Alethic pluralism is the view that there are many ways for truth-bearers to be true since different properties realise truth in different domains. Thus, especially in its strong version, pluralism amounts to the claim that the notion of truth we ordinarily employ is actually directly linked with a plurality of realizer properties. At the same time, this conceptual unity is normally taken to be mirrored at the linguistic level by the existence of a single truth predicate “true”. However, although…
Read moreAlethic pluralism is the view that there are many ways for truth-bearers to be true since different properties realise truth in different domains. Thus, especially in its strong version, pluralism amounts to the claim that the notion of truth we ordinarily employ is actually directly linked with a plurality of realizer properties. At the same time, this conceptual unity is normally taken to be mirrored at the linguistic level by the existence of a single truth predicate “true”. However, although much has been said about the relation between the concept of truth and its realizers, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the meaning of the natural language predicate “true”. In this paper I intend to present and argue for a compositional polysemic model of the truth predicate, claiming that this framework constitutes the best account of “true” once a strong pluralist metaphysical picture is endorsed. In the text, I will present the details of this polysemy account and its differences from other existing proposal. Then, I will argue against some constant and context-sensitive alternatives. I will conclude that a polysemic account of "true" better fits a strongly plural conception of truth.
