方面暗示着,一切以异化的形式实现的心理学,都不可能真正承担起为人文科学奠基的逻辑职能,并因而违背了我们的常识。     

A Non-Inferentialist, Anti-Realistic Conception of Logical Truth and Falsity

Anti-realistic conceptions of truth and falsity are usually epistemic or inferentialist. Truth is regarded as knowability, or provability, or warranted assertability, and the falsity of a statement or formula is identified with the truth of its negation. In this paper, a non-inferentialist but nevertheless anti-realistic conception of logical truth and falsity is developed. According to this conception, a formula (or a declarative sentence) A is logically true if and only if no matter what is told about what is told about the truth or falsity of atomic sentences, A always receives the top-element of a certain partial order on non-ontic semantic values as its value. The ordering in question is a told-true order. Analogously, a formula A is logically false just in case no matter what is told about what is told about the truth or falsity of atomic sentences, A always receives the top-element of a certain told-false order as its value. Here, truth and falsity are pari passu, and it is the treatment of truth and falsity as independent of each other that leads to an informational interpretation of these notions in terms of a certain kind of higher-level information.     

Truth as transcendental in Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas presents his most complete exposition of the transcendentals inDe veritate 1, 1, that deals with the question “What is truth?”. The thesis of this paper is that the question of truth is essential for the understanding of his doctrine of the transcendentals. The first part of the paper (sections 1–4) analyzes Thomas's conception of truth. Two approaches to truth can be found in his work. The first approach, based on Aristotle's claim that “truth is not in things but in the mind”, leads to the idea that the proper place of truth is in the intellect. The second approach is ontological: Thomas also acknowledges that there is truth in every being. The famous definition of truth as “adequation of thing and intellect” enables him to integrate the two approaches. Truth is a relation between two terms, both of which can be called “true” because both are essential for the conformity between thing and intellect. The second part of the paper (sections 5–7) deals with the manner in which Thomas gives truth a place in the doctrine of the transcendentals, and shows that his conception of truth leads to important innovations in this doctrine: the introduction of relational transcendentals and the correlation between spirit and being. If “truth” is transcendental, it must be convertible with “being”. Sect. 6 discusses objections that Thomas advances himself to this convertibility. Sect. 7 deals with a difficulty in his account of truth as a relational transcendental. Ontological truth expresses a relation to an intellect but the relation to the human intellect is accidental for the truth of things. Essential for their truth can only be a practical intellect that causes things. In this way, Thomas argues, the divine intellect relates to all things.     

Truth in the Tractatus

My paper takes issue both with the standard view that the Tractatus contains a correspondence theory and with recent suggestions that it features a deflationary or semantic theory. Standard correspondence interpretations are mistaken, because they treat the isomorphism between a sentence and what it depicts as a sufficient condition of truth rather than of sense. The semantic/deflationary interpretation ignores passages that suggest some kind of correspondence theory. The official theory of truth in the Tractatus is an obtainment theory – a sentence is true iff the state of affairs it depicts obtains. This theory differs from deflationary theories in that it involves an ontology of states of affairs/facts; and it can be transformed into a type of correspondence theory: a sentence is true iff it corresponds to, i.e. depicts an obtaining state of affairs (fact). Admittedly, unlike correspondence theories as commonly portrayed, this account does not involve a genuinely truth-making relation. It features a relation of correspondence, yet it is that of depicting, between a meaningful sentence and its sense – a possible state of affairs. What makes for truth is not that relation, but the obtaining of the depicted state of affairs. This does not disqualify the Tractatus from holding a correspondence theory, however, since the correspondence theories of Moore and Russell are committed to a similar position. Alternatively, the obtainment theory can be seen as a synthesis of correspondence, semantic and deflationary approaches. It does justice to the idea that what is true depends solely on what is the case, and it combines a semantic explanation of the relation between a sentence and what it says with a deflationary account of the agreement between what the sentence says and what obtains or is the case if it is true     

Facilitating memory‐based lie detection in immediate and delayed interviewing: The role of mnemonics

We experimentally investigated how different mnemonic techniques employed in an interview conducted immediately after an event affected truth tellers' and liars' responses when they were interviewed again after a 2‐week delay. We also compared how verbal accounts changed over time within truth tellers and liars, and how consistent both groups were. Participants (n = 143) were shown a mock intelligence operation video and instructed either to tell the truth or lie about its contents in two interviews, one of which was immediately after watching the video and the other after a 2‐week delay. In the immediate interview, they were asked to provide a free recall and then asked to provide further information via one of three mnemonics: context reinstatement, sketch, or event‐line. In the delayed interview, they were asked to provide only a free recall. Truth tellers reported more visual, spatial, temporal, and action details than did liars both immediately and after a delay. Truth tellers experienced more of a decline in reporting details after a delay than did liars, and this decline was affected by the mnemonic used. Truth tellers thus showed, more than liars, patterns of reporting indicative of genuine memory decay. Liars produced patterns of a “stability bias” instead. Truth tellers and liars were equally consistent between their immediate and delayed statements.     

Analysing Causality: The Opposite of Counterfactual is Factual

Using Jim Woodward's Counterfactual Dependency account as an example, I argue that causal claims about indeterministic systems cannot be satisfactorily analysed as including counterfactual conditionals among their truth conditions because the counterfactuals such accounts must appeal to need not have truth values. Where this happens, counterfactual analyses transform true causal claims into expressions which are not true.     

Using the Verifiability lie Detection Approach in an Insurance Claim Setting

In this experiment, we tested the verifiability approach in an insurance claim setting. Core of the verifiability approach is that truth tellers give more details that can be verified than liars. Fifty undergraduate students took part, who produced true and false insurance claim statements related to theft, loss, or damage. These statements were coded in terms of verifiability (the number of details that could be checked by an investigator) and witness factors (friends, police, other officials and CCTV cameras). Truth tellers provided more verifiable details than liars and liars provided more unverifiable details than truth tellers. In addition, truth tellers (versus liars) more frequently informed their friends about the incident or referred to CCTV footage of the incident. The potential and limitations of using the verifiability approach in insurance settings are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reclaiming the Idea of Truth: Some Thoughts on Theory in Response to Practice

This paper examines the idea of truth, its place in therapy and in the history of systemic theory. Beginning with some practice fragments, the theory exploration considers the idea of truth in the modernist frame, the paradox of the modernist metaphor in describing the activity of therapy, and the peculiarities of the idea of truth in the earlier systemic therapies. Postmodernist and social constructionist ideas are then explored, and meaning is identified as the concept which currently occupies the place of an idea of truth in systemic discourse. It is argued that meaning as a concept is insufficiently attached to an idea of (external) reality or to an understanding of the relationship of the individual to knowledge of her/his experience of the world. Reclaiming the idea of truth as an emotional and social process has more potential to meet the complexities of human experience in thinking about the process of therapeutic change.     

Alston's Anti‐Justificationism as a Strategy to Resolve the Conflict Between Internalism and Externalism

After a justificationist period, William P. Alston has tried to eliminate justification from the epistemology of belief. He introduced a list of epistemic desiderata all of which contribute to the positive status of beliefs and none of which has an exclusive and decisive role so that it could be isolated as the property of being justified. Careful examination reveals, however, that this list includes fewer desiderata than advertised. Truth‐conducive desiderata are most important for Alston, and these are five; during his discussion, however, Alston reduces these desiderata to only one, the reliability of process, which has an externalist character. Besides this desideratum, there is one other group of desiderata, all of which have an internalist character. What Alston has in fact done, then, through the presentation of his anti‐justificationist list, is to separate externalist and internalist elements for the positive status of belief and to give an independent role to each. Since Alston regards the truth‐conducive group as the most important, however, and since he has failed to show a real pluralism in this group, we may conclude that he continues to have a monistic approach to the evaluation of beliefs, which belies his alleged pluralism.     

Field's Paradox and Its Medieval Solution

Hartry Field's revised logic for the theory of truth in his new book, Saving Truth from Paradox, seeking to preserve Tarski's T-scheme, does not admit a full theory of negation. In response, Crispin Wright proposed that the negation of a proposition is the proposition saying that some proposition inconsistent with the first is true. For this to work, we have to show that this proposition is entailed by any proposition incompatible with the first, that is, that it is the weakest proposition incompatible with the proposition whose negation it should be. To show that his proposal gave a full intuitionist theory of negation, Wright appealed to two principles, about incompatibility and entailment, and using them Field formulated a paradox of validity (or more precisely, of inconsistency).

The medieval mathematician, theologian and logician, Thomas Bradwardine, writing in the fourteenth century, proposed a solution to the paradoxes of truth which does not require any revision of logic. The key principle behind Bradwardine's solution is a pluralist doctrine of meaning, or signification, that propositions can mean more than they explicitly say. In particular, he proposed that signification is closed under entailment. In light of this, Bradwardine revised the truth-rules, in particular, refining the T-scheme, so that a proposition is true only if everything that it signifies obtains. Thereby, he was able to show that any proposition which signifies that it itself is false, also signifies that it is true, and consequently is false and not true. I show that Bradwardine's solution is also able to deal with Field's paradox and others of a similar nature. Hence Field's logical revisions are unnecessary to save truth from paradox.     

Truth and reflection

Conclusion Many topics have not been covered, in most cases because I don't know quite what to say about them. Would it be possible to add a decidability predicate to the language? What about stronger connectives, like exclusion negation or Lukasiewicz implication? Would an expanded language do better at expressing its own semantics? Would it contain new and more terrible paradoxes? Can the account be supplemented with a workable notion of inherent truth (see note 36)? In what sense does stage semantics lie between fixed point and stability semantics? In what sense, exactly, are our semantical rules inconsistent? In what sense, if any, does their inconsistency resolve the problem of the paradoxes?The ideals of strength, grounding, and closure together define an intuitively appealing conception of truth. Nothing would be gained by insisting that it was the intuitive conception of truth, and in fact recent developments make me wonder whether such a thing exists. However that may be, until the alternatives are better understood it would be foolish to attempt to decide between them. Truth gives up her secrets slowly and grudgingly, and loves to confound our presumptions.