Truth -- Meaning -- Reality [Hardcover]

Truth -- Meaning -- Realitypresents a fresh approach to philosophy: a broad and unified deflationism that encompasses language, thought, knowledge, reality, and the relations between them.

Horwich's story begins with a minimalist view of truth according to which this extraordinary concept is far less profound and substantial than has usually been assumed, since it stems entirely from our regarding It is true that dogs bark as equivalent to Dogs bark, and similarly in the case of all other statements. There's nothing more to truth than that!

This view turns out to be of fundamental importance throughout the subject. In the first instance it paves the way to an account of meaning as use, whereby the sense of each word-type is given by its basic patterns of deployment rather than by its association with a feature of the non-linguistic world. And the combination of deflated truth and 'meaning as use' then yields a perspective from which the long-standing debates between forms of realism and anti-realism must be preconceived. We are able to see that the positions typically adopted in these debates are all defective -- contrived products of the mistaken assumption that reality, together with our representation of it, must exhibit a rigid uniformity and that deviations from the norm would be intolerably weird.

The fourteen essays collected here constitute a coherent and complete expression of this three-pronged philosophy. Each of them is self-standing. But they have been revised and arranged so as to reveal the power and plausibility of Horwich's overall approach.

Preface

Chapter 1. What is truth?
Chapter 2. Varieties of deflationism
Chapter 3. A defense of minimalism
Chapter 4. The value of truth
Chapter 5. A minimalist critique of Tarski
Chapter 6. Kripke's paradox of meaning
Chapter 7. Regularities, rules, meanings, truth conditions, and epistemic norms
Chapter 8. Semantics: What's trutlÃè