Welcome back to the Deep Dive. If you were with us last time, you'll remember we started exploring the tricky landscape of truth with Simon Blackburn as our guide. Right. We looked at that basic terrain, that sort of philosophical battleground. Exactly. This big conflict between wanting absolute objective truth and, well, recognizing that things get messy, that interpretation matters. Blackburn really set up the high stakes, didn't he? That whole ideological war over facts, reason, authority. He did. But now we're moving deeper. We're getting into the really complex territory with Michael P. Lynch's big anthology, The Nature of Truth. Yeah, this one's different. It's not just a guide. It's packed with the primary sources themselves. We're talking about the philosophical heavyweights, old and new, all wrestling with this fundamental question. And Lynch frames it so well right from the start. He reminds us just how incredibly hard it is to pin down this concept. It seems so basic, truth, but it's so abstract. You mentioned Voltaire. Yeah. Voltaire's quip that truth seems only definable by, well, platitudes, like saying a true statement just reports the facts as they are, which sounds simple until you try to unpack it. And then there's that eternally echoing question from Pontius Pilate. What is truth? It sort of hangs over this whole discussion. It really does. But Lynch doesn't just leave us with historical anecdotes. He pushes us immediately toward the core philosophical forks in the road. That's key. He lays out the two big starting points for basically every debate that follows. First, does truth even have a nature? Is there something substantial there to define? And second. And second, if it does have a nature, what kind of nature is it? What are its properties? OK, let's dig into that distinction because it seems like that second question, what kind of nature is what really drove a lot of the classic philosophers? Lynch calls their ideas substantive theories, right? Exactly, substantive theories. They all start from this deep -seated assumption that truth isn't trivial. It's a really important fundamental property, a genuine feature of things, maybe of propositions, maybe of the world itself. And it needs explaining. It needs a complex, detailed explanation. Precisely. These are the theories that try to figure out the connection between, say, a true belief and the world outside that belief. They're wrestling with realism, with objectivity. They want to know what's the actual mechanism. How does a belief become true? Right. So before we dive into those specific substantive theories, let's quickly revisit that background tension we mentioned, the one Blackburn highlighted, that kind of philosophical fault line. The absolutism versus relativism thing. Yeah. That ancient war. Because it seems to rumble underneath all these different theories. It really does. You've got the absolutist side insisting there's objective fact out there. And it's what controls whether our beliefs are right or wrong. They're the ones standing on objective fact, holding up reason and objectivity as like truth's essential partners. Yeah, they demand transparency, a universal standard. They think that's the only way to actually find or certify truth. And then the relativist pushback. They look at that insistence on plain universal fact and think, well, sometimes that feels a bit rigid, maybe even conservative. Or just not equipped to handle how messy interpretation really is in the world. They worry that objectivity might just be an illusion we construct. Or that demanding one single truth is sometimes just a power play, a way to impose authority. And this whole conflict feeds directly into the first major theory we need to tackle. The correspondence theory. For ages, this has been the sort of default intuitive view. The common sense idea. Right. And often philosophers arrived here specifically because they rejected its main classical rival, which was the coherence theory. Okay. So correspondence. Bertrand Russell gave us one of the most systematic modern versions, didn't he? He's trying to nail it down after pushing back against those idealist coherence guys. He was. And Russell was very clear about what any decent theory of truth must do. He had these three core requirements. What were they? OK, first, any theory of truth has to allow for the opposite. Falsehood. Truth needs a contrast. Seems obvious, but it's crucial. Makes sense. Second, truth has to be a property of something like beliefs or propositions or statements. It's not a property of, you know, chairs or trees themselves. Okay, a property of representation. Exactly. But third, and this is the absolute core of correspondence truth, must be a property that depends entirely on the relation between that belief. that representation, and things outside the belief itself. Something external to the mind determines truth. That's the heart of it. My belief is true not because of how it feels to me or how well it fits my other beliefs, but because of how it relates to the world out there. Which brings us to that classic formulation. A belief is true if it corresponds to a fact. Simple, right? Well, that's where it gets tricky, isn't it? This is why it's not just a platitude, like Lynch warned, because the moment you try to make that precise, problems erupt. Okay, so what's the main challenge? What makes correspondence to a fact so difficult? Well, there are two huge ones, really. First, what exactly is a fact? And second, what does correspondence actually mean? What kind of relation are we talking about? Let's take fact first. Yeah. How do you define it without just saying, oh, a fact is the thing that makes a true sentence true? Yeah. Because that's completely circular. Exactly. You define fact in terms of truth, truth in terms of fact. You haven't explained anything. And then it gets worse. What about complex beliefs? Right. Like your example. Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC and was assassinated five years later. Is that one belief corresponding to one big complex fact in the world? Or does it correspond to two separate simpler facts? Right. And how do those simple facts combine to make the complex fact? Russell himself wrestled with this stuff intensely. He tried to argue. for something called logical atomism, the idea that the world is built from simple, irreducible facts. Like atoms of reality? Kind of, but then you run into the nasty problem of negative facts. What about my belief that the cat is not on the mat? Does there have to be a weird, shadowy, negative fact out there, the cat not being on the mat fact, for my belief to correspond to? It seems bizarre, right? Or is the truth of my negative belief somehow grounded in all the positive facts about where the cat is, which exclude it being on the mat? It gets incredibly complicated. Defining fap started to look even harder than defining truth. Wow. It's kind of mind -boggling that the most basic intuitive idea truth is matching reality runs into these fundamental logical hurdles just trying to define its own terms after centuries of thought. It really is. Now, as we said, Russell championed correspondence partly because he was actively rejecting its main rival at the time, the coherence theory. OK, so what's the coherence view? Coherence theorists argue that a belief is true if and only if it coheres fixed consistently and logically with a larger specified body of beliefs. Usually this means something like the entire system of human knowledge or an ideally rational set of beliefs. So truth is about internal consistency within a belief system, not external matching. Exactly. But Russell and other realists found this totally insufficient as the fundamental nature of truth. Why? What were their big objections? Russell had a couple of really powerful ones. First, he argued there's just no good reason to think that only one possible coherent system of beliefs could exist. Ah, the multiple systems problem. Right. He used this great thought experiment. Imagine a really, really skilled novelist. Someone with an amazing imagination. Okay. could that novelist invent an entirely fictional past for the world? A complete history, internally consistent, maybe even explaining all the evidence we see now, but completely different from the actual past. Seems possible, yeah. Like a super elaborate conspiracy theory or alternate history. Exactly. Both the novelist's fake history and the real history could be perfectly coherent internally, but only one of them actually happened. Only one corresponds to reality. So coherence alone can't be true. So internal consistency might be a good sign, maybe a test for truth. But it can't be the definition of truth itself if multiple conflicting systems can be equally coherent. That's precisely Russell's point. Coherence is often a test, maybe even a great test, but not its nature. Or think about science. You might have two competing scientific hypotheses. Both explain all the known data. Both are internally consistent. Right, until a new experiment comes along. Yeah, until we find that decisive evidence. But the fact that multiple coherent systems can exist simultaneously means coherence can't be the defining feature of truth for a realist. Okay, that makes sense. But the coherence theorists didn't just roll over, did they? Thinkers like Ralph Walker pushed back hard against correspondence. What was their main line of attack? Walker and others really honed in on that separation correspondence creates between our thoughts and the external reality. They flipped the script. How so? Walker argued that if you think of thoughts and things as related only externally, if truth is just this sort of lucky alignment between an internal belief and an independent external fact, then how can you ever really have knowledge? What do you mean? He suggested it makes knowledge seem purely accidental. Like luck. If your belief just happens, by chance, to match up with some fact out there that's totally separate from your mind, how is that reliable? How can you be justified in holding that belief? It seems like a lucky guess. Hmm. So the connection feels too arbitrary. Too arbitrary, too external. And Walker also brings up perception. He points out that even our basic sensory experiences, color, sound, smell, aren't just raw data hitting us from outside. They're already structured and interpreted within our experience. So even the data we use to check for coherence is already internal. in a sense right so walker asks suppose we manage to build the most perfectly coherent systematic picture using all of our experiences including these secondary qualities does the sheer coherence within that system actually prove it corresponds to anything truly outside it he's suggesting maybe it doesn't he's suggesting that if you put the nature of truth in one place external correspondence, and the test for truth somewhere else, internal coherence, you create this unbridgeable gap. You can never really justify the leap from your internal test results to the external state of affairs. It leaves you in a kind of philosophical limbo. Okay, so the classic theories are hitting some major walls. Correspondence struggles to define fact and correspondence without circularity or weirdness like negative facts. Coherence struggles with the multiple systems problem and that potential disconnect from external reality leading to the knowledge is luck charge. It really sets the stage for a big shift, doesn't it? Moving away from trying to define truth by its static metaphysical components, what it is, and towards thinking about it in terms of what it does, its function. And that brings us squarely into the territory of the American pragmatists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Absolutely. This was a move driven by a deep desire for clarity, but a different kind of clarity, not just abstract definition, but practical operational clarity. How do ideas actually work in our experience? Charles Sanders Pierce is a key figure here, one of the founders. He was looking for a more perfect clearness of thought, right? Something beyond just defining terms abstractly like Descartes did. Exactly. Pierce wanted meaning grounded in consequences, observable, practical, experimental consequences. What difference does this idea make in practice? And this leads to that core pragmatic maxim, the famous one. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects. That's the heart of it for Pierce. Can you give an example of how he applied that? Yeah. He famously used the example of transubstantiation from theology, the doctrine about the bread and wine in communion. Pierce basically said, look, if the wine continues to have all the sensible characteristics of wine taste, smell, appearance, chemical properties, then to say it's really metaphysically blood is just senseless jargon. Because there's no conceivable, practical, observable difference. Precisely. Our entire concept of wine is the sum total of its sensible effects. If there are no potential differences in experience or experimental outcome between idea A and idea B, then A and B are, for all practical purposes, the same concept. Beliefs, for Pierce, are essentially guides to action habits of expecting certain sensible results from certain actions in certain situations. Wow, that's intensely practical. It almost sounds like a philosophy built directly out of the scientific method itself. It's very closely tied. And that connection flows directly into his view of truth. So how does truth fit into this sensible effects framework? For Pierce, truth and reality aren't found in some static correspondence or perfect coherence right now. They emerge from the process of investigation carried out over the long haul. He defined truth with a capital T as the opinion fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate. Fated. That sounds deterministic. Well, it's about the ideal limit of inquiry. The idea is that if the scientific method, with its constant testing and self -correction, were pursued indefinitely, it would eventually converge on a single, stable set of beliefs. That final, unshakable consensus is truth. Reality is what that final opinion would describe. So it's not about what we agree on now, which could be wrong. No, absolutely not. It's about what we would inevitably agree upon if we could push inquiry to its absolute limit, ironing out all errors and biases. It tries to ground truth in the objective self -correcting process of the community of investigators. Okay, that's Pierce. Then we have William James, who's probably even more famous, maybe infamous, for his pragmatic take on truth. He really leans into the usefulness angle. James definitely emphasizes the practical utility, the cash value of ideas, as he sometimes put it. His view is often called an epistemic theory. Truth is tied to processes of knowing and verifying. So for James, true ideas are? True ideas are ones we can assimilate into our existing beliefs, ones we can validate, corroborate, verify through experience. Truth isn't a static property ideas have. It's something that happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events, by its verification. And this verification is about whether it works. Essentially, yes. True ideas are the ones that work in the broadest sense. They help us navigate experience effectively, move smoothly from one part of our lives to another, predict future experiences, and generally lead to satisfactory results without causing frustration or contradiction. But critically, James stresses this has to be over the long run and across the whole range of experience. It's not just about immediate short -term convenience. Right, but this is exactly where he gets hammered with the charge of relativism, isn't it? It is. The big critique is, if truth is just about usefulness, couldn't something be useful for me to believe, given my interests, but completely useless or even harmful for you to believe? Or couldn't a belief be incredibly useful for a whole society, say, a foundational myth that promotes social harmony, even if it's demonstrably false, according to historical evidence? Does its usefulness make it true for James? That's the million dollar question James constantly had to fend off. He tries to push back by emphasizing the public long term nature of working. But he also makes this really important distinction to try and handle it. He distinguishes between full verification processes, actually going out and directly checking every single detail of a belief and what he calls truths in a state of nascency or potential truths. OK, what does that mean? It means most of the truths we live by aren't fully directly verified by us personally. We operate on a huge network of credit essentially. We assume Japan exists without flying there to check. We trust the clock on the wall tells the right time without taking it apart. We take a lot for granted because it usually works out. Exactly. These beliefs function as if they were true because following them leads us reliably to the experiences we expect without clashing with other accepted truths. They work in the sense that the system holds together and guides us effectively. They are shortcuts that, on the whole, So it's about the system working, not just individual beliefs in isolation. Right. And James uses this whole pragmatic framework to make a really sharp break with the older rationalist tradition in philosophy. How so? What's the contrast? He argues that rationalism, with its focus on abstract principles, logic, and necessary truths, is always looking backward. Backward to principles, to past eternity, trying to find truth in static contemplation, divorced from... practical consequences. And pragmatism. Pragmatism, James insists, faces forward. It looks to the future, to outcomes, to consequences and experience. He found the rationalist idea of some unconditional or transcendent reality that simply demands our agreement, regardless of practical payoff, to be frankly a meaningless abstraction. So if mirroring reality perfectly doesn't actually help us do anything or predict anything better, why should we care about it? That's exactly his challenge. The motive for seeking truth, for James, has to lie in the future consequences, the practical advantages it brings. He completely shifts the burden of proof away from just assuming correspondence is intrinsically valuable. That's a powerful shift. But OK, if pragmatism ties truth so closely to what works or what would be agreed upon at the end of inquiry, how does it really hang on to objectivity? It still feels perilously close to just saying truth is whatever we end up agreeing on. That's a fair concern, and it's something contemporary pragmatists have worked hard to refine. Cheryl Misak, for instance, offers a really sophisticated defense. She argues that pragmatism can maintain objectivity, but it needs to be careful about how it connects truth to inquiry. Not in an immediate way. Not in an immediate, indicative way. She says the pragmatists shouldn't say X is true because it fits our current evidence. That's obviously fallible. Instead, they need to use the subjunctive conditional. Okay, the subjunctive. What's the difference in practical terms? Can you give an example that seems like a crucial distinction? It's huge. The indicative conditional is about the present state. If it fits the evidence now, it is true. The subjunctive conditional is about a hypothetical ideal future state. A belief is true, if it would fit the evidence, and would withstand all further tests and revisions, were inquiry to be pursued ideally. indefinitely until no further recalcitrant experiences or reasons for doubt emerged. OK, so truth isn't defined by what we happen to think right now with our limited knowledge and biases. Exactly. It's defined by what we would be compelled to believe under ideal conditions of investigation if we could ever reach them. That's the key move. It places the ultimate standard outside our current finite perspective, thereby preserving objectivity. Truth becomes robust, something resistant to our whims because it's tied to the evidence and reasoning that would emerge in the long run. But does Missick think we're guaranteed to actually converge on one single truth? No, and this is important. She acknowledges that the expectation of convergence, the idea that there really is one right answer out there that ideal inquiry would find, is what she calls a regulative assumption. A regulative assumption. What does that mean? Think of it like this. Imagine you're a judge in traffic court. To even begin the process of figuring out what happened in an accident, you have to assume there is a single objective sequence of events that actually occurred. Right. Otherwise, the whole trial is pointless. Exactly. That assumption that there is a discoverable truth of the matter is necessary for the practice of inquiry, for the trial to make sense. But, and this is the crucial part, the judges need to assume this doesn't magically guarantee that the truth is easily knowable. or that they'll definitely find it, or even that the world is always so neat and tidy. So we assume convergence to make inquiry possible, but we don't know for sure if it's metaphysically true. Precisely. The assumption guides the practice, but the pragmatist remains aware that our methods are fallible, and the world might be more complex than our assumption allows. It keeps pragmatism honest about the limits of investigation. Okay, we've covered a lot of ground, from correspondence trying to match the world, to coherence looking at internal fit, to pragmatism focusing on inquiry and practical outcomes. Now, the anthology takes another sharp turn, right, into the 20th century's analytical obsession with language. Yes, a major pivot. Instead of focusing primarily on the metaphysical property of truth, many philosophers started analyzing the word true itself. and how we use it. What job does that word do in our sentences? And Lynch highlights two really different linguistic approaches here. First, this famous dustup between P .F. Strawson and J .L. Austin. Right. This centers on the function of saying is true. Strawson was coming from a background related to redundancy theories. The idea that is true doesn't add much factual content. Like Ramsey saying it's true Caesar was murdered just means Caesar was murdered. Exactly. But Strawson gave this a specific twist. He argued that when you say something like, your statement is true, you're not actually describing the statement. You're not saying it has the property of corresponding to reality. So what are you doing, according to Strawson? You're performing a linguistic act. You're endorsing the other person's statement or granting it or conceding it. He suggested that saying that's true is often functionally equivalent to just saying ditto or yes or I agree. It's a performative utterance. Okay, so it's about the action you perform with the words, not the descriptive content. That was Strawson's claim. But then J .L. Austin, the champion of ordinary language analysis, came back with a really sharp critique. What was Austin's counter? Austin agreed that, yes, often when we say your statement is true, we are performing an act like agreeing or conceding. No argument there. But he insisted it's also, and crucially at the same time, making an assertion about the original statement. So the performative part doesn't cancel out the descriptive part. Exactly. Austin argued the performative function relies on the underlying descriptive truth -stating function. He called it TSDS. And he had this brilliant, simple counterexample to prove it. Which was? The look and see case, Austin says. Imagine someone makes a statement. You investigate. Maybe you look out the window and you see that their statement is true. But you don't say anything. You don't endorse it. You don't concede it. You just silently recognize its truth. Ah. So the truth exists independently of whether you perform the act of agreeing. Precisely. That silent recognition shows the statement has a truth value. It corresponds, in Austin's view, to the facts before and independently of any linguistic act of endorsement you might perform later. You can't silently look and see an agreement or a concession. Those require speech acts. That seems pretty decisive against a purely performative view. It was a very powerful point. It showed that the truth predicate does seem to describe something about the statement itself, which enables the later performative use but isn't exhausted by it. Still, Strawson had some interesting points, too, especially about the concessive use. He did. Strawson pointed out that when we say things like, it's true that the economy is improving, but inequality is rising, the it's true that part often functions just like saying, although. Like, although the economy is improving, inequality is rising. Exactly. He argued that in these cases, it's true that. Dross isn't really adding a truth claim. It's more like a rhetorical device to signal you're about to grant a point before making a contrasting one. It forces you to really examine the different jobs the word true does in our actual speech. So a fascinating debate about the nuances of ordinary language. But then we shift gears dramatically, moving from the somewhat messy world of everyday speech to the super precise logical world of Alfred Tarski. Yeah, a totally different approach. Tarski was a brilliant Polish logician and mathematician, and he wasn't primarily interested in everyday language use. He was trying to solve a fundamental crisis within formal logic and mathematics. The paradoxes. The semantic paradoxes, yeah. Especially the infamous liar paradox. This sentence is false. Which ties itself in knots. If it's true, then what it says must be correct, meaning it's false. But if it's false, then what it says is incorrect. meaning it's not false, so it must be true. Exactly. It creates a contradiction, and that's lethal for any formal system that aims for consistency. Tarski saw that this kind of paradox arises because natural language is semantically closed or universal. Meaning it can talk about its own truth or falsity. Right. It contains its own semantic predicates like is true and can refer to its own sentences. Tarski's solution was basically to say you can't allow that in a formally consistent language. So how did he fix it? His core move was structural. He insisted on a strict hierarchy of languages. You need to distinguish clearly between the object language, the language you're talking about, and the meta language, the richer, more expressive language you use to talk about the object language. Okay, can you give an analogy? Think of it like a user manual for a complex machine. The manual, meta language. describes the machine's parts and how they work . The manual needs to be written in a language that can refer to the machine's components, but the manual itself can't be one of the machine's components. If it were, you'd risk circularity and paradox. Got it. The language used for analysis must stand outside the language being analyzed. Exactly. The metalanguage has to contain the object language within it, plus the tools, like a truth predicate, needed to describe the semantics of the object language. Crucially, the truth predicate for the object language must belong only to the meta -language. And using this structure, he developed his semantic conception of truth. Yes. He defined truth not through vague ideas like correspondence or coherence, but formally and recursively, using the concept of satisfaction. Satisfaction. How did that work? It's a technical concept, but roughly. Think of a simple predicate like is blue. That predicate, or more formally, the sentential function x is blue, is said to be satisfied by all the objects in the world that are in fact blue. Turski showed how you could build up from satisfaction for simple predicates to satisfaction for complex sentences. For a complete sentence, which has no free variables like x, there are only two possibilities in his system. Either it's satisfied by all objects in the domain, if it's true, or it's satisfied by no objects, if it's false. So snow is white is true if the objects in the world satisfy that condition? Essentially, yes. It's true if it's satisfied by all objects under a suitable interpretation of satisfaction for sentences. This formal definition, constructed within the meta -language, successfully avoids the liar paradox by preventing sentences from talking about their own truth value directly. A major technical achievement. But what did Tarski himself think about the philosophical implications? Did he think he'd finally solve the big questions about realism or idealism? This is really important. Tarski explicitly claimed his definition was completely neutral on those big epistemological and metaphysical debates. Neutral. How so? He saw himself as providing a formally correct and materially adequate definition of truth for certain kinds of languages, a definition that captured the basic intuition behind correspondence. Truth means saying of what is that it is, but did so in a way that was mathematically rigorous and avoided paradox. But he wasn't claiming this technical definition settled whether reality is mind dependent or independent. No. He argued his semantic conception was compatible with various philosophical stances. Whether you were a realist, an idealist, or an empiricist, you could, in principle, adopt his formal definition of truth for your language. He provided a tool, a consistent framework, not a final metaphysical answer. Okay, so Tarski gives us this powerful formal tool, but explicitly stays neutral on the deep metaphysical stuff. And maybe that neutrality, combined with all the headaches that the substantive theories like correspondence and coherence ran into, Maybe that paved the way for the next major movement. I think that's exactly right. It leads directly into what's arguably the dominant view in much contemporary philosophy of truth, deflationism or minimalism. Deflationism. The name suggests they think previous theories were kind of inflated, puffed up. Precisely. Minimalists like F .P. Ramsey back in the day and more recently Paul Horwich essentially argue that philosophers have made truth into a much bigger, more mysterious deal than it actually is. The whole problem might stem from assuming truth is some deep, substantial explanatory property in the first place. So what is truth for a minimalist? Well, Ramsey had that famous observation saying it is true that Caesar was murdered. Adds nothing significant over just asserting Caesar was murdered. The is true part. seems redundant in terms of content. Okay. Building on that, Horridge's minimal theory argues that the property of truth is entirely captured by or constituted by all the non -aradoxical instances of what's called the equivalent schema, or ES. The equivalent schema. That's the P is true if and only if P thing. Exactly. The proposition that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white. The proposition that grass is green is true if and only if grass is green. And so on for every proposition P that doesn't lead to paradox. So, For the minimalist, the entire nature of truth is just this collection of simple equivalences. There's no deeper property like correspondence or coherence needed. That's the core idea. Truth is considered an insubstantial property. Its entire meaning and function are exhausted by these ES instances. But if truth is so insubstantial, if it is true, adds no real content, why do we even have the word? Why do we need a truth predicate at all? Ah, that's the crucial question for deflationists. Their answer is that the truth predicate serves a vital logical or expressive function, even if it doesn't name a deep property. An expressive function. Like what? Give us an example. The classic example is generalization. Suppose you admire someone's judgment immensely, maybe a religious leader or a scientist. You want to endorse everything they believe about a certain topic, even things they haven't said yet or things you haven't heard. You can't list out every single proposition they hold. Proposition 1 is right. Proposition 2 is right. Proposition 3 is right. Especially if it's potentially an infinite list. Right, that's impossible. But the truth predicate lets you do it easily. You just say, everything the Pope says about theology is true, or all of Einstein's later theories are true. You're using is true to generalize over a potentially huge, even infinite class of propositions without having to state each one individually. So it's a tool for endorsing or asserting collections of sentences indirectly. Exactly. It's a device for managing assertion and agreement on a large scale, not for describing a profound metaphysical link between language and world. OK, that's minimalism. It sounds clean, almost elegant in its simplicity, but it feels like it leaves something out. Maybe this idea that truth is just this thin, logical. device, it seems to clash with our intuition that truth in science feels different from truth in ethics, for example. And that's precisely the reaction that fuels the next major contemporary movement, truth pluralism. Thinkers like Michael Lynch himself, Crispin Wright, Gila Sher, they push back against minimalism's deflationary view. So what's the core idea of pluralism? Pluralism generally holds that while truth might be a single concept or play a single functional role across the board, The property that makes a belief or statement true, the property that realizes truth can be different in different areas of discourse. Okay. Unpack that. Different realizing properties. Yeah. So for statements about the physical world, maybe the property that makes them true is something like correspondence to physical facts. That works well there. Right. But what about statements in ethics or aesthetics? Or mathematics. Does it really make sense to say a moral claim like torture is wrong is true because it corresponds to some weird moral fact floating out there in the universe? That seems problematic. Yeah. Yeah. The negative fact issue earlier. Exactly. So the pluralists suggest that in domains like morality or mathematics, truth might be realized by a different kind of property altogether, maybe something epistemic related to justification or proof. And Crispin Wright proposed a specific epistemic property for this role, didn't he? Especially for areas where correspondence seems awkward. He did. Wright developed the idea of super -assertability. Super -assertability. What is that? Roughly, a statement is super -assertable if it's currently warranted based on our evidence and methods. And it would remain warranted no matter how much more information we gathered or how much our methods improved in the future. It would withstand all possible future scrutiny without defeat. So it's like ideal, indestructible justification. Kind of. For right, in domains like ethics, where correspondence is dubious, maybe that property super -assertibility is what constitutes truth. A moral claim is true if it would be endorsed by ideally rational inquiry in the long run. That gives you an objective standard for non -scientific truths without forcing them into a potentially inappropriate correspondence box. That's the appeal. It allows for objectivity and realism about, say, morality, but tailored to the nature of moral discourse. Okay, so that's Wright's approach. But other pluralists have different models. Keila Schur, for instance. Right. Schur offers what she calls a more moderate version of pluralism. She's a bit wary of making the realizing properties too radically different, which might risk fragmenting the concept of truth entirely. So she tries to maintain more unity. Yes. Her approach tries to balance unity and diversity. She actually argues that all truths can, in a broad sense, fall under the correspondence principle. But, and this is key, she thinks correspondence itself isn't a single monolithic relation. It's more like a complex network of different relations and principles that connect thought to reality in various ways depending on the subject matter. And she has a core idea underpinning this network. She does. It's what she calls the imminence thesis. She argues that truth fundamentally arises at the intersection of three basic aspects of human cognition. Imminence, our internal thoughts and representations. Transcendence, our ability to critically question whether things are as our thoughts represent them. And normativity, the standards that determine a correct answer to that transcendent question. So truth emerges from this fundamental structure of how we think about the world and question our own thoughts. That's the idea. It provides a common conceptual source for truth across different domains, even if the specific ways correspondence works might vary. And Michael Lynch, the editor of the anthology, he offers his own version too, right? Simple determination pluralism. He uses an analogy. Yeah, Lynch uses a really helpful analogy. The property of winning a game. Okay. Winning is a single general property. It's the goal state, the success condition. But the way you achieve that property, the specific actions or states of affairs that realize winning are completely different depending on the game. Right. Checkmate in chess is totally different from scoring more goals in football. Exactly. So Lynch suggests truth might be like winning a single overarching normative property or goal. But the property that determines or realizes truth in a specific domain, like physics or ethics or logic, could be different, just like the rules for winning are different for different games. Correspondence might be the rule for winning in the empirical facts game, while coherence or super -assertibility might be the rule for winning in the mathematical proof or moral justification game. That's quite intuitive. It keeps the general importance of truth while allowing for domain -specific differences in how it works. It definitely tries to capture the best of both worlds, avoiding the potential oversimplification of correspondence, but also avoiding the deflationist conclusion that truth isn't really a substantial property worth analyzing. OK, so pluralism offers ways to handle the diversity of truth. But there's an even more radical critique lurking at the end of the anthology, isn't there? One that takes Tarski's paradoxes and says maybe the problem isn't just formal languages. Maybe it's our concept of truth itself. Yes. This brings us to the really cutting edge and potentially quite unsettling territory of inconsistency theorists and conceptual engineering. Inconsistency theorists like Kevin Sharp. What's their basic claim? They argue that the problem isn't just that specific sentences like the liar are paradoxical. They argue that the very rules governing our ordinary, everyday concept of truth, the fundamental principles that make the concept useful to us, like the equivalent schema, P is true if P, are themselves inconsistent. The concept itself is flawed, broken. That's the radical claim. They argue that when you combine the core principles governing how we use true, like the ES, which seems essential for generalization, with basic logic, you inevitably generate contradictions, not just the liar, but other related paradoxes like Curry's paradox. Their diagnosis is that our ordinary concept of truth has inconsistent constitutive principles. It's fundamentally defective. Wow. So if the concept itself is broken, what do they propose we do? Just stop talking about truth? Well, that leads to the project of conceptual engineering. If the original tool... our concept of truth is flawed, maybe we should design and adopt new, better tools. Replace the concept. Essentially, yes. They propose developing replacement concepts, sometimes called elatheic properties, that can do some or most of the important jobs that our current concept of truth does, like allowing generalization, marking assertion, but are specifically designed to be logically consistent and paradox -free. Hasn't formal logic already kind of done this with things like Tarski and truth or truth in a model? Those are consistent technical notions. That's a great point. And inconsistency theorists would say, yes, formal semantics has developed consistent surrogates. The conceptual engineering project wants to take that further, perhaps even suggesting we should try to revise our ordinary usage to align with these cleaner concepts. Is that realistic? Can we just decide to replace a concept as fundamental as truth? This brings up the retentionism counter -argument, right? Alexis Burgess defends holding onto our existing concept. Exactly. Burgess represents the retentionist stance. He argues we should be extremely cautious about claims that we must revise or replace our core concepts. Just because a concept generates paradoxes in certain highly artificial or self -referential contexts doesn't automatically mean it's useless or should be discarded. What are the arguments for retention? Well, first, Burgess questions whether the consistency of the technical surrogates used in formal semantics has actually been essential to the success of those fields. Maybe their utility comes from other features. Second, and perhaps more importantly, he raises the issue of psychological plausibility. Meaning, can real people actually ditch their intuitive notion of truth? Right. If semantic theories are supposed to tell us something about... how human language and thought actually work, they need to engage with the concepts people actually use. Our ordinary notion of truth, flaws, and all is deeply embedded in our psychology, our communication, our social practices. Do we really have the ability or even the motivation to replace it wholesale with some philosophers technically pure but perhaps less intuitive substitute? It seems like a massive uphill battle. We rely on our messy everyday concept of truth constantly for generalizing, for trusting others, for navigating disagreements. It's incredibly functional despite the theoretical paradoxes. And this ties back to the pragmatists in a way. If the ultimate test of a concept is how well it works for us, how indispensable it is to our practices. And maybe the sheer functional utility of our existing, possibly inconsistent, concept of truth outweighs the logical purity of a proposed replacement that might not do the job as well in practice. That's the tension Burgess highlights. We have to weigh the theoretical demand for consistency against the practical, psychological, and social reality of how we actually use and depend on the concept of truth. Hashtag, hashtag, outro. Wow. What a journey through Lynch's anthology. We've really covered the spectrum, haven't we? We really have. From the ancient ideal of correspondence, trying to mirror reality. Through the internal logic of coherence, then the pragmatic shift towards usefulness, and the results of inquiry with Pearson James. Then diving into the very language we use with Austin, Strawson, and Tarski's incredibly precise formal solution. And finally landing in these intense contemporary debates. Is truth minimal and deflated? Is it plural, realized differently in different areas, or is the concept itself flawed and in need of replacement? I think the overwhelming takeaway from tracing this history through the anthology is this constant powerful tension. It's a struggle between two deep philosophical impulses. On the one hand, the drive to find unity, that single universal nature or property that defines truth everywhere, for all types of claims. The search for the theory of truth. And on the other hand... The persistent recognition of diversity, the fact that truth seems to operate differently or be achieved differently in physics versus ethics versus mathematics versus everyday factual claims, the need to account for how truth is realized in all these very contexts. It really does feel like almost every philosopher we discussed was either trying to build a unified theory that somehow covered everything or trying to explain why truth has to look so different across these different domains. Unity versus diversity. Absolutely. And that unresolved tension leads us directly into a final provocative thought for you, the listener, to mull over. It comes straight out of that retentionism debate we just touched on. Okay. What should we be thinking about? Well, we heard from the inconsistency theorists that our ordinary, everyday concept of truth, the one we use constantly to communicate, trust, disagree, generalize, is, from a strict logical perspective, potentially defective, riddled with paradox. Right. And the conceptual engineers proposed replacing it with cleaner, consistent... technically perfect surrogates. But then think about the pragmatists like James, who argued that the value of a concept lies in its practical utility, its cash value, how well it works in guiding our lives and interactions. So here's the question for you. Given how incredibly useful, how functionally indispensable our ordinary, maybe logically flawed concept of truth is for virtually every aspect of human life, for science, for law, for personal relationships, for simply understanding each other, could it be that the sheer practical grip and utility of this defective concept makes it, in a deep, pragmatic sense, more vital, perhaps even more true to human needs than any logically pristine, technically consistent replacement that In other words, does the functional success of our messy everyday tool trump the logical perfection of a theoretically better tool that we might not be able to use as effectively? Exactly. Is utility ultimately a more important virtue for our concept of truth than strict logical consistency? That's a question of practical value versus theoretical purity for you to wrestle with.