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Truth And Falsehood In Plato's Sophist, Michael Oliver Wiitala

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation is a study of the ontological foundations of true and false speech in Plato’s Sophist. Unlike most contemporary scholarship on the Sophist, my dissertation offers a wholistic account of the dialogue, demonstrating that the ontological theory of the “communing” of forms and the theory of true and false speech later in the dialogue entail one another.

As I interpret it, the account of true and false speech in the Sophist is primarily concerned with true and false speech about the forms. As Plato sees it, we can only make true statements about spatio-temporal beings if it …

Inflationary Truth-Theoretic Semantics, Michael Brady Horton

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

I argue that satisfaction and reference—and therefore, truth—are multiply realizable properties. I advocate a novel approach motivated by a commitment to the robustness and fruitfulness of truth-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics.

DEFLATIONISM: Philosophers keen on deflating the metaphysical pretensions of truth theories claim that we need not appeal to a substantive truth-property. Recently, however, some philosophers have sought to combine deflationism about truth with the view that our concept of truth or the truth-predicate can play an important role in natural language semantics.

TRUTH-THEORETIC SEMANTICS: The goal of a formal semantic theory of a natural language is to provide …

Truly Normative Matters: An Essay On The Value Of Truth, Charles Kamper Floyd Iii

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Is truth valuable? In addressing this question, one must parse it into questions that are more manageable. Is the property of truth only instrumentally valuable, or is it both instrumentally valuable and noninstrumentally valuable? Is the normativity of the concept of truth an intrinsic or extrinsic property of the concept? In addressing the first of these questions, I show that certain arguments are flawed, arguments that purport to show that truth is not valuable in any kind of way. After establishing that it is reasonable to think that the property of truth is valuable, I show how inflationists and deflationists …