Marian David

Meinong-Studies, Vol. 6, contains papers focusing on the connections between intentionality and nonexistent objects, presenting historical analyses on the background of Meinong’s philosophical position up to the Meinong-Russell-Debate. It also contains systematic studies of fictional characters, of Kripke’s alternative theory of fiction, and of the relevance of fictions playing the role of assumptions in scientific contexts. The volume is completed by biographical sketches of Christian von Ehrenfels, founder of Gestalt-theory and Meinong’s close friend, and of Ernst Mally, disciple of Meinong and successor to his chair.

Our tmst in our own trustworthiness as evaluators of tmth plays a uniquely important role in Lehrer's recent work in epistemology. Lehrer has claimed that a person who trusts in her own trustworthiness has a reason for accepting everything she accepts, including that she is trustworthy. This claim is too bold, trust in our trustworthiness cannot play the epistemic role Lehrer assigns to it. Neither does a suitably revised version of the claim succeed in assigning any important epistemic role to our own trustworthiness as evaluators of truth.

Minimalism, Paul Horwich’s deflationary conception of truth, has recently received a makeover in form of the second edition of Horwich’s highly stimulating book Truth1. I wish to use this occasion to explore a thesis vital to Minimalism: that the minimal theory of truth provides an adequate explanation of the facts about truth. I will indicate why the thesis is vital to Minimalism. Then I will argue that it can be saved from objections only by tampering with the standards of adequate explanation —a move that deprives it from giving support to Minimalism. At the heart of Minimalism lies a theory of truth for propositions. It is called the minimal theory, or MT for short. It consists of a collection of axioms. Each axiom is a proposition of the form..

The so-called “disquotational theory of truth” has not previously been developed much beyond the thesis that saying, for example, that ‘Snow is white’ is true amounts only to saying that snow is white. Marian David has set out to see what further sense can be made of the disquotational theory, and to compare its merits with those of correspondence theories of truth. His prognosis is that an intelligible disquotational theory of truth can be developed but will suffer from drastic shortcomings that make it all but unusable.

Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to a fact -- a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20 th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). During the last 2300 years this basic idea has been expressed in many ways, resulting in a rather extended family of views, theories, and theory sketches. The members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences.

This paper is concerned with a popular view about the nature of propositions, commonly known as the Russellian view of propositions. Alvin Plantinga has dubbed it, or more precisely, a crucial consequence of it, Existentialism, and in his paper “On Existentialism” (1983) he has presented a forceful argument intended as a reductio of this view. In what follows, I describe the main relevant ingredients of the Russellian view of propositions and states of affairs. I present a relatively simple response Russellians might want to make to Plantinga’s anti-existentialist argument. I then explore one aspect of this response—one that leads to some rather curious consequences for the Russellian view of propositions and states of affairs.

Schmitt allots a chapter to each of the main types of theories about truth: pragmatism, coherentism, deflationism, and the correspondence theory. He discusses various arguments for these positions and concludes that only the arguments supporting the correspondence theory are successful. Schmitt's positive case for correspondence makes up the least original part of the book. He explicitly credits Field and remarks that he is mainly concerned with making Field's difficult account more accessible —a task that he discharges honorably..) Schmitt also offers detailed discussions of about fifteen negative arguments aimed against pragmatism, coherentism, and deflationism. He finds most of them effective, with the result that the correspondence theory emerges as the only tenable account of truth. He discusses some objections but seems somewhat less eager to raise problems for his own view than for its competitors.

In Reason, Truth, and History Hilary Putnam has presented an anti-skeptical argument purporting to prove that we are not brains in a vat. How exactly the argument goes is somewhat controversial. A number of competing "recon¬structions" have been proposed. They suffer from a defect which they share with what seems to be Putnam's own version of the argument. In this paper, I examine a very simple and rather natural reconstruction of the argument, one that does not employ any premises in which a sentence, viz. the sentence 'I am a brain in a vat', is mentioned rather than used. In this respect my version of the argument is importantly different from what appears to be Putnam's own version.