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The Tarskian Turn: Deflationism and Axiomatic Truth

Online ISBN:
9780262298643
Print ISBN:
9780262015868
Publisher:
The MIT Press
Book

The Tarskian Turn: Deflationism and Axiomatic Truth

Published:
15 July 2011
Online ISBN:
9780262298643
Print ISBN:
9780262015868
Publisher:
The MIT Press

Abstract

This book investigates the relationship between formal theories of truth and contemporary philosophical approaches to truth. The work of mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) marks the transition from substantial to deflationary views about truth. Deflationism — which holds that the notion of truth is light and insubstantial — can be and has been made more precise in multiple ways. Crucial in making the deflationary intuition precise is its relation to formal or logical aspects of the notion of truth. Allowing that semantical theories of truth may have heuristic value, this book focuses on axiomatic theories of truth developed since Tarski and their connection to deflationism. Arguing that the insubstantiality of truth has been misunderstood in the literature, it proposes and defends a new kind of deflationism, inferential deflationism, according to which truth is a concept without a nature or essence. The book argues that this way of viewing the concept of truth, inspired by a formalization of Kripke’s theory of truth, flows naturally from the best formal theories of truth that are currently available. Alternating between logical and philosophical chapters, the book steadily progresses toward stronger theories of truth. Technicality cannot be altogether avoided in the subject under discussion, but the book attempts to strike a balance between the need for logical precision on the one hand and the need to make his argument accessible to philosophers.

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