Henri Galinon

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).

The thesis that truth is a logical notion has been stated repeatedly by deflationists in philosophical discussions on the nature of truth. However, to prove the point, one would need to show that the truth predicate does classify as logical according to some reasonable criterion of logicality. Following Tarski, invariance criteria have been considered to provide an adequate rendering of the generality and formality of logic. In this article, we show how the deflationist can use invariance criteria in support of her claim that deflationary truth is a logical notion.

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, Truth at Work, Paradoxes of Truth and Denotation and Axiomatic Theories of Truth. Studying the nature of the concept of ‘truth’ has always been a core role of philosophy, but recent years have been a boom time in the topic. With a wealth of recent conferences examining the subject from various angles, this collection of essays recognizes the pressing need for a volume that brings scholars up to date on the arguments. Offering academics and graduate students alike a much-needed repository of today’s cutting-edge work in this vital topic of philosophy, the volume is required reading for anyone needing to keep abreast of developments, and is certain to act as a catalyst for further innovation and research.

L’interrogation sur la nature de la référence, et plus généralement sur la relation entre notre langage et le monde, doit-elle prendre la forme d’une théorie scientifique, appelée à jouer un rôle central en philosophie? Ou bien, au contraire, ne peut-elle déboucher que sur les paradoxes quiniens de l’indétermination de la traduction et de l’inscrutabilité de la référence? Dans Truth and words (2009), Gary Ebbs rejette la première branche de l’alternative, tout en refusant le scepticisme de Quine. Cette discussion critique vise à présenter cette œuvre exigeante.

We can think of functional completeness in systems of propositional logic as a form of expressive completeness: while every logical constant in such system expresses a truth-function of finitely many arguments, functional completeness garantees that every truth-function of finitely many arguments can be expressed with the constants in the system. From this point of view, a functionnaly complete system of propositionnal logic can thus be seen as one where no logical constant is missing. Can a similar question be formulated for quantified first-order logics ? How to make sense of the question whether, e.g., ordinary first-order logic is "functionaly" complete or have no logical constant missing ? In this note, we build on a suggestive proposal made by Bonnay(2006) and shows that it is equivalent to the criterion that a first-order logic L be functionaly complete if and only if every class of structures closed under L-elementary equivalence is L-elementary. Ordinary first-order logic is not complete in this sense. We raise the question whether any logic can be.

In ‘The varieties of indispensability arguments’ Marco Panza and Andrea Sereni argue that, for any clear notion of indispensability, either there is no conclusive argument for the thesis that mathematics is indispensable to science, or the notion of indispensability at hand does not support mathematical realism. In this paper, I shall not object to this main thesis directly. I shall instead try to assess in a naturalistic spirit a family of objections the authors make along the way to the use of indispensability premises in indispensability arguments

This model allows to study how the existence and structure of relations of epistemic trust in a group of truth-seeking agents might affect the epistemic performance of the agents taken individually and as a group. At each step, each agent independently receive from nature a noisy signal pointing to the real value of a certain parameter in [0,1], and balance this information with indirect information about the parameter he obtains by observing the beliefs of his trusted fellows. Agents are taken to be boundedly rational and update their belief following a version of DeGroot model of update (also known as Lehrer-Wagner rule). The agents' abilities to extract information from nature can be differentiated between expert abilities and laymen abilities. These abilities can in turn be varied in the model, in the form of a variation of the standard deviation of the normal law followed by the random signals that experts and layman respectively receive from nature as indication pointing to the real value of the parameter. The structures of epistemic trust can be choosen amongst 4 possibilities : a so-called "master" structure, an "observer" structure, an "circle" structure and a form of random structure which can be used for control purposes in experiments. Epistemic performance is measured as the distance of the believed value to the true value of the parameter.