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 ...

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 ...

Prior, Arthur Norman (1914–69)

By Williams, C.J.F.

Prior is most often thought of as the creator of tense logic. (Tense logic examines operators such as ‘It will be the case that’ in the way that ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Frege–Geach problem

By Schroeder, Mark

The Frege–Geach problem is an important and well-known obstacle to metaethical theories belonging to the broadly noncognitivist tradition, including emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism. It is also sometimes called ...

Reference

By Devitt, Michael

It is usual to think that referential relations hold between language and thoughts on one hand, and the world on the other. The most striking example of such ...

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, 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 ...

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 ...

Eliminativism

By Rey, Georges

‘Eliminativism’ refers to the view that mental phenomena – for example, beliefs, desires, conscious states – do not exist. Although this can seem absurd on its face, in ...

Fictionalism in metaphysics

By Caddick Bourne, Emily

Fictionalism proposes that a certain discourse – such as talk about possible worlds, or mathematical talk – is useful, perhaps even indispensable for theoretical purposes, but should not ...

Ramsey, Frank Plumpton (1903–30)

By Mellor, D.H.

Before Ramsey died at the age of 26 he did an extraordinary amount of pioneering work, in economics and mathematics as well as in logic and philosophy. His ...

Semantics

By Crimmins, Mark

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested ...

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 ...

Meaning and truth

By Williams, Stephen G.

Analytic philosophy has seen a resurgent interest in the possibility of explaining linguistic meaning in terms of truth, which many philosophers have seen as considerably more tractable than ...

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 ...

Two truths in Buddhist philosophy

Contemporary academic Buddhist philosophers are putting forward some tentative proposals to articulate the nature of the two truths in Buddhist philosophy and its relationship with Western philosophical theories ...