RICERCA ITALIANA     

Aspects of truth.

Università degli Studi di Torino

Abstract

Within the context of (mainly analytic) research on truth of the last few decades, we plan to work on issues involving the definition and conception of truth, the epistemology of truth, contextualism and relativism. Some of the questions that will be addressed are the following: Does it make sense to define truth as correspondence with facts? Can the theory of language dispense with the concept of truth? What is a context? Is there such a thing as a word's or a sentence's literal meaning? What do we mean by saying that a proposition is true FOR someone? What is a constitutive rule? What makes a source reliable? It seems clear that such questions overlap with many philosophical issues besides the issue of truth, and that the answers could be of some interest even for public issues that are being debated.

Principal Investigator

Diego Marconi Università degli Studi di TORINO

Research Objectives

This research intends to contribute to the analysis of some among the problems that were singled out in discussions on truth in the last few decades. Here we shall indicate three subareas, in each of which we are planning to contribute.

A) Notion of truth and conceptions of truth - We saw that what is perhaps the most natural and intuitive conception of truth, truth as correspondence with facts, must face crucial objections, some of which concern the very notion of correspondence. We will try to determine whether the Tarskian conceptual framework, as employed in Tarski's work on truth, can be made to fit at least some among the intuitions that motivate the correspondence theory.
We also saw that the antirealist tradition in semantics (Dummett, Prawitz) meets with Chomsky's conception of language (and the science of language) in challenging both the realist notion of truth and its use in the theory of language. Many Chomskyans have concluded that the notion of truth has no role to play in the theory of language. On the contrary, we are persuaded that semantic theory cannot dispense with the notion of truth. Therefore, we propose to specify an epistemic conception of truth that would cohere with a computational theory of mind, i.e. a conception of truth that would be acceptable from Chomsky's internalist viewpoint.

B) Contextual dependence of truth and/or relativity of truth - Truth has been regarded as depending on the >>>

First Results

As we suggested in the "State of the art" section, in the last few decades the subject of truth has been both a field of intense philosophical research and discussion (within both the analytic and the "continental" traditions) and an object of public discussion, often of a quite polemical nature, induced by important social and political events. We expect to generate a few contributions to specialized philosophical research on truth (particularly on the topics that will be indicated below); however, we do not rule out the possibility that we may also contribute to the improvement of the intellectual quality of public debate as it involves such issues as relativity vs. absoluteness of truth, stability vs. variability of meanings, reliability of testimony.

Strictly scientific contributions we propose to produce will mostly be in the following areas:

- Concerning the discussion on, and among conceptions of truth, we intend to (a) precisely analyze the idea of correspondence, showing the limits within which it can be explicated by a plausible theory; (b) offer a conception of truth that would be compatible with Chomsky's (and others') criticism of the realist conceptions of truth and reference, while maintaining that the theory of meaning cannot dispense with some notion of truth.

- Concerning the epistemological problems of truth, we intend to (a) precisely analyze (better than it has been done so far >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

In the last two decades the topic of truth, that never eluded philosophy's attention, has been in the foreground not just of philosophical research but of public debate as well. Undoubtedly, two interconnected phenomena have been crucial in bringing the topic to centerstage: first of all, geopolitical events that led some to speak (rightly or wrongly) of a "clash of civilizations" involving on the one side the Western world, tolerant and widely secularized, and, on the other side, the Islamic world, backward, aggressive, and reluctant to any separation of the religious sphere from the civic and political sphere. Secondly, migratory phenomena that have concerned Western Europe more intensely than they had in the past, making societies more pluralistic that were used to perceive themselves as essentially uniform. In both cases, some thought that the needs of peace both among and within nations demanded that issues of truth be parenthesized, indeed, that the very idea of truth be weakened or abandoned. It was claimed that tolerance and the rejection of dogmatism could only be grounded on surrendering any claim of truth for one's beliefs and opinions. Others, on the contrary,insisted that loyalty to tradition and entrenched beliefs demanded unqualified defense of, first and foremost, the concept of truth: they claimed the right to present one's beliefs as true, as the alternative was yielding to cultural aggression and depriving one's thought and >>>