Preface
Summary
In the first decades of twentieth-century philosophy metaphysics and ontology were regarded as dubious and questionable philosophical disciplines by analytic philosophers. This animosity was a consequence of the linguistic turn in philosophy at the beginning of the century and the influence of logical positivism. It also concerned the theory of truth in a substantial way. The truth-theoretic works of F. P. Ramsey and Alfred Tarski in the late 1920s and early 1930s marked the turning point to a basically linguistic way of considering the philosophical problem of truth. Socalled deflationist conceptions of truth, which had been developed mainly under the influence of Ramsey's so-called redundancy theory of truth and Tarski's socalled semantic conception of truth, became more and more popular and dominant. Nevertheless, in the 1970s some philosophers began to cast doubt on the correctness of the linguistic turn. And at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s metaphysical and ontological philosophical enquiries flourished again under the main influence of authors such as D. M. Armstrong, D. Lewis, M. J. Loux and P. van Inwagen. In the middle of the 1980s this metaphysical renaissance also reached the theory of truth. So-called theories of truth-making, which claim that truths have an ontological ground, attracted more and more attention. But theories of truthmaking should not only interest philosophers who are concerned with the nature of truth. These theories also aim to deliver important insights concerning the relations between language, content and the world in general.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Truth and Truth-Making , pp. vii - viiiPublisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008