•  762
    From one to many: recent work on truth
    American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4): 323-340. 2016.
    In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In th…Read more
  •  699
    Domains, plural truth, and mixed atomic propositions
    Philosophical Studies 166 (S1): 225-236. 2013.
    In this paper, I discuss two concerns for pluralist truth theories: a concern about a key detail of these theories and a concern about their viability. The detail-related concern is that pluralists have relied heavily upon the notion of a domain, but it is not transparent what they take domains to be. Since the notion of a domain has been present in philosophy for some time, it is important for many theorists, not only truth pluralists, to be clear on what domains are and what work they can do. …Read more
  •  607
    The many (yet few) faces of deflationism
    Philosophical Quarterly (263): 362-382. 2016.
    It's often said that according to deflationary theories of truth, truth is not a ‘substantial’ property. While this is a fine slogan, it is far from transparent what deflationists mean (or ought to mean) in saying that truth is ‘insubstantial’. Focusing so intently upon the concept of truth and the word ‘true’, I argue, deflationists and their critics have been insufficiently attentive to a host of metaphysical complexities that arise for deflationists in connection with the property of truth. M…Read more
  •  589
    Pluralism and the absence of truth
    Dissertation, University of Connecticut. 2014.
    In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to deflationism as the provenance of the suspi…Read more
  •  360
    Truth in English and elsewhere: an empirically-informed functionalism
    In Jeremy Wyatt, Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen & Nathan Kellen (eds.), Pluralisms in Truth and Logic, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 169-196. 2018.
    Functionalism about truth, or alethic functionalism, is one of our most promising approaches to the study of truth. In this chapter, I chart a course for functionalist inquiry that centrally involves the empirical study of ordinary thought about truth. In doing so, I review some existing empirical data on the ways in which we think about truth and offer suggestions for future work on this issue. I also argue that some of our data lend support to two kinds of pluralism regarding ordinary thought …Read more
  •  205
    Absolutely tasty: an examination of predicates of personal taste and faultless disagreement
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (3): 252-280. 2018.
    Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by…Read more
  •  91
    Pluralisms in Truth and Logic (edited book)
    Palgrave Macmillan. 2018.
    This edited volume brings together 18 state-of-the art essays on pluralism about truth and logic. Parts I and II are dedicated to respectively truth pluralism and logical pluralism, and Part III to their interconnections. Some contributors challenge pluralism, arguing that the nature of truth or logic is uniform. The majority of contributors, however, defend pluralism, articulate novel versions of the view, or contribute to fundamental debates internal to the pluralist camp. The volume will be o…Read more
  •  82
    This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter--what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad tast…Read more
  •  67
    What is truth?
    Humanities, Arts and Society (HAS) Magazine 3 (1). 2021.
    In this paper, I consider three responses to the question "What is truth?," investigating their ramifications in philosophy and public life.
  •  58
    The nature of disagreement: matters of taste and environs
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 10739-10767. 2021.
    Predicates of personal taste have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which r…Read more
  •  54
    Primitivists about truth maintain that truth cannot be analysed in more fundamental terms. Defences of primitivism date back to the early years of analytic philosophy, being offered by G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gottlob Frege. In more recent years, a number of contemporary philosophers—including Donald Davidson, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Douglas Patterson, and Jamin Asay—have followed suit, defending their own versions of primitivism. I'll begin by offering a brief history of primiti…Read more
  •  32
    Is Truth Primitive?
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4): 1281-1304. 2022.
    Primitivist theories of truth have been defended by some of the luminaries of analytic philosophy, including the early Moore and Russell, Frege, Davidson, and Sosa. In this paper, I take up a contemporary primitivist theory that has been systematically developed throughout a sizeable body of work but has yet to receive sustained critical attention—Jamin Asay's primitivist deflationism. Asay's major ambitions are to defend a novel primitivist account of the concept truth and to harmonise that acc…Read more
  •  18
    Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet underappreciated r…Read more
  •  15
    Prosentential theory of truth in Dorothy Grover (1936-2017)
    Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers. 2022.
    In this entry, we offer a very brief overview of Dorothy Grover's prosentential theory of truth.
  •  13
    In defence of the villain: Edwards on deflationism and pluralism
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (8): 1513-1537. 2023.
    In The Metaphysics of Truth, Doug Edwards offers a sustained case against deflationism about truth and in favour of his preferred pluralist theory of truth. Here, I take up three of the main components of that case. The first is Edwards' account of the distinctive metaphysical commitments of deflationism. His views about this issue have changed over the past few years, and I detail these changes as well as a concern for the views that he develops in the book. Second, I take up the argument that …Read more
  •  12
    Jamin Asay has recently argued that deflationists about the concept of truth cannot satisfactorily account for our alethic desires, i.e., those of our desires that pertain to the truth of our beliefs. In this brief reply, I show how deflationists can draw on well‐established psychological findings on framing effects to explain how the concept of truth behaves within the scope of our alethic desires.
  •  10
    A Correction to this paper has been published: 10.1007/s11229-021-03266-6.
  •  9
    There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of the view…Read more