Project description
Semantics for deflationary truth
The truth is crucial in all our discourses. Studying it today on traditional philosophic grounds and semantics based on the relation of truth and corresponding reality uncovers many paradoxes. The most promising alternative is a modern deflationary approach in philosophy, based on assertions of predicate truth of a statement, and not attribute of ‘truth’. Proof-theoretic semantics can offer an inferentialist explanation of deflationism. However, research compatibility of proof-theoretic semantics within this approach to truth is lacking. The EU funded Truth in PTS project will fill this gap, providing novel proof-theoretic semantics for deflationary truth. Its focus will be on intuitionistic and intermediate logics to support deflationism, purifying its implications and contents.
Objective
Truth plays an important role in our everyday discourse. However, the philosophical study of truth has proven challenging. The semantics of truth is complicated both by questions of the nature of truth and by the paradoxes naïve theories generate. Traditional views about truth hold that a statement is true if it corresponds to reality. These views require positing a correspondence relation between reality on the one hand and language on the other; spelling out the details of such an account has fallen prey to vicious circle arguments and other accusations of triviality. Deflationism about truth, in contrast, assumes that the meaning of “true” can be explained with reference only to its linguistic and logical role. As such, it is natural to try and clarify the content of deflationism by offering an inferentialist explanation of deflationism. Proof-theoretic semantics brings precision to inferentialism. Hence, if the truth predicate can be given a proof-theoretic semantics, we will finally be able to state precisely what deflationism amounts to. The main objective of this project is to assess to what extent proof-theoretic semantics is compatible with the deflationist conception of truth and to deploy proof-theoretic semantics in elucidating what it means for truth to be a metaphysically light notion. This is important because it has been argued that no proof-theoretic semantics can be given to truth. However, the argument is based on a naïve, classical, inflationary notion of truth. Deflationism opens up a non-classical, non- naïve approach to truth. There is no research on whether proof-theoretic semantics is compatible with this approach to truth. This project will provide a proof-theoretic semantics for deflationary truth, focusing on intuitionistic and intermediate logics, and thereby give strong support to deflationism and clarify its implications and contents.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
BS8 1QU Bristol
United Kingdom