Abstract
A theory of truth is supposed to tell us what it is for something to be true or false. But what kind of “something” is at issue here? What are the bearers of truth and falsehood? Philosophical discussions of truth tend to revolve around four broad categories of truth bearers: sentences (utterances), statements (assertions), beliefs (judgments, thoughts), and propositions. The significant differences among these four categories are responsible for a considerable amount of complexity in the theory of truth. It seems unlikely that a single feature could account for ‘x is true’ with ‘x’ ranging over truth bearers of arbitrary type. Instead, a general theory of truth will have to take the form of a disjunction: x is true just in case x is either a true sentence or a true statement or a true belief or a true proposition. Here the general notion of truth is partitioned into four subnotions, sentence-truth, statement-truth, belief-truth, and proposition-truth, each of which will have to be given its own account. Still, the over-all theory will aim to show that the general notion of truth is not just a bare disjunction; it will aim to show that the subnotions are all tied (each in its own manner) to a single explanatory ground. One way to achieve this is by selecting a category of basic truth bearers and taking the associated subnotion of truth as primary, while treating the others as derived. The primary notion has to be explained in terms of some feature that does not itself contain any notion of truth. The derived notions have to be explained in terms of the primary notion together with certain relations that hold between the basic truth bearers, on the one hand, and the non-basic truth bearers on the other. A theory with this structure will give at least some unity to the general notion of truth.
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David, M. (2004). Theories of Truth. In: Niiniluoto, I., Sintonen, M., Woleński, J. (eds) Handbook of Epistemology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-1986-9_9
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