Fredrik Nyseth

Recently, there have been several attempts to use the kind of reasoning found in Fitch’s knowability paradox to argue for rather sweeping metaphysical claims: Jago (2020) uses such reasoning to argue that every truth has a truthmaker, and Loss (2021) does so to argue that every fact is grounded. This strategy has been criticized by Trueman (2021), who points out that the same kind of reasoning could be used to establish entirely opposite conclusions. In response, Jago (2021) has offered a revised argument that is meant to avoid Trueman’s objection. I argue that this revised argument is in fact undermined by an objection quite similar to Trueman’s.

According to linguistic conventionalism, necessities are to be explained in terms of the conventionally adopted rules that govern the use of linguistic expressions. A number of influential arguments against this view concerns the ‘Truth-Contrast Thesis’. This is the claim that necessary truths are fundamentally different from contingent ones since they are not made true by ‘the facts’. Instead, they are supposed to be something like ‘true in virtue of meaning’. This thesis is widely held to be a core commitment of the conventionalist position, and the view is frequently rejected on the grounds that this thesis is untenable. I argue that this line of reasoning is mistaken. While the thesis should be rejected, it is not, I argue, entailed by linguistic conventionalism – nor was it invariably accepted by the paradigmatic conventionalists.

According to Paul Boghossian, some truths are knowable a priori because they are expressed by epistemically analytic sentences. In such cases, understanding the sentence is meant to suffice for justified belief in the proposition it expresses. One alleged route from understanding to justification goes via what Boghossian calls ‘the synonymy model’. This article presents a dilemma for this model and argues that although a strategy for avoiding the dilemma is available, this does not vindicate Boghossian's model.