Neil Tennant

The Taming of the True continues the project Neil Tennant began in Anti-realism and Logic of investigating and defending anti-realism. Tennant’s earlier book anticipated a second volume, in which issues related to empirical discourse would be addressed in greater detail. The Taming of the True provides this sequel. It also attempts a ground-clearing project, by addressing challenges to some of the presuppositions and implications of Tennant’s anti-realist position. Finally, it takes an opportunity to revisit some of the issues examined in the earlier book, in light of the evolving debate over realism and anti-realism.

We examine the arguments on both sides of the recent debate (Hale and Wright v. Field) on the existence, and modal status, of the natural numbers. We formulate precisely, with proper attention to denotational commitments, the analytic conditionals that link talk of numbers with talk of numerosity and with counting. These provide conceptual controls on the concept of number. We argue, against Field, that there is a serious disanalogy between the existence of God and the existence of numbers. We give stronger reasons than those advanced by Wright for resisting Field's analogy. We argue that the rules governing the basic numerical notions commit us to the natural numbers as necessary existents. We also show that the latest twist in the debate involving 'surdons' leaves both sides in a stalemate

Michael Friedman maintains that Carnap did not fully appreciate the impact of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem on the prospect for a purely syntactic definition of analyticity that would render arithmetic analytically true. This paper argues against this claim. It also challenges a common presumption on the part of defenders of Carnap, in their diagnosis of the force of Gödel's own critique of Carnap in his Gibbs Lecture. The author is grateful to Michael Friedman for valuable comments. Part of the research towards this paper was carried out while the author was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. The paper was presented to the Center's Fellowship Reunion Conference in Athens in 1992. It was committed for publication in the Proceedings of that conference, but those Proceedings never appeared. By the time it became evident that they would never appear, both the hard copy and the source file had been mislaid. The hard copy re-surfaced in 2007. The literature on this topic since 1992 appears to leave some space for the ideas and arguments presented here. Although the paper has been updated in light of the more recent literature, its basic thesis, presented in 1992, remains the same. Only 3 is new, questioning a basic presumption made by more recent commentators in their presentation of Gödel's criticism of Carnap in his Gibbs Lecture. For helpful comments on the current version, the author is indebted to Robert Kraut, Stewart Shapiro, and Adam Podlaskowski. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?

I clarify how the requirement of conservative extension features in the thinking of various deflationists, and how this relates to another litmus claim, that the truth-predicate stands for a real, substantial property. I discuss how the deflationist can accommodate the result, to which Cieslinski draws attention, that non-conservativeness attends even the generalization that all logical theorems in the language of arithmetic are true. Finally I provide a four-fold categorization of various forms of deflationism, by reference to the two claims of conservativeness and substantiality. This helps to clarify the various possible positions in the deflationism debate

1. This paper is an informal exposition of a model-theoretic semantics for knowledge and belief set out in full detail else where. Considerations of space and simplicity prevent any recapitulation of tracts of formal definitions. My aim is simply to inform the reader of the alleged existence of one “new direction” in semantics, and to direct him to the original source for its detailed development. I shall explain certain self-imposed limitations on the scope and adequacy conditions of this treatment. Then, in subsequent discussion of the semantical problems which I claim to have treated, I shall try to impart the flavour of the technical methods involved.