Bradley Armour-Garb

In our paper, we mount a novel argument, which trades on recent work by Roy Sorensen [2016], following work by Saul Kripke, against Yablo's preferred reading of if-thenism, which is an attempt to read problematically ontologically committing sentences in a way that does not carry such ontological commitments. Although our argument is directed at Yablo's proposed reading of if-thenism, if the argument is successful, other versions of if-thenism may be affected. After reviewing Sorensen's recent work and presenting our argument, we consider a possible way out and use this as a means for presenting some challenges to Yablo.

The Law of Non-Contradiction - that no contradiction can be true - has been a seemingly unassailable dogma since the work of Aristotle. It is an assumption challenged from a variety of angles in this collection of original papers. Twenty-three of the world's leading experts investigate the 'law', considering arguments for and against it and discuss methodological issues that arise. The result is a balanced inquiry into a venerable principle of logic, one that raises questions at the very centre of logic itself

This anthology of the very latest research on truth features the work of recognized luminaries in the field, put together following a rigorous refereeing process. Along with an introduction outlining the central issues in the field, it provides a unique and unrivaled view of contemporary work on the nature of truth, with papers selected from key conferences in 2011 such as Truth Be Told (Amsterdam), Truth at Work (Paris), Paradoxes of Truth and Denotation (Barcelona) and Axiomatic Theories of Truth (Oxford).

In this dissertation, I take a close look at the deflationary theory of truth, and deflationary semantics, generally. My thesis is that, as a theory about the nature and function of the property of truth, deflationism is well supported. However, deflationary semantics, which combines deflationism about truth with deflationism about meaning cannot be argued for by pointing to the expressive function of the truth predicate. ;Having shown that deflationism about meaning cannot be argued for in this way, I develop a challenge to deflationary semantics, the challenge of the contingency of sentential truth conditions. The challenge for the deflationist is to explain the fact that her view assigns the wrong modal properties to "true". As I show, the deflationist does not have the resources either to explain or to explain away this counter-intuitive feature of her view. Since, in addition, the arguments for deflationism do not support the adoption of a deflationary attitude towards meaning, I offer and support what I call propositional deflationism. Propositional deflationism deflates truth for propositions, thereby respecting the deflationist's contentions about the nature and function of truth, without deflating truth for sentences and beliefs. The result is a hybrid view that is deflationist about truth, though not about meaning.

Philosophical work on truth covers two streams of inquiry, one concerning the nature (if any) of truth, the other concerning truth-related paradox, especially the Liar. For the most part these streams have proceeded fairly independently of each other. In his "Deflationary Truth and the Liar" (JPL 28:455-488, 1999) Keith Simmons argues that the two streams bear on one another in an important way; specifically, the Liar poses a greater problem for deflationary conceptions of truth than it does for inflationist conceptions. We agree with Simmons on this point; however, we disagree with his main conclusion. In a nutshell, Simmons' main conclusion is that deflationists can solve the Liar only by compromising deflationism. If Simmons is right, then deflationists cannot solve the Liar paradox. In this paper we argue that, pace Simmons, there is an approach to the Liar that is available to deflationists, namely dialetheism.

Stephen Read has presented an argument for the inconsistency of the concept of validity. We extend Read’s results and show that this inconsistency is but one half of a larger problem. Like the concept of truth, validity is infected with what we call semantic pathology, a condition that actually gives rise to two symptoms: inconsistency and indeterminacy. After sketching the basic ideas behind semantic pathology and explaining how it manifests both symptoms in the concept of truth, we present cases that establish the indeterminacy of validity and that link this indeterminacy with the concept’s inconsistency. Our conclusion is that an adequate treatment of the semantic pathology thus revealed must deal with both of its symptoms. Further, it must extend to the occurrences of this condition elsewhere: in the concept of truth, in the other central semantic notions, and even in certain philosophical concepts outside semantics.

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally.

In this paper, we set out what we see as a novel, and very promising, approach to resolving a number of the familiar linguistic puzzles that provide philosophy of language with much of its subject matter. The approach we promote postulates semantic pretense at work where these puzzles arise. We begin by briefly cataloging the relevant dilemmas. Then, after introducing the pretense approach, we indicate how it promises to handle these putatively intractable problems. We then consider a number of objections to pretense views, taking this as an opportunity to provide more detailed explanation of what a pretense account amounts to, what the pretense approach commits us to, and why it is a promising approach in philosophy of language.

In Vagueness and Contradiction (2001), Roy Sorensen defends and extends his epistemic account of vagueness. In the process, he appeals to connections between vagueness and semantic paradox. These appeals come mainly in Chapter 11, where Sorensen offers a solution to what he calls the no-no paradox—a “neglected cousin” of the more famous liar—and attempts to use this solution as a precedent for an epistemic account of the sorites paradox. This strategy is problematic for Sorensen’s project, however, since, as we establish, he fails to resolve the semantic pathology of the no-no paradox.

In a series of articles, Dan Lopez De Sa and Elia Zardini argue that several theorists have recently employed instances of paradoxical reasoning, while failing to see its problematic nature because it does not immediately (or obviously) yield inconsistency. In contrast, Lopez De Sa and Zardini claim that resultant inconsistency is not a necessary condition for paradoxicality. It is our contention that, even given their broader understanding of paradox, their arguments fail to undermine the instances of reasoning they attack, either because they fail to see everything that is at work in that reasoning, or because they misunderstand what it is that the reasoning aims to show.

Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I show how broader attention to Dummett's writings on the theory of meaning allows one to discern, and formalize, a valid argument for logical revision. Then, after correctly providing a rigorous statement of the argument, I am able to delineate four possible anti-Dummettian responses. Following recent work by Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright, I conclude that progress in the anti-realist's dialectic requires greater clarity about the key modal notions used in Dummett's proof.

It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that marshal parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists. At the same time, the utility of “proposition-talk”—indeed, the apparent linguistic commitment evident in our use of 'that'-clauses (in offering explanations and making predictions)—is also in need of explanation. We account for this with a fictionalist analysis of our use of 'that'-clauses. Our account avoids certain problems that arise for the usual error-theoretic versions of fictionalism because we apply the notion of semantic pretense to develop an alternative, pretense-involving, non-error-theoretic, fictionalist account of proposition-talk.

In this paper, we do two things. First, we clarify the notion of deflationism, with special attention to deflationary accounts of truth. Second, we argue that one who endorses a deflationary account of truth (or of semantic notions, generally) should be, or perhaps already is, a pretense theorist regarding truth-talk. In §1 we discuss mathematical fictionalism, where we focus on Yablo’s pretense account of mathematical discourse. §2 briefly introduces the key elements of deflationism and explains deflationism about truth in particular. §3 discusses why deflationary accounts of truth should be construed as pretense accounts and gives a preliminary sketch of a particular pretense account of truth-talk. §4 addresses a main objection to a pretense account, and §5 concludes.

This article reveals a tension between a fairly standard response to "liar sentences," of which (L) Sentence (L) is not true is an instance, and some features of our natural language determiners (e.g., 'every,' 'some,' 'no,' etc.) that have been established by formal linguists. The fairly standard response to liar sentences, which has been voiced by a number of philosophers who work directly on the Liar paradox (e.g., Parsons [1974], Kripke [1975], Burge [1979], Goldstein [1985, 2009], Gaifman [1992, 2000]), Glanzberg [2004], Azzouni [2006], and others), but can also be heard from philosophers who do not work directly on that paradox, is that liar sentences do not express propositions. Call this the "No Proposition View" (hereafter NPV). Evidently, the belief that liar sentences do not express propositions is a deeply held intuition. As the previously mentioned tension will reveal, there is reason to worry about whether this deeply held intuition can be sustained.

In ‘A Consistent Way with Paradox’, Laurence Goldstein (2009) clarifies his solution to the liar, which he touts as revenge immune. In addition, he (Ibid.) responds to one of the objections that Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2006) raise against certain solutions to the open pair and argues that his proffered solution to the liar family of paradoxes undermines what they (Ibid.) call the dialetheic conjecture. In this paper, after critically evaluating Goldstein’s response to A-G&W, I turn to his proposed solution to the liar paradox, where I show that it is difficult to see how it manages to avoid that conjecture.

In this book, Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge distinguish various species of fictionalism, locating and defending their own version of philosophical fictionalism. Addressing semantic and philosophical puzzles that arise from ordinary language, they consider such issues as the problem of non-being, plural identity claims, mental-attitude ascriptions, meaning attributions, and truth-talk. They consider 'deflationism about truth', explaining why deflationists should be fictionalists, and show how their philosophical fictionalist account of truth-talk underwrites a dissolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. They further explore the semantic notions of reference and predicate-satisfaction, showing how philosophical fictionalism can also resolve puzzles that these notions appear to present. Their critical examination of fictionalist approaches in philosophy, together with the development and application of their own brand of philosophical fictionalism, will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and linguistics.

Recently, several philosophers have proposed fictionalist accounts of truth-talk, as a means for resolving the semantic pathology that the Liar Paradox appears to present. These alethic fictionalists aim to vindicate truth-talk as a kind of as if discourse, while rejecting that the talk attributes any real property of truth. Liggins has recently critically assessed one such proposal, Beall’s constructive methodological deflationist, offering objections to Beall’s proposed alethic fictionalism that potentially generalize to other alethic fictionalist accounts. Liggins further argues that CMD supports a classically consistent response to the Liar Paradox—one that can be extracted from CMD, while leaving its putatively problematic fictionalist elements behind in favor of alethic nihilism. In this paper, after establishing that Liggins’s criticisms of CMD are off base, we show that the classical resolution of the Liar Paradox that he proposes is unworkable. Since his resistance to alethic fictionalism turns out to be unmotivated, we conclude that this approach is still worth considering as a framework for a resolution of the Liar Paradox.