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This paper argues for three kinds of possible worlds: Wittgensteinian totalities of facts, Lewisian worlds or universes, concrete objects of maximal essence, and the world, a concrete object of minimal essence. It moreover explains that correspondence truth applies to Wittgensteinian totalities and pragmatic truth to Lewisian universes. And it finally argues that this conceptualization lays proper foundations to two-dimensional semantics. published

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 detailed-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. The viability-related concern is that it's not clear how a pluralist truth theory could explain the truth-conditions of mixed atomic propositions. To address this concern, truth pluralists should recognize something to which they have not been sufficiently attentive: that some atomic propositions belong to more than one domain. But, recognizing this requires rethinking the relationships between the nature of propositions, their membership in domains, and their truth. I address these issues and propose an understanding of them that is preferable to the best existing account of them, that offered by Michael Lynch.

Contextual theories of truth are motivated primarily by the resolution they provide to paradoxical reasoning about truth. The principal argument for contextual theories of truth relies on a key intuition about the truth value of the proposition expressed by a particular utterance made during paradoxical reasoning, which Anil Gupta calls “the Chrysippus intuition.” In this paper, I argue that the principal argument for contextual theories of truth is circular, and that the Chrysippus intuition is false. I conclude that the philosophical motivation for contextual theories of truth fails.

Belief is generally thought to be the primary cognitive state representing the world as being a certain way, regulating our behavior and guiding us around the world. It is thus regarded as being constitutively linked with the truth of its content. This feature of belief has been famously captured in the thesis that believing is a purposive state aiming at truth. It has however proved to be notoriously difficult to explain what the thesis really involves. In this paper, I begin by critically examining a number of recent attempts to unpack the metaphor. I shall then proceed to highlight an error that seems to cripple most of these attempts. This involves the confusion between, what I call, doxastic and epistemic goals. Finally, having offered my own positive account of the aim-of-belief thesis, I shall underline its deflationary nature by distinguishing between aiming at truth and hitting that target (truth). I end by comparing the account with certain prominent inflationary theories of the nature of belief.

Quine argues, in “On the Nature of Moral Values” that a coherence theory of truth is the “lot of ethics”. In this paper, I do a bit of work from within Quinean theory. Specifically, I explore precisely what a coherence theory of truth in ethics might look like and what it might imply for the study of normative value theory generally. The first section of the paper is dedicated to the exposition of a formally correct coherence truth predicate, the possibility of which has been the subject of some skepticism. In the final two sections of the paper, I claim that a coherence theory in ethics does not reduce the practice of moral inquiry to absurdity, in practice as well as in principle.

Quine rejects Peirce's theory of truth because, among other things, its notion of a limit of a sequence of theories is defective in that the notion of a limit depends on that of “nearer than” which is defined for numbers but not for theories. This paper shows that the missing definition of “nearer than” applied to theories can be supplied from within Quine's own epistemology. The upshot is that either Quine's epistemology must be rejected or Peirce's pragmatic theory of truth is partially vindicated.

L'A. developpe une theorie pragmatique des conditionnelles simples introduites par la conjonction si. Cette theorie unifiee des actes allocutionnaires de la forme si P, Q ne concerne en aucun cas les theories propositionnelles, mais s'etend aux contrefactuels et aux indicatives en combinaison avec la deduction, la negation et la disjonction

In their paper 'A prosentential theory of truth' Grover, Camp and Belnap propound a theory of truth which is essentially a modified version of Ramsey's redundancy theory of truth. In this paper I shall not seek to deter-mine whether or not the prosentential theory is true; rather I shall attempt to show that its proponents' argument for its plausibility breaks down at certain crucial points, most notably when they discuss the matter of propositional quantification. In the first section of this paper I shall give a brief account of the prosentential theory of truth as expounded by Grover, Camp and Belnap; in the second section I shall lodge three main complaints against the theory so expounded.