Anil Gupta

This book offers a novel account of the relationship of experience to knowledge. The account builds on the intuitive idea that our ordinary perceptual judgments are not autonomous, that an interdependence obtains between our view of the world and our perceptual judgments. Anil Gupta shows in this important study that this interdependence is the key to a satisfactory account of experience. He uses tools from logic and the philosophy of language to argue that his account of experience makes available an attractive and feasible empiricism.

Tim Maudlin’s Truth and Paradox offers a theory of truth that arises from a foundationalist picture of language. The picture is attractive, and Maudlin builds on it courageously. From the formal point of view, the theory of truth that emerges is, as Maudlin observes, nothing other than the least-fixed-point theory of Saul Kripke. From the philosophical point of view, however, the differences between Maudlin’s and Kripke’s theories are large. It is these differences that lead Maudlin to claim advantages that Kripke did not claim for his own theory. Maudlin says that his theory demands no object-language/metalanguage distinction, that he has “developed a theory of truth for a language that can serve as its own metalanguage.” He promises early on that his theory will be “more adequate to our actual practice of reasoning about truth [than revision and other fixed-point theories].” And he claims that the language he has constructed is expressively complete.

In three-valued languages, sentences can have one of three semantic values: true, false, and neither-true-nor-false. Correspondingly, predicates can be true, false, or neither-true-nor-false of objects. Hence the interpretation of a predicate in a three-valued language needs to fix not only the extension of the predicate—the objects of which the predicate is true—but also its antiextension—the objects of which the predicate is false. In fact, the interpretation of a predicate in a three-valued language can be identified with the ordered pair consisting of the extension E and the anti-extension A of the predicate.

We offer a defense of one aspect of Paul Horwich’s response to the Liar paradox—more specifically, of his move to preserve classical logic. Horwich’s response requires that the full intersubstitutivity of ‘ ‘A’ is true’ and A be abandoned. It is thus open to the objection, due to Hartry Field, that it undermines the generalization function of truth. We defend Horwich’s move by isolating the grade of intersubstitutivity required by the generalization function and by providing a new reading of the biconditionals of the form “ ‘A’ is true iff A.”