New Waves in Philosophy Series Editors: Vincent F. Hendricks and Duncan Pritchard Titles include: Otavio Bueno and Øystein Linnebo (editors) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS Boudewijn DeBruin and Christopher F. Zurn (editors) NEW WAVES IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Allan Hazlett (editor) NEW WAVES IN METAPHYSICS Vincent F. Hendricks and Duncan Pritchard (editors) NEW WAVES IN EPISTEMOLOGY Yujin Nagasawa and Erik J. Wielenberg (editors) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger and Søren Riis (editors) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY P. D. Magnus and Jacob Busch (editors) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Thomas S. Petersen, Jesper Ryberg and Clark Wolf (editors) NEW WAVES IN APPLIED ETHICS Sarah Sawyer (editor) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones (editors) NEW WAVES IN AESTHETICS Cory D. Wright and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen (editors) NEW WAVES IN TRUTH Forthcoming: Jesús Aguilar, Andrei A. Buckareff and Keith Frankish (editors) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION Thom Brooks (editor) NEW WAVES IN ETHICS
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New Waves in Truth Edited by Cory D. Wright California State University Long Beach, USA Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen Københavns Universitet, Denmark and University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Selection and editorial matter Cory D. Wright and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen 2010 Chapters their individual authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-22998-3 ISBN 978-0-230-29699-2 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230296992 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New waves in truth / edited by Cory D. Wright, Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen. p. cm. (New waves in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Truth. I. Wright, Cory D., 1975 II. Pedersen, Nikolaj J. L. L., 1978 BD171.N47 2010 121 dc22 2010011094 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
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Contents Series Editors Preface Notes on Editors List of Contributors ix x xi Truth: The New Wave 1 Cory D. Wright & Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen Part I Deflationism and Beyond 1 Truth as Conceptually Primitive 13 Douglas Patterson 2 Rejectionism about Truth 30 Matti Eklund 3 New Wave Deflationism 45 Nic Damnjanovic 4 Why Deflationists Should be Pretense Theorists (and Perhaps Already are) 59 Bradley Armour-Garb & James A. Woodbridge Part II Ascription, Attribution, Predication 5 Compendious Assertion and Natural Language (Generalized) Quantification: A Problem for Deflationary Truth 81 John Collins 6 Explicit Truth Ascriptions 97 Claire Horisk Part III Truth Values 7 Deflationism and Truth Value Gaps 115 Patrick Greenough 8 Falsity 126 Kevin Scharp vii
viii Contents Part IV The Value of Truth 9 Metarepresentation and the Cognitive Value of the Concept of Truth 139 Gurpreet Rattan 10 Truth, Autonomy, and the Plurality of Goods 157 Adam Kovach 11 True Belief Is Not Instrumentally Valuable 174 Chase B. Wrenn Part V Realism and Correspondence 12 The Makings of Truth: Realism, Response-Dependence, and Relativism 191 Dan López de Sa 13 Truth, Pluralism, Monism, Correspondence 205 Cory D. Wright & Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen 14 Representation-Friendly Deflationism versus Modest Correspondence 218 Patricia Marino Part VI Kinds of Truth and Truth-apt Discourse 15 Truth and Error in Morality 235 Dale Dorsey 16 Perspectival Truth and Color Primitivism 249 Berit Brogaard 17 A New Problem for the Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth 267 Gillian Russell 18 How to Be an Expressivist about Truth 282 Mark Schroeder References 299 Index 313
Series Editors Preface New Waves in Philosophy Series The aim of this series is to gather the young and up-and-coming scholars in philosophy to give their view of the subject now and in the years to come, and to serve a documentary purpose, i.e., this is what they said then, and this is what happened. It will also provide a snapshot of cutting-edge research that will be of vital interest to researchers and students working in all subject areas of philosophy. The goal of the series is to have a New Waves volume in every one of the main areas of philosophy. We would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for taking on this project in particular, and the entire New Waves in Philosophy series in general. Vincent F. Hendricks & Duncan Pritchard (Editors) ix
Notes on Editors Cory D. Wright received his PhD in Philosophy & Cognitive Science from University of California San Diego in 2007. Previously, he was a Fulbright scholar at Universiteit Utrecht, a James S. McDonnell Post-doctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University St. Louis, and a Visiting Fellow at the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science at Universiteit van Tilburg. Currently, Wright is an assistant professor of Philosophy at California State University Long Beach. His research interests are primarily in Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Psychology. Wright is the author of On the functionalization of pluralist approaches to truth in Synthèse (2005) and Truth, Ramsification, and the pluralists revenge in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2010). NikolajJ.L.L.Pedersenreceived his PhD from the Arché Centre at the University of St. Andrews in 2006. He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of California Los Angeles and at københavns universitet. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests are primarily in Epistemology, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Logic, and Metaphysics. Pedersen is the author of What can the problem of mixed inferences teach us about alethic pluralism? in The Monist (2006) and Stabilizing alethic pluralism in Philosophical Quarterly (2010). x
List of Contributors Bradley Armour-Garb is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, State University of New York Albany, USA. Berit Brogaard is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri St. Louis, USA and RSSS Visiting Fellow, Philosophy Program, Australian National University, Australia. John Collins is Lecturer, School of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, UK. Nic Damnjanovic is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Western Australia, Australia. Dale Dorsey is Assistant Professor & Graduate Advisor, Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, USA. Matti Eklund is Associate Professor, Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University, USA. Patrick Greenough is Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of St. Andrews and Associate Fellow, Arché Research Centre, UK. Claire Horisk is Associate Professor & Graduate Advisor, Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri Columbia, USA. Adam Kovach is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Marymount University, USA. Dan López de Sa is ICREA Reseacher, LOGOS, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain and is Associate Fellow, Arché Research Centre, UK. Patricia Marino is Associate Professor & Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Canada. Douglas Patterson is Associate Professor, Philosophy Department, Kansas State University, USA and Humboldt Fellow, Institut für Philosophie, Universität Leipzig, Germany. Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen is Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Department of Philosophy, University of California Los Angeles, USA and SERG Research Fellow, Institut for Medier, Erkendelse, og Formidling, Københavns Universitet, Denmark. Gurpreet Rattan is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada. xi
xii List of Contributors Gillian Russell is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Washington University St. Louis, USA. Kevin Scharp is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Ohio State University, USA. Mark Schroeder is Associate Professor & Graduate Director, Department of Philosophy, University of Southern California, USA. James A. Woodbridge is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA. Chase B. Wrenn is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama, USA. Cory D. Wright is Assistant Professor & Graduate Advisor, Department of Philosophy, California State University Long Beach, USA.