Will Gamester

Inflationists have argued that truth is a causal-explanatory property on the grounds that true belief facilitates practical success: we must postulate truth to explain the practical success of certain actions performed by rational agents. Deflationists, however, have a seductive response. Rather than deny that true belief facilitates practical success, the deflationist maintains that the sole role for truth here is as a device for generalisation. In particular, each individual instance of practical success can be explained only by reference to a relevant instance of a T-schema; the role of truth is just to generalise over these individualised explanations. I present a critical problem for this strategy. Analogues of the deflationist’s individualised explanations can be produced by way of explanation of coincidental instances of practical success where the agent merely has the right false beliefs. By deflationary lights, there is no substantive explanatory difference between such coincidental and non-coincidental instances of practical success. But the non-/coincidental distinction just is an explanatory distinction. The deflationist’s individualised explanations of non-coincidental instances of practical success must therefore be inadequate. However, I argue that the deflationist’s prospects for establishing an explanatory contrast between these cases by supplementing her individualised explanations are, at best, bleak. The inflationist, by contrast, is entitled to the obvious further explanatory premise needed to make sense of the distinction. As such, pending some future deflationary rejoinder, the deflationary construal of the principle that true belief facilitates practical success must be rejected; and with it the deflationary conception of truth.

A comprehensive metaphysics of truth will tell us what the truth of any sentence whatsoever consists in.
Monists about truth say that truth consists in the same thing whichever sentence you consider. Pluralists say that truth consists in different things for different sets of sentences. The orthodoxy has it that pluralists face problems when it comes to accounting for the truth of logical compounds composed of sentences that are true in different ways, or for the idea of validity as “necessary truth preservation” when the inference contains sentences that are true in different ways. I argue that this is mistaken. First, I show that logic and logical form only impose structural constraints on a comprehensive metaphysics of truth, which are not guaranteed to be satisfied by a theory just because it is monistic rather than pluralistic. Second, I provide a pluralist-friendly metaphysics of truth that does satisfy these constraints. As far as logic and logical form are concerned, then, we have no reason to prefer monism to pluralism.

This is a much-expanded version of the Analysis paper “Logic, logical form and the disunity of truth”. I go into much more detail about the so-called “mixing” problems, explicitly discuss moderate pluralism (and in particular Michael Lynch’s manifestation functionalism) in this context, and offer some more defence of my form-restricted pluralism. Feedback welcome!

Moral expressivists say that ‘Eating meat is wrong’ expresses a motivational state, like disapproval of eating meat, rather than a representational state, like the belief that eating meat is wrong. How, then, can the expressivist make sense of the possibility that her moral judgements could be mistaken – if they do not aim to represent, how can they misrepresent? This is the challenge from moral fallibility. I am concerned to defend Simon Blackburn’s account of fallibility in terms of potential for improvement, especially from Andy Egan’s charge that it commits the expressivist to an implausible asymmetry between herself and others, or “smugness”. I argue that while we ought to concede that the moral truths are epistemically constrained – that is, in principle accessible to a suitably placed inquirer – a “suitably placed” inquirer is anyone who occupies a node within a vast network of moral outlooks. In making this case, I establish necessary and sufficient conditions on moral truth by expressivist lights; which in turn shows how the expressivist is entitled to a substantive theory of moral truth, which I suggest can serve as the explanatory basis for a truth-conditional semantics for moral discourse.

I’ve recently argued that any inflationist about truth is committed to the extensional adequacy of a certain pluralistic metaphysics of truth, whereby truth consists in different properties depending on the logical form of the truthbearer (Gamester 2018). For instance, while an atomic truth may correspond with the facts, a first-order negation is true in virtue of negating a truthbearer that does not correspond with the facts. While the traditional correspondence monist concedes that true negations have this property, she adds that they also correspond, and it is this correspondence that their truth consists in. This additional postulation, I show, saddles the monist with the liar paradox; and I show how my pluralistic metaphysics allows us to avoid the paradox by resisting this additional assumption: I provide a pluralistic, Tarskian response to the liar paradox, but using as an explanatory basis a metaphysics of truth that we already agree is extensionally adequate.. This provides a major consideration in favour of form-dependent pluralism about truth over monism, as well as providing a bridge between the literature concerning the metaphysics of truth and that concerning the semantic paradoxes.

This paper provides something of a shopper’s guide to truth pluralism, by providing a critical but sympathetic investigation of the principle motivations given in its favour. Pluralists hold that different regions of discourse – e.g., scientific, mathematical, normative, institutional – are true in different ways. The principle arguments for truth pluralism have thus far been derived from ontological premises: it is because different discourses are concerned with such different kinds of thing – e.g., the physical world vs. numbers vs. normative properties vs. the socially constructed world – that we should think that they are true in different ways. I offer a detailed critique of the most developed versions of this argument, due to Douglas Edwards (2018) and Michael Lynch (2009), determining its limitations as thus far developed, and indicating where, if anywhere, compelling arguments may lie.

This paper addresses a number of issues surrounding how to best formulate pluralism about truth by focusing on the so-called “Problem of Mixed Atomics”. Pluralists maintain that normative or evaluative truths, like ‘Stealing is wrong’, and mathematical truths, like ‘7 is prime’, might be true in one way, while ordinary descriptive truths, like ‘The Eiffel Tower is tall’, are true in another. Pluralists face a challenge when it comes to saying in what way an atomic is true when it seems to “mix” these different kinds of content. For instance, thick ethical predications, like ‘Amy is courageous’ seem to have both descriptive and evaluative content. I first get clear on exactly what a mixed atomic is, by addressing the complicated issue of how to individuate different kinds of truths. I then get clear on exactly what challenge mixed atomics are supposed to present. Having done so, I articulate my preferred way of meeting this challenge, which involves a principled reduction of the Problem of Mixed Atomics to the so-called “Problem of Mixed Compounds”, to which the pluralist needs, and has, an independent solution. Along the way, I am concerned to emphasise that which theoretical options are available or attractive to the pluralist depends on her underlying motivations for being a pluralist. In particular, I am concerned to meet the challenge on behalf on my own preferred “representationally-driven” pluralism, while problematising the issue for the more popular “metaphysically-driven” pluralism.

My thesis concerns pluralism about truth: roughly, the theory that there is more than way to be true. I’m interested in showing this theory in its best light. This involves casting a critical eye over extant incarnations, formulating new, stronger motivations in its favour, and defending it from objections. I directly reject deflationism about truth; motivate pluralism by appeal to an underlying metasemantic pluralism (representationalism for some discourses; expressivism for moral discourse); defend pluralism from its most prominent objections; and develop a novel Tarskian solution to the liar paradox. I also criticise extant versions of pluralism, offer a complex taxonomy of pluralist views of truth, and offer a detailed solution to the problem of mixed atomics.