Maria Jose Frapolli

The book offers a proposal on how to define truth in all its complexity, without reductionism, showing at the same time which questions a theory of truth has to answer and which questions, although related to truth, do not belong within the scope of such a theory. Just like any other theory, a theory of truth has its structure and limits. The semantic core of the position is that truth-ascriptions are pro-forms, i.e. natural language propositional variables. The book also offers an explanation of the syntactic behaviour of truth-terms, and the pragmatic roles of truth-acts. The theory of truth we present is a technical proposal, relatively uncontaminated by radical philosophical discussion. It makes indeed philosophical points, but it is intended to be a conceptual analysis, as neutral as possible, of the aspects that may serve as a point of departure for more philosophically-laden destinations. Like the Fregean account of quantifiers, which is prior to and, to a large extent, independent of the metaphysical debate about existence and its forms, or the Kaplanian view on demonstratives, that is neutral regarding the debate about individuals and the possibilities we have to actually “reach” them in a referring act, we intend our proposal about truth to be a sophisticated and explicative setting that helps to situate other debates about truth accurately, far from the distorted and sometimes strongly ideological discussions that have turned the topic into a paradigm of philosophical impasse.

The aim of this paper is to discuss Kripkc’s reasons for declaring the existence of both necessary a posteriori as well as contingent a priori statements, thus breaking the traditional extensional coincidence of the two pairs of concepts:necessary‐contingent and a priori‐a posteriori. As I shall argue, there is no reason, from Kripke’s work at least, to reject the usual picture of the topic The appeal ot his arguments rests on the ambiguity with which his expressions are used and on the introduction o\ new senses for old notions. This does not mean, however, that all Knpke’s and Putnam’s intuitions on singular terms and natural kind nouns are wrong. Once Kripke’s ideas are properly uudeistood, they are much moreharmless then they are presented to be and they do not pose a threat to traditional relations relations between modal and epistemological categories.