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Remarks on a Foundationalist Theory of Truth
Author(s) -
GUPTA Anil
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00558.x
Subject(s) - foundationalism , citation , philosophy , sociology , computer science , epistemology , library science
Tim Maudlin's Truth and Paradox offers a theory of truth that arises from a foundationalist picture of language.1 The picture is attractive, and Maudlin builds on it courageously (indeed, fearlessly). From the formal point of view, the theory of truth that emerges is, as Maudlin observes, nothing other than the least-fixed-point theory of Saul Kripke.2 From the philosophical point of view, however, the differences between Maudlin's and Kripke's theories are large. It is these differences that lead Maudlin to claim advantages that Kripke did not (and, I think, would not) claim for his own theory. Maudlin says that his theory demands no object-language/metalanguage distinction, that he has "developed a theory of truth for a language that can serve as its own metalanguage (191)." He promises early on (p. 4) that his theory will be "more adequate to our actual practice of reasoning about truth [than revision and other fixed-point theories]." And he claims that the language he has constructed is expressively complete (168). The foundationalist picture that underlies these striking claims is as follows. Consider a formal language L that has, apart from the usual logical resources (e.g., conjunction, negation, and quantifiers), a truth predicate T for itself. Plainly, the truth values of the sentences of L depend immediately upon the truth values of certain other sentences. Thus, the truth value of a conjunction (A & B) depends immediately upon the truth values of the conjuncts A and B, and the truth value of T('C) depends on C. In Maudlin's