Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Universals, Predication, and Truth
- 2 The Univocity of Truth
- 3 The Correspondence Theory for Predicative Sentences
- 4 Russell's Theory of Truth and Its Principal Problems
- 5 How Predicative Beliefs Correspond to the World
- 6 The Metaphysics of Facts
- 7 The Metaphysics of Propositions
- 8 The Correspondence Theory and Complex Propositions
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Univocity of Truth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Universals, Predication, and Truth
- 2 The Univocity of Truth
- 3 The Correspondence Theory for Predicative Sentences
- 4 Russell's Theory of Truth and Its Principal Problems
- 5 How Predicative Beliefs Correspond to the World
- 6 The Metaphysics of Facts
- 7 The Metaphysics of Propositions
- 8 The Correspondence Theory and Complex Propositions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
HORWICH AND DEFLATIONARY THEORIES OF TRUTH
The predicate ‘true’ should mean the same thing for all the different kinds of proposition that it applies to, so that when it is said that a proposition is true, the same sort of thing is said whatever the kind of proposition. In other words, truth should be univocal. One of the manifest virtues of some theories of truth is that they make it clear from the very statement of the theory that truth is univocal in this fashion. Theories that rely on a single truth schema are of this type. Ramsey's redundancy theory is one of the earliest theories of this type, and Horwich's minimalist theory is one of the more recent examples. Alston's minimalist realist theory of truth conforms to this type in that it has a single T-schema that says all that he wants to say about truth for all propositions.
Some truth schema theories, such as Ramsey's redundancy theory, claim that the use of the predicate ‘true’ is redundant, in the sense that the sentence ‘ ‘Caesar was murdered’ is true’ says nothing more than the sentence ‘Caesar was murdered’. The claim that this equivalence exhausts what is meant by the predicate ‘true’ is his account of what is meant by ‘true’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Correspondence Theory of TruthAn Essay on the Metaphysics of Predication, pp. 33 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002