Anil Gupta

I respond to six objections, raised by Selim Berker and Karl Schafer, against the theory offered in my Empiricism and Experience: (1) that the theory needs a problematic notion of subjective character of experience; (2) that the transition from the hypothetical to the categorical fails because of a logical difficulty; (3) that the constraints imposed on admissible views are too weak; (4) that the theory does not deserve the label 'empiricism'; (5) that the motivations provided for the Reliability constraint are insufficient; and (6) that convergence is bound to fail since epistemic entitlements are permissions

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.

This paper contains a critical discussion of Paul Horwich’s use theory of meaning. Horwich attempts to dissolve the problem of representation through a combination of his theory of meaning and a deflationism about truth. I argue that the dissolution works only if deflationism makes strong and dubious claims about semantic concepts. Horwich offers a specific version of the use theory of meaning. I argue that this version rests on an unacceptable identification: an identification of principles that are fundamental to an explanation of the acceptance of sentences with principles that are fundamental tomeaning.

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.