The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives

Front Cover
Michael P. Lynch
MIT Press, Apr 13, 2001 - Philosophy - 822 pages
"What is truth?" has long been the philosophical question par excellence. The Nature of Truth collects in one volume the twentieth century's most influential philosophical work on the subject. The coverage strikes a balance between classic works and the leading edge of current philosophical research.

The essays center around two questions: Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature does it have? Thus the book discusses both traditional and deflationary theories of truth, as well as phenomenological, postmodern, and pluralist approaches to the problem. The essays are organized by theory. Each of the seven sections opens with a detailed introduction that not only discusses the essays in that section but relates them to other relevant essays in the book. Eleven of the essays are previously unpublished or substantially revised. The book also includes suggestions for further reading.

Contributors
Linda Martín Alcoff, William P. Alston, J.L. Austin, Brand Blanshard, Marian David, Donald Davidson, Michael Devitt, Michael Dummett, Hartry Field, Michel Foucault, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta, Martin Heidegger, Terence Horgan, Jennifer Hornsby, Paul Horwich, William James, Michael P. Lynch, Charles Sanders Pierce, Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, F.P. Ramsey, Richard Rorty, Bertrand Russell, Scott Soames, Ernest Sosa, P.F. Strawson, Alfred Tarski, Ralph C. Walker, Crispin Wright

 

Contents

Truth and Falsehood
17
A Realist Conception of Truth
41
Truth as Indirect
67
Coherence as the Nature of Truth
103
The Coherence Theory
123
The Case for Coherence
159
How to Make Our Ideas Clear
193
Pragmatisms Conception of Truth
211
Truth
447
Truth
473
Further Reflections on Locating
505
A Critique of Deflationism
527
A Defense of Minimalism
559
The Metaphysics of Truth
579
The Folly of Trying to Define Truth
623
Epistemology and Primitive Truth
641

Truth
229
Two Philosophical Perspectives
251
On the Essence of Truth
295
Truth and Power
317
The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations
331
Tarskis Theory of Truth
365
What Is a Theory of Truth?
397
The Nature of Truth
433
The Identity Theory
663
Truth as Identity and Truth as Correspondence
683
The Face of Cognition
705
A Functionalist Theory of Truth
723
Minimalism Deflationism Pragmatism Pluralism
751
Contributors
789
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About the author (2001)

Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity and True to Life: Why Truth Matters, both published by the MIT Press.

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