Truth Pluralism and Many-Valued Logic: Lesson from Suszko’s Thesis

Abstract

AbstractAccording to truth pluralism, sentences from different areas of discourse can be true in different ways. This view has been challenged to make sense of logical validity, understood as necessary truth preservation, when inferences involving different areas are considered. To solve this problem, a natural temptation is that of replicating the standard practice in many-valued logic by appealing to the notion of designated values. Such a simple approach, however, is usually considered a non-starter for strong versions of truth pluralism, since designation seems to embody nothing but a notion of generic truth. In this paper, I explore the analogy with many-valued logic by comparing the problem of mixed inferences with Suszko’s thesis, and argue that the strong pluralist has room to resist the commitment to a generic property of truth by undermining the semantic significance of Suszko’s reduction.