Truth, correspondence theory of

By Kirkham, Richard L.

The two oldest theories of truth in Western philosophy, those of Plato and Aristotle, are both correspondence theories. And if the non-philosopher can be said to subscribe to ...

Truth, correspondence theory of

By Rasmussen, Joshua

The correspondence theory in its simplest form says that truth is a connection to reality. To be true is to accurately describe – in other words, match, picture, ...

Zhi

By Hall, David L.; Ames, Roger T.

In classical Chinese philosophy, zhi, conventionally translated as ‘knowing’, is not so much a knowing ‘what’, which provides some understanding of the natural world, as it is ...

Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838–1917)

By Chisholm, Roderick M.; Simons, Peter

Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who taught at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna. He made significant contributions to almost every branch of philosophy, notably psychology and ...

Searle, John (1932–)

By Lepore, Ernie

John Searle was a pupil of J.L. Austin at Oxford in the 1950s. He is the Mills Professor of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley, ...

Facts

By Oliver, Alex

The existence and nature of facts is disputed. In ordinary language we often speak of facts (‘that’s a fact’) but it is hard to take such talk seriously ...

Dōgen (1200–53)

By Kasulis, Thomas P.

Dōgen Kigen, the founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism, is most noted for his argument that meditation is the expression or enactment of enlightenment, not the means to ...

Yoruba epistemology

By Hallen, Barry

The Yoruba of west Africa have articulated systematic criteria that are used to assign varying degrees of epistemic certainty to experience. What one views with one’s own eyes ...

Pragmatism

By Rorty, Richard

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition founded by three American philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule ...

Truth, identity theory of

By Candlish, Stewart

It is sometimes suggested that a fundamental shortcoming of the correspondence theory of truth is that it fails to do justice to the thought that if we are ...

Boethius of Dacia (fl. c.1275)

By Ebbesen, Sten

Boethius developed an original theory of scientific knowledge designed to reconcile science with Christian doctrine without allowing one to determine the contents of the other. His main strategy ...

Strawson, Peter Frederick (1919–2006)

By Snowdon, Paul F.

Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1947, becoming Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968, and retiring in 1987. A sequence of influential books and articles ...

Truth, pragmatic theory of

By Kirkham, Richard L.

Two distinctly different kinds of theories parade under the banner of the ‘pragmatic theory of truth’. First, there is the consensus theory of C.S. Peirce, according to which ...

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, ...

Truth, deflationary theories of

By Liggins, David

Deflationists aim to offer a lucid and metaphysically lightweight account of truth, stripped of obscure or redundant elements. They hold that the theory of truth should be simpler ...

Reliabilism

By Goldman, Alvin I.

Reliabilism is an approach to the nature of knowledge and of justified belief. Reliabilism about justification, in its simplest form, says that a belief is justified if and ...

Language, philosophy of

By Crimmins, Mark

Philosophical interest in language, while ancient and enduring (see Language, ancient philosophy of; Language, medieval theories of; Language, Renaissance philosophy of; Language, early modern philosophy of), has blossomed ...

Truth, deflationary theories of

By Kirkham, Richard L.

So-called deflationary theories of truth, of which the best known are the redundancy, performative and prosentential theories, are really theories of truth ascriptions. This is because they ...

Metaphysics

By Craig, Edward

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of ...

Knowledge by acquaintance and description

By Fumerton, Richard

The attempt to distinguish knowledge by acquaintance from knowledge by description is most closely associated with Bertrand Russell. The distinction is also crucial to one way of trying ...

Truth, coherence theory of

By Kirkham, Richard L.

The term ‘coherence’ in the phrase ‘coherence theory of truth’ has never been very precisely defined. The most we can say by way of a general definition is ...

Negative facts

By Oaklander, L. Nathan

If propositions are made true in virtue of corresponding to facts, then what are the truth-makers of true negative propositions such as ‘The apple is not red’? Russell ...

Evil, problem of

By Adams, Marilyn McCord

In this context, ‘evil’ is given the widest possible scope to signify all of life’s minuses. Within this range, philosophers and theologians distinguish ‘moral evils’ such as war, ...

Logical atomism

By Oliver, Alex

The name ‘logical atomism’ refers to a network of theses about the parts and structure of the world and the means by which language represents the world. Wittgenstein, ...

Knowledge and justification, coherence theory of

By Bonjour, Laurence

Coherence theories of justification represent one main alternative to foundationalist theories of justification. If, as has usually been thought, possessing epistemic justification is one necessary condition (along ...