Rögnvaldur Ingthorson: The Dispute about Truth, what is really all about?

The philosophical dispute about truth is a confusing mess of conflicting views and approaches. In this talk I will attempt to sort out some of the confusion by offering an overview and analysis of the more popular theories of truth. In the analysis I follow a suggestion from Kirkham (1992), notably that an analysis should go beyond what the proponents of each theory say about truth to also try to figure out (i) what their meta-philosophical stance is to answering the question “what is truth?” (basically, what they think philosophy is all about), and (ii) whether that stance is equally appropriate for the critical evaluation of all theories of truth, some of which may presuppose a different view of what philosophy is all about. When looking at the different theories in this way it appears that most of the disagreement about truth boils down to the following. Because of widely divergent presuppositions about what philosophy is all about, different philosophers take “truth” to refer to different things. As a result they end up offering different (and mostly compatible) accounts of different things, rather than different and incompatible accounts of the same thing. Some take philosophy to be essentially about language, and so understand the question “what is truth” as a question about the function of the truth predicate in natural languages. Deflationary and pluralist accounts of truth fall into this category. Some think philosophy is fundamentally epistemology and so believe it revolves around the question of how we know that a proposition is true. Epistemic versions of the coherence and pragmatist theories belong in this category. Others think philosophy is an attempt to understand the fundamental features of reality and so assume that truth is a feature of reality, such as the relation between content of ideas and what those ideas are about. The correspondence theory and metaphysical versions of the coherence and identity theory belong in this category. In conclusion, there is a lot less genuine disagreement about truth than what is popularly believed, and the little disagreement there is revolves just as much about the proper aims (and limits) of philosophy. What we get are complementary accounts of what truth is (an ontological question), how we talk about truth (a question about language), and how we justify belief (an epistemic question).

Tue 5th of March 2024 
Tieteiden Talo, classroom 104

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