Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler

According to Aristotle's Categories (14b14–22), the proposition that p is true because p, but it is not the case that p because the proposition that p is true. Call this truth dependence. Truth dependence is challenging for Horwich's minimalism. According to his minimal conception of truth, all there is to truth are the instances of the T‐schema “the proposition that p is true iff p.” If this is an adequate conception of truth, then one might challenge minimalism to explain truth dependence in terms of the instances of the T‐schema. However, unlike truth dependence, the T‐schema neither involves an explanatory asymmetry nor a cross‐categoriality. Many alleged minimalist solutions have been offered to this problem. This article is the first to look at different kinds of alleged solutions: deductive‐nomological, pragmatic, and conceptual. In doing so, the article establishes two adequacy conditions on any Minimalist account of truth dependence: first, account for the explanatory asymmetry and cross‐categoriality of truth dependence, and, second, do so in terms of the instances of (E). None of the alleged minimalist solutions satisfy these conditions. Thus, we are still in dire need of an adequate minimalist account of truth dependence.

In The True and the Good: A Strong Virtue Theory of the Value of Truth (2023), Wrenn argues for a strong virtue theory of the value of truth. What makes truth valuable is Truthfulness, a human virtue. We value truth because we ought to be Truthful, and not vice versa (state-given). Therefore, he argues that the truth of a proposition as such does not confer value to states of believing it. I disagree. I argue that Wrenn’s Strong Virtue Theory of the Value of Truth is either too strong or simply false. In any case, my main argument is based on a thought experiment that is supposed to challenge his theory, and pump our intuition that truth as such confers value on states of believing it (object-given). I also point to some issues that concern the compatibility of Aristotelianism and truth’s value, and also the formulation of the Strong Virtue Theory.

Sometimes, political bald-faced lies pass for truth. That is, certain groups of people behave according to them – behave as if the political bald-faced lies were true. How can this phenomenon be explained? I argue that to explain it we need to take political bald-faced lies to be performative utterances whose goal is to bring about a worldly state of affairs just in virtue of making the utterance. When the former US-President tweeted ‘we won the election’, people stormed Capitol Hill to protest election fraud and some were killed. In this way, the bald-faced lie was successful in passing for truth. My performative view of political bald-faced lies is to be preferred over various other views such as the contempt for truth view (Lynch 2021), the deception view (Lackey 2013), and the value-signaling view (Stanley 2012). These alternative views fail to adequately account for how political bald-faced lies pass for truth.

Beall’s (e.g., 2009, 2021) transparency theory of truth is recognized as a prominent, deflationist solution to the liar paradox. However, it has been neglected by truth theorists who have attempted to show that a deflationist theory of truth can (or cannot) account for truth dependence, i.e., the claim that the truth of a proposition depends on how things described by the proposition are, but how these things are does not depend on the truth of the proposition. Truth theorists interested in truth dependence have, instead, been focused on Horwich’s Minimalism (e.g., 1998). The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I construct what versions of the transparency theory would say about truth dependence. Second, I argue that even the best version of transparent truth ultimately fails to account for truth dependence. On the assumption that accounting for truth dependence is an adequacy condition on any theory of truth, the paper rejects transparency theory as an adequate theory of truth.