Truth predicates, truth bearers, and their variants

Truth-bearers or Truth-makers?

Truth-bearers and Modesty *

In this paper I discuss Künne’s Modest Theory of truth, and develop a variation on a worry that Field expresses with respect to Horwich’s related view. The worry is not that deflationary accounts are false, but rather that, because they take propositions as truth-bearers, they are not philosophically interesting. Compatibly with the intuitions of ordinary speakers, we can understand proposition...

On the "semantics" for Languages with Their Own Truth Predicates

In the 1920s, logical positivists were skeptical of the notion of truth. For one thing, the liar's paradox seemed to show that truth is inconsistent. Other sources of skepticism were, as Soames [26] notes, "the frequent use of truth in metaphysical discussions, the tendency to confuse truth with epistemological notions like certainty and confirmation, and the inability to see how acceptance of ...

Complexity and Hierarchy in Truth Predicates∗

Since seminal work of Tarski (e.g. Tarski, 1935), hierarchies have been much discussed in the literature on truth and paradox. Especially in recent years, this discussion has been decidedly negative. Tarski’s hierarchy of languages is sometimes described as the “orthodox” response to the Liar paradox (e.g. Kripke, 1975), but it is an orthodoxy many authors have gone to great lengths to avoid. F...

Restricted truth predicates in first-order logic

It is well-known that there exist consistent first-order theories that become inconsistent when we add Tarski’s schema T. This is Tarski’s Theorem. To avoid the inconsistency result, one can restrict Tarski’s schema in different ways. In our paper we restrict Tarski’s schema T by only instantiating the schema with a proper subset of the set of all sentences. We prove several results concerning ...