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Apr 2001
ISBN 0262621452
792 pp.
3 illus.
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The Nature of Truth
Michael P. Lynch

"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 Eleven of the essays are previously unpublished or substantially revised.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.

Table of Contents
 Preface
 Acknowledgments
 Introduction: The Mystery of Truth
I Realism and the Correspondence Theory
1 Truth and Falsehood
by Bertrand Russell
2 Truth
by J. L. Austin
3 A Realist Conception of Truth
by William P. Alston
4 Contextual Semantics and Metaphysical Realism: Truth as Indirect Correspondence
by Terence Horgan
II Coherence Theories
5 Coherence as the Nature of Truth
by Brand Blanshard
6 The Coherence Theory
by Ralph C. S. Walker
7 The Case for Coherence
by Linda Martín Alcoff
III Pragmatism and Verificationism
8 How to Make Our Ideas Clear
by Charles Sanders Peirce
9 Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
by William James
10 Truth
by Michael Dummett
11 Two Philosophical Perspectives
by Hilary Putnam
12 Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright
by Richard Rorty
IV Phenomenological and Postmodernist Conceptions
13 On the Essence of Truth
by Martin Heidegger
14 Truth and Power
by Michel Foucault
V Tarski's Theory of Its Importance
15 The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics
by Alfred Tarski
16 Tarski's Theory of Truth
by Hartry Field
17 What Is a Theory of Truth?
by Scott Soames
VI Deflationary Views and Their Critics
18 The Nature of Truth
by Frank Plumpton Ramsey
19 Truth
by P. F. Strawson
20 Truth
by W. V. O. Quine
21 Correspondence Truth, Disquotational Truth, and Deflationism
by Hartry Field
22 The Prosentential Theory: Further Reflections on Locating Our Interest in Truth
by Dorothy Grover
23 A Critique of Deflationism
by Anil Gupta
24 A Defense of Minimalism
by Paul Horwich
25 The Metaphysics of Truth
by Michael Devitt
VII Primitivism, Identity Theory, and Alethic Pluralism
26 The Folly of Trying to Define Truth
by Donald Davidson
27 Epistemology and Primitive Truth
by Ernest Sosa
28 Truth: The Identity Theory
by Jennifer Hornsby
29 Truth as Identity and Truth as Correspondence
by Marian David
30 The Face of Cognition
by Hilary Putnam
31 A Functionalist Theory of Truth
by Michael P. Lynch
32 Minimalism, Deflationism, Pragmatism, Pluralism
by Crispin Wright
 Contributors
 Index
 
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