Gila Sher

Kant is known for having said relatively little about truth in Critique of Pure Reason. Nevertheless, there are important lessons to be learned from this work about truth, lessons that apply to the contemporary debate on the nature and structure of truth and its theory. In this paper I suggest two such lessons. The first lesson concerns the structure of a substantive theory of truth as contrasted with a deflationist theory; the second concerns the structure of a correspondence theory of truth. The first lesson warns us against conceiving of a substantive theory of truth in a way that led Kant to conclude that such a theory is unviable. In so doing it indirectly suggests what a viable substantive theory of truth would be like. The second lesson teaches us that a correspondence theory of truth need not be as naive and overly simplistic as it is usually thought to be, but can, and should be, far more complex. This lesson is based on a correspondence theory of truth incipient in the Critique, one whose structure reflects the complexity of the relation between mind and world in Kant’s theory.

Gila Sher approaches knowledge from the perspective of the basic human epistemic situation—the situation of limited yet resourceful beings, living in a complex world and aspiring to know it in its full complexity. What principles should guide them? Two fundamental principles of knowledge are epistemic friction and freedom. Knowledge must be substantially constrained by the world (friction), but without active participation of the knower in accessing the world (freedom) theoretical knowledge is impossible. This requires a grounding of all knowledge, empirical and abstract, in both mind and world, but the fall of traditional foundationalism has led many to doubt the viability of this ‘classical’ project. Sher challenges this skepticism, charting a new foundational methodology, foundational holism, that differs from others in being holistic, world-oriented, and universal (i.e., applicable to all fields of knowledge). Using this methodology, Epistemic Friction develops an integrated theory of knowledge, truth, and logic. This includes (i) a dynamic model of knowledge, incorporating some of Quine’s revolutionary ideas while rejecting his narrow empiricism, (ii) a substantivist, non-traditional correspondence theory of truth, and (iii) an outline of a joint grounding of logic in mind and world. The model of knowledge subjects all disciplines to demanding norms of both veridicality and conceptualization. The correspondence theory is robust and universal yet not simplistic or naive, admitting diverse forms of correspondence. Logic’s grounding in the world brings it in line with other disciplines while preserving, and explaining, its strong formality, necessity, generality, and normativity.

Branching quantifiers were first introduced by L. Henkin in his 1959 paper ‘Some Remarks on Infmitely Long Formulas’. By ‘branching quantifiers’ Henkin meant a new, non-linearly structured quantiiier-prefix whose discovery was triggered by the problem of interpreting infinitistic formulas of a certain form} The branching (or partially-ordered) quantifier-prefix is, however, not essentially infinitistic, and the issues it raises have largely been discussed in the literature in the context of finitistic logic, as they will be here. Our discussion transcends, however, the resources of standard lst-order languages and we will consider the new form in the context of 1st-order logic with 1- and 2-place ‘Mostowskian` generalized quantifiers.2..

In this paper I reconstruct David Foster Wallace’s argument against fatalism in his undergraduate honors thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality”. My goal is to present the argument in a clear and concise way, so that it is easy to see its main line of reasoning and potential power. A secondary goal is to offer clarificatory and critical notes on some of the issues at stake. The reconstruction reveals interesting connections between Wallace’s argument and John MacFarlane’s recent work on relative truth.

The problem that motivates me arises from a constellation of factors pulling in different, sometimes opposing directions. Simplifying, they are: (1) The complexity of the world; (2) Humans’ ambitious project of theoretical knowledge of the world; (3) The severe limitations of humans’ cognitive capacities; (4) The considerable intricacy of humans’ cognitive capacities . Given these circumstances, the question arises whether a serious notion of truth is applicable to human theories of the world. In particular, I am interested in the questions: (a) Is a substantive standard of truth for human theories of the world possible? (b) What kind of standard would that be?

This chapter offers a logical, linguistic, and philosophical account of modern quantification theory. Contrasting the standard approach to quantifiers (according to which logical quantifiers are defined by enumeration) with the generalized approach (according to which quantifiers are defined systematically), the chapter begins with a brief history of standard quantifier theory and identifies some of its logical, linguistic, and philosophical strengths and weaknesses. It then proceeds to a brief history of generalized quantifier theory and explains how it overcomes the weaknesses of the standard theory. One of the main philosophical advantages of the generalized theory is its philosophically informative criterion of logicality. The chapter describes the work done so far in this theory, highlights some of its central logical results, offers an overview of its main linguistic contributions, and discusses its philosophical significance.

The paper offers a new analysis of the difficulties involved in the construction of a general and substantive correspondence theory of truth and delineates a solution to these difficulties in the form of a new methodology. The central argument is inspired by Kant, and the proposed methodology is explained and justified both in general philosophical terms and by reference to a particular variant of Tarski's theory. The paper begins with general considerations on truth and correspondence and concludes with a brief outlook on the "family" of theories of truth generated by the new methodology.

Logic and mathematics are abstract disciplines par excellence. What is the nature of truth and knowledge in these disciplines? In this paper I investigate the possibility of a new approach to this question. The underlying idea is that knowledge qua knowledge, including logical and mathematical knowledge, has a dual grounding in mind and reality, and the standard of truth applicable to all knowledge is a correspondence standard. This applies to logic and mathematics as much as to other disciplines; i.e., logical and mathematical truth are based on correspondence. But the view that logical and mathematical truth are (i) based on correspondence and (ii) require a grounding in reality demands a change in the common conception of both correspondence and epistemic grounding.

In the early part of the 20th century the logical positivists launched a powerful attack on traditional philosophy, rejecting the very idea of philosophy as a substantive discipline and replacing it with a practical, conventionalist, meta-theoretical view of philosophy. The positivist critique was based on a series of dichotomies: the analytic vs. the synthetic, the external vs. the internal, the apriori vs. the empirical, the meta-theoretical vs. the object- theoretical, the conventional vs. the factual. Quine's attack on the positivists' dichotomies was, by extension (if not by intention), also an attack on their critique of philosophy. Quine's own theory, however, in time took an extreme naturalistic turn that, if anything, deepened the schism between philosophy and knowledge. In this paper I show that many of Quine's early philosophical ideas - his denial of the analytic-synthetic distinction, his thesis of the interconnectedness of knowledge, his universal revisability thesis, his principle of the inseparability of language and theory, his methodological pragmatism, and his realism - are in fact compatible with a substantive philosophy. Moreover, certain inner tensions in Quine's theory naturally lead to a new model of knowledge in which philosophy plays a substantive role: not as a "first philosophy", or as a "meta-science", or as a "chapter in psychology", but as an independent discipline in its own right, alongside, continuous with, and complementary to, science.

Knowledge requires both freedom and friction . Freedom to set up our epistemic goals, choose the subject matter of our investigations, espouse cognitive norms, design research programs, etc., and friction (constraint) coming from two directions: the object or target of our investigation, i.e., the world in a broad sense, and our mind as the sum total of constraints involving the knower. My goal is to investigate the problem of epistemic friction, the relation between epistemic friction and freedom, the viability of foundationalism as a solution to the problem of friction, an alternative solution in the form of a neo-Quinean model, and the possibility of solving the problem of friction as it applies to logic and the philosophy of logic within that model.

This is a critique of Michael P. Lynch’s functional pluralism with respect to truth. The paper is sympathetic to Lynch’s overall approach to truth, but is critical of (i) his platitudinous characterization of the general principles of truth, (ii) his excessive pluralism with respect to the “realizers” of truth, (iii) his treatment of atomic truth, and (iv) his analysis of “mixed” logical inferences. The paper concludes with a proposal for a functional pluralism that puts greater emphasis on the unity of truth. For example: while Lynch regards truth as based on correspondence principles in some domains and on coherence principles in others, the current proposal regards truth as based on correspondence principles in all domains, restricting the plurality of truth to a plurality of correspondence principles.

The Bounds of Logic presents a new philosophical theory of the scope and nature of logic based on critical analysis of the principles underlying modern Tarskian logic and inspired by mathematical and linguistic development. Extracting central philosophical ideas from Tarski’s early work in semantics, Sher questions whether these are fully realized by the standard first-order system. The answer lays the foundation for a new, broader conception of logic. By generally characterizing logical terms, Sher establishes a fundamental result in semantics. Her development of the notion of logicality for quantifiers and her work on branching are of great importance for linguistics. Sher outlines the boundaries of the new logic and points out some of the philosophical ramifications of the new view of logic for such issues as the logicist thesis, ontological commitment, the role of mathematics in logic, and the metaphysical underpinning of logic. She proposes a constructive definition of logical terms, reexamines and extends the notion of branching quantification, and discusses various linguistic issues and applications.

Following Henkin's discovery of partially-ordered (branching) quantification (POQ) with standard quantifiers in 1959, philosophers of language have attempted to extend his definition to POQ with generalized quantifiers. In this paper I propose a general definition of POQ with 1-place generalized quantifiers of the simplest kind: namely, predicative, or "cardinality" quantifiers, e.g., "most", "few", "finitely many", "exactly α", where α is any cardinal, etc. The definition is obtained in a series of generalizations, extending the original, Henkin definition first to a general definition of monotone-increasing (M↑) POQ and then to a general definition of generalized POQ, regardless of monotonicity. The extension is based on (i) Barwise's 1979 analysis of the basic case of M↑ POQ and (ii) my 1990 analysis of the basic case of generalized POQ. POQ is a non-compositional Ist-order structure, hence the problem of extending the definition of the basic case to a general definition is not trivial. The paper concludes with a sample of applications to natural and mathematical languages