Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T19:03:45.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Truth, Marks of Truth, and Conditionals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2022

Ian Rumfitt
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay assesses the account of truth presented in Wiggins's 2002 paper ‘An indefinibilist cum normative view of truth and the marks of truth'. I agree with Wiggins that we should seek, not to define truth, but to elucidate it by unfolding its connections with other basic notions. However, I give reasons for preferring an elucidation based on Ramsey's account of truth to Wiggins's Tarski-inspired approach. I also cast doubt on Wiggins's thesis that convergence is a mark of truth, arguing instead that a claim which is up for assessment as true or false must be one to which different speakers/hearers can attach, and know that they are attaching, the same sense. I use this principle to rule out an account of indicative conditionals, and bring (albeit inconclusively) some considerations to bear on the question of whether those conditionals have truth values. An appendix revisits a debate about the determinateness of distinctness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 97 , Special Issue 3: In honour of David Wiggins , July 2022 , pp. 295 - 320
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Burgess, J.P., Philosophical Logic, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D.H., ‘The folly of trying to define truth’, The Journal of Philosophy 93 (1996) 263–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dummett, M.A.E., Grammar and Style: For Examination Candidates and Others, (London: Duckworth, 1993).Google Scholar
Edgington, D.M.D., ‘On conditionals’, Mind 104 (1995) 235–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frege, G., ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892) 25–50.Google Scholar
Frege, G., ‘Die Verneinung’, Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus I (1919) 143–57.Google Scholar
Frege, G., Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Hermes, H. et al. , (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969).Google Scholar
Frege, G., Posthumous Writings, translated by Long, P. and White, R., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).Google Scholar
Gibbard, A.F., ‘Two recent theories of conditionals’. In Harper, W. et al. , eds., Ifs (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981), 211–47.Google Scholar
Gould, G.H., ‘On Mozart and related matters: Glenn Gould in conversation with Bruno Montsaingeon’, The Piano Quarterly 24 (1976). Page references are to the reprinting in Gould, ed. T. Page, The Glenn Gould Reader (New York: Vintage Book, 1984), 32–43.Google Scholar
Grice, H.P., ‘Meaning’, The Philosophical Review 66 (1957) 377–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, G.E. & Cresswell, M.J., An Introduction to Modal Logic, (London: Methuen, 1968).Google Scholar
Kratzer, A., ‘The notional category of modality’. In Eikmeyer, H.-J. & Reiser, H., eds., Words, Worlds, and Contexts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 38–74.Google Scholar
Kratzer, A., ‘Conditionals’. In Kratzer, Modals and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 86–108. (An expanded version of a paper originally published in 1986.)Google Scholar
Lewis, D.K., ‘Adverbs of quantification’. In Keenan, E., ed., Semantics of Natural Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 3–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D.K., ‘Probabilities of conditionals and conditional probabilities’, The Philosophical Review 85 (1976) 297–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovibond, S.M., & Williams, S.G., eds. Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth, and Value, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).Google Scholar
Moran, R., The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parfit, D.A., ‘Personal identity’, The Philosophical Review 80 (1971) 3–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prior, A.N., Objects of Thought, ed. Geach, P.T. & Kenny, A.J.P., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramsey, F.P., ‘Facts and propositions’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 7 (1927) 153–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramsey, F.P., On Truth, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rumfitt, I., ‘Old Adams buried’, Analytic Philosophy 54 (2013) 157–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rumfitt, I., ‘Truth’, Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Language 1 (2019a) 148–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rumfitt, I., ‘Infinitesimals, nations, and persons’, Philosophy 94 (2019b) 513–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stalnaker, R.C., Inquiry, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Strawson, P.F., ‘Meaning and truth’. In his Logico-Linguistic Papers, (London: Methuen, 1971), 170–89.Google Scholar
Tarski, A., ‘Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen’, Studia Philosophica I (1935) 261–405. Page references are to the translation by J.H. Woodger, ‘The concept of truth in formalized languages’, in Tarski, eds. Woodger & J. Corcoran, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 152–278.Google Scholar
Wiggins, D.R.P., ‘Verbs and adverbs, and some other modes of grammatical combination’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 86 (1986a) 273–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiggins, D.R.P., ‘On singling out an object determinately’. In Pettit, P.N. & McDowell, J.H., eds., Subject, Thought, and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986b), 169–80.Google Scholar
Wiggins, D.R.P., ‘Truth, and truth as predicated of moral judgements’. In his Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 139–84. (An edited version of a paper originally published in 1987.)Google Scholar
Wiggins, D.R.P., ‘Reply to Timothy Williamson’. In Lovibond & Williams, eds., (1996) 231–38.Google Scholar
Wiggins, D.R.P., ‘An indefinibilist cum normative view of truth and the marks of truth’. In Schantz, R., ed., Current Issues in Theoretical Philosophy, Volume 1: What is Truth? (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2002), 316–32.Google Scholar
Wiggins, D.R.P., Continuants: Their Activity, Their Being and Their Identity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, T., ‘Knowing and asserting’, The Philosophical Review 105 (1996a) 489–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, T., ‘The necessity and determinacy of distinctness’. In Lovibond & Williams, eds., (1996b) 1–17.Google Scholar
Williamson, T., ‘Indefinite extensibility’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 55 (1998) 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, T., Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar