Bearers Of Truth Research Articles

Three Comments on Writing the Book of the World

Theodore Sider�s Writing the Book of the World is systematic, wide-ranging, intelligent, and interesting. It is sure to be influential, and deservedly so. Reading it and thinking about it have been a real pleasure. I am certain that I shall return to it again and again. 1. Multifaceted metaphysics Sider�s book opens with this: Metaphysics, at bottom, is about the fundamental structure of reality. Not about what�s necessarily true. Not about what properties are essential. Not about conceptual analysis. Not about what there is. Structure. (1)1 But I reply that metaphysics is not � not even �at bottom� � about only one thing, and so not � not even �at bottom� � about only the fundamental structure of reality. Consider the following claims: free actions cannot be causally determined; true propositions concerning future actions do not preclude freedom; the fundamental bearers of truth and falsity are abstract objects; some properties are universals; all properties are qualitative; persisting objects have temporal parts; a physical object can be wholly located in more than one place at the same time; no two physical objects can be entirely in the same place at the same time; composition is unrestricted; every truth has a truthmaker; propositions are sets of possible worlds; possibly, nothing exists; absences are causally efficacious; each human being is essentially not a chimpanzee. It is false that every one of these claims, at bottom, is about structure. It is likewise false that there is some other single unified topic that every one of these claims is about. Yet they all are metaphysical claims. Maybe they are all metaphysical because their content is interrelated by �family resemblances�. Or maybe they count as metaphysical not only because of their content, but also in part because of historical accident. Or maybe there is some other explanation. Here �

Marcus on Belief and Belief in the Impossible

I review but don't endorse Marcus' arguments that impossible beliefs are impossible. I defend her claim that belief's objects are, in some important sense, not the bearers of truth and falsity, discuss her disposition- alism about belief, and argue it's a good fit with the idea that belief's objects are Russellian states of affairs.

Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment

AbstractThis article argues that Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment represents a breakthrough of grace as it re-enacts, for Jamaica as a nation, the divine miracle and humility of the incarnation: God speaking to Jamaicans in their own language, Patwa, just as Jesus Christ chose to be with a peasant family, Joseph and Mary. Jamaicans have always prayed and worshipped in Patwa, intuitively believing that God understands Patwa; yet, the translation of the New Testament into Patwa suggests that, as well as listening to and understanding God’s children when they speak to God in Patwa, God also speaks Patwa, not as a foreigner but as one who embraces and understands the nuances of Jamaican language and culture. The article looks at the formation of Jamaican Patwa in the nexus between Africa and Europe and questions in what ways Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment may serve as a source of liberation. Questions raised in the article include whether the translation of the New Testament in Patwa will reverse notions, among Jamaicans, of an inherent superiority of the English language; whether it is possible that Jamaicans will now begin to understand that no language or culture is excluded from being the bearer of Scripture or divine truth, and that no language or culture has an exclusive access to divine truth. The article also considers what this translation into the language of the masses of Jamaicans teaches concerning the nature of God and the missio Dei.

What is Meaning (Soochow University Lectures in Philosophy) * By SCOTT SOAMES

The standard conception of propositions introduces them as meanings of sentences, bearers of truth and falsity and as objects of attitudes. Are there things which have all these properties? In his recent book What is Meaning Scott Soames offers rich food for thought on the foundation of propositions. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, we find an elaboration of the claim that for more than a century philosophers have been working with a mistaken or puzzling conception of propositions. In the second part, a cognitive realist view of propositions is defended: propositions are certain types of certain act, i.e. acts of predicating something of an object or of applying a function to an argument. In the course of the book, foundational problems in the conception of propositions are revealed. Frege’s (1892) and Russell’s (1903) conception of propositions as complex entities composed of the meanings of the constituents of the sentences that express them stumbles with the problem of the unity of proposition. Davidson’s (1967) enterprise to dispense with propositions as entities in favour of a truth-theory of understanding a language is too weak to account for the difference in meaning among extensionally equivalent sentences. An expansion of Davidson’s project so that one takes truth conditional theories to range over metaphysically possible as well as epistemically possible world states is still too weak to account for the difference in meaning between metaphysically necessary or a priori equivalent sentences. On the other hand, any conception of propositions as a formal system, either as sets of some sort or as functions of some sort is, according to the author, a dead end. Propositions are intrinsically representational, they are intrinsically truth-value bearers, while sets or functions are not.

Truth-bearers or Truth-makers?

One way visual representations might function in scientific reasoning is to convey content that is true or false, analogous to making a claim. An alternative way that visual representations might function is as an object that may make statements true or false, but is not itself true or false, analogous to a scientific model. In this paper I evaluate the most recent and extended defense of this latter position and show that the case study involved does not in fact support the view that the diagrams discussed function as truth-makers rather than truth bearers.

Kant on Truth-Aptness

Many scholars claimed that, according to Immanuel Kant, some judgements lack a truth-value: analytic judgements, judgements about items of which humans cannot have experience, judgements of perception, and non-assertoric judgements. However, no one has undertaken an extensive examination of the textual evidence for those claims. Based on an analysis of Kant's texts, I argue that: • according to Kant, only judgements of perception are not truth-apt. All other judgements are truth-apt, including analytic judgements and judgements about items of which humans cannot have experience. • Kant sometimes states that truth-apt judgements are actual bearers of truth or falsity only when they are taken to state what is actually the case. Kant calls these judgements assertoric. Other texts ascribe truth and falsity to judgements, regardless of whether they are assertoric. Kant's views on truth-aptness raise challenges for correspondentist and coherentist interpretations of Kant's theory of truth; they rule out the identification of Kant's crucial notion of objective validity with truth-aptness; and they imply that Kant was not a verificationist about truth or meaning.

Propositions and same-saying: introduction

Philosophers often talk about the things we say, or believe, or think, or mean. The things are often called ‘propositions’. A proposition is what one believes, or thinks, or means when one believes, thinks, or means something. Talk about propositions is ubiquitous when philosophers turn their gaze to language, meaning and thought. But what are propositions? Is there a single class of things that serve as the objects of belief, the bearers of truth, and the meanings of utterances? How do our utterances express propositions? Under what conditions do two speakers say the same thing, and what (if anything) does this tell us about the nature of propositions? There is no consensus on these questions—or even on whether propositions should be treated as things at all. During the second Propositions and Same-Saying workshop, which took place on July 19–21 2010 at the University of Sydney, philosophers debated these (and related) questions. The workshop covered topics in the philosophy of language, perception, and metaphysics. The present volume contains revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the workshop.

Eternalism and Propositional Multitasking: in defence of the Operator Argument

It is widely held that propositions perform a plethora of theoretical roles. They are believed to be the semantic values of sentences in contexts, the objects of attitudes, the contents of illocutionary acts, the referents of ‘that’-clauses, and the primary bearers of truth. This assumption is often combined with the claim that propositions have their truth-values eternally. Following Kaplan’s and Lewis’s Operator Argument, I argue that the compositional semantic values of sentences do not correspond to eternal propositions. Therefore, we cannot hold on to both assumptions at the same time: either we regard the non-eternal entities that realize the compositional role of propositions as fulfilling the remaining theoretical roles, or we abandon the assumption that there is a unique realizer. The Operator Argument has recently come under attack, mainly for its intensional assumptions. However, rejecting these assumptions is not a sufficient defense of eternal propositions as compositional semantic values of sentences. Firstly, we can give a generalized version of the Operator Argument that seems independent of the contested assumptions. Secondly, the extensional alternative to the intensional framework does not allow us to retain eternal propositions as unique semantic values either.

Searching for Culpability in the Archives: Commonwealth Nuclear Test Veterans’ Claims for Compensation

In the late 1950s, Commonwealth servicemen participated in a series of British nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific. Today these veterans claim to suffer multiple health problems from radiation exposure, and seek compensation from the British and New Zealand governments. In resisting the State's control of evidential archival documents, the veterans devalue State documents and contest the truth of military records, instead elevating personal and collective memories based on notions of witnessing. Yet veterans do accept certain documents as legitimate bearers of historical truth if they emerge from the archives without the influence of powerful State agencies. From these “unfiltered” documents, test veterans create their own private archives which function as sites of memorialization, social legitimation and legal proof. Engaging with the work of Ann Stoler (Stoler, A. L. (2002), “Colonial archives and the arts of governance”, Archival Science, vol. 2, pp. 87–109; Stoler, A. L. (2009), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford), I argue that revealing State power requires understanding how groups outside the archives both subvert and mimic its documentary logic.

Le Langage de l'implicite dans l'œuvre de Crébillon fils (review)

Reviewed by: Le Langage de l'implicite dans l'œuvre de Crébillon fils Olivier Delers (bio) Émeline Mossé . Le Langage de l'implicite dans l'œuvre de Crébillon fils. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009. 475pp. €88. ISBN 978-2-7453-1867-1. In her book, Émeline Mossé argues that the figure of the implicit can help us delineate a unified "système crébillonien" and thus reconciles two antithetical aspects of Crébillon fils's work: the propensity of his characters to engage in libertine behaviour and the underlying moral tonality of his novels. In Mossé's study, the implicit is a versatile and ever-evolving notion that accounts for a wide range of textual phenomena: silences, detours, ellipses, vague and ethereal characterization, or the narrator's willingness to let the readers fill the margins of the text with their own thoughts and interpretations. The loose conceptualization of the book's major theme is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it allows Mossé to insist on the rich juxtaposition of social, stylistic, and generic questions in Crébillon fils's novels. She shows, for instance, that the necessity for noble characters to conceal the true nature of their feelings turns language into a "magical art" (161) that only some can decipher and explains the parodic nature of novels like Le Sopha or Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit. On the other hand, the implicit remains under-theorized throughout, in spite of references to Bernadette Fort's Le Langage de l'ambiguité dans l'oeuvre de Crébillon fils (1978) and a reliance on L'Implicite by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1986) to provide a theoretical framework. With each new chapter, the implicit gains new meanings and variations as it is used to explain different [End Page 148] characteristics of Crébillon fils's novels. In the end, it becomes equated with the practice of literary interpretation itself, revealing the internal coherence behind Crébillon fils's body of work and thus defining an elusive "poétique crébillonienne." This is perhaps most visible when Mossé links the implicit to what she calls Crébillon fils's "laboratory of generic research" (169). The implicit is both a way of analyzing the different novelistic forms employed by the author but also a specific mode—parody—meant to diffuse possible criticism of his generic experimentations. Still, Mossé manages to claim for the oft-forgotten Crébillon fils a central and unique place in the development of eighteenth-century French fiction: the length of his career (from Le Sylphe in 1730 to Lettres Athéniennes in 1771) and the variety of novels he published show the extent to which he tried to tame a still anarchical genre and to propose a comprehensive theory of the novel. Mossé convincingly argues that metatextuality lies at the heart of Crébillon fils's prose fiction by showing how theoretical reflections parallel the main narrative lines and create a dialogue with the text as it unfolds. The Crébillonian narrator is looking for allies, that is, for an informed readership that can decode his implicit references and playful, ironic comments and laugh with him, even when the riddles he poses are hard to decipher. In doing so, the narrator is asking the reader to become aware of the act of reading itself: neither the characters nor the narrator are the sole bearer of truth, and readers should be able to extract their own moral conclusions from the text. It is not a surprise, then, that Crébillon fils's novels should read as a never-ending language game with wide-ranging implications for characterization, style, and the production of textual meaning. The implicit explains the author's tendency to stage mysterious and secretive characters and to let readers piece together coherent portraits from scattered elements in the narration. In fact, Crébillon fils rarely focuses on the physical quality of his characters, as if they were solely constituted by language and by the verbal exchanges they have with one another. Generic pronouns are often used, indicating that language itself can not solve the communication breakdown that characterizes polite society in the...

The Story About Propositions

Talking even about rather ordinary circumstances appears to implicate directly certain metaphysically loaded identifications. For example, if Dr. Gustav Lauben is a doctor then it seems to follow that he has the property of being a doctor; just as if he is injured, he has the property (or the characteristic) of being injured. Moreover, if Frege should come to believe that the good doctor is injured then there is something that he believes—to wit, something apparently denoted by the expression ‘that the good doctor is injured’, something philosophers standardly call a proposition. And, of course, if the good doctor is injured and Frege believes that he is, then what Frege believes—the proposition that the good doctor is injured—is true, in which case, it seems, the proposition has the property of truth. All of this is, as we said, routine, and it is the job of the metaphysician (especially the metaphysician of meaning) to explain all of this (or to explain it away). While we take the issues just canvassed all to belong to the same family, our focus in this paper will be on propositions. The notion of a proposition plays a central role in philosophical theorizing about language and the mind. This is no wonder, since it appears to provide considerable theoretical advantage in the form of a single kind of entity playing a wide range of roles. Propositions are held to be the sharable objects of belief and other intentional attitudes, the contents of these thought-states and of assertions and other speech acts, the common meanings of utterances from different languages, and the fundamental bearers of truth, necessity, aprioricity, and other

The Minimalist Theory of Truth: Challenges and Concerns

AbstractMinimalism is currently the received deflationary theory of truth. On minimalism, truth is a transparent concept and a deflated property of truth bearers. In this paper, I situate minimalism within current deflationary debate about truth by contrasting it with its main alternative – the redundancy theory of truth (according to which truth is a transparent concept but not a property). I also outline three of the primary challenges facing minimalism, its formulation, explanatory adequacy and stability, and draw some lessons for the soundness of its conception of truth.

Partnership in Truth-Making

After arguing that truth-making is properly construed as a partnership between truth bearers and truth-makers, I focus on two prominent arguments against the category of fact as one of the key relata in the truth-making relation. After rejecting those arguments, I go on to examine a more difficult issue, one that might force us to appreciate more fully the robust role that thought has in “creating” truth.

Visual Representations in Science

This paper evaluates a general argument for the conclusion that visual representations in science must play the role of truth bearers if they are to figure as legitimate contributors to scientific arguments and explanations. The argument is found to be unsound. An alternative approach to assessing the role of visual representations in science is exemplified by an examination of the role of structural formulas in organic chemistry. Structural formulas are found not to play the role of truth bearers; nonetheless, they contribute to the arguments and explanations of organic chemistry. An early success of conformational analysis is presented in order to illustrate the role of structural formulas in the discourse of organic chemistry.

Framing the Body: Imperialism and Visual Discourse in María Cristina Mena's Short Fiction

Framing the Body:Imperialism and Visual Discourse in María Cristina Mena's Short Fiction Margaret A. Toth In 1913, Century magazine commissioned Mexican American writer María Cristina Mena, only twenty years old and unknown at the time, to write a series of stories about life in Mexico. Over the course of the next few years, these stories were published in Century, while several others appeared in journals like American Magazine. When Mena's final short story was printed in Household Magazine in 1931, the periodical billed her as "the foremost interpreter of Mexican life" (Mena, The Collected Stories 137).1 Largely forgotten today, Mena carved a distinct, if modest, space for herself on the early-twentieth-century US cultural landscape. She cultivated professional friendships with such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, published numerous short stories in well-known periodicals (most appearing between 1913 and 1916), and, later in life, authored several children's books.2 Recently, critics have revisited Mena's stories, interrogating, among other things, the author's tricksteresque discourse, gender politics, and role as cultural interpreter.3 In this essay, I adopt a new interpretive lens through which to read Mena's work, as I situate her short fiction within a framework attentive to the colonialist dynamics at work in early-twentieth-century US-Mexico relations. Broadly speaking, Mena's stories provide a sustained, if at times veiled, commentary on the imperialist interests of the United States in Mexico. More specifically, they think through how this particular imperialist drama plays itself out in and on subaltern bodies. By engaging both theoretical questions about imperialist visual production and pragmatic ones about living within the shadow of US colonialism, Mena asks us to see how bodies of people of color are shaped not only figuratively, within the imperialist imaginary, but also literally, by the daily realities of imperialism.4 To argue these claims, I turn first to stories in which Mena grapples with [End Page 92] broad, conceptual questions about imperialist visual practices.5 In the opening section of this essay, I illustrate that Mena's stories, themselves steeped in ocular language, respond in complex ways to imperialist art's construction of the other. In their discussion of colonialist photography, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson maintain that the genre relies on "[t]he colonial constructions of racial, cultural, and geographic difference" (2). This emphasis on and often production of difference in colonialist photography, and in imperialist visual texts more generally, abets imperialist political projects, fueled as they are by a power distribution that requires maintaining a distance between colonizer and colonized. Imperialist images of human subjects, in particular, turn upon a self/other dichotomy, with the separating bar representing an insurmountable difference: On the one side, we have the normative white, western, imperialist subject; on the other, the colonized, exoticized, and racialized other, emptied of subjectivity. Images grounded in this ideology were popular in early-twentieth-century US publications, including Century. Yet Mena's stories, published alongside exoticizing pieces like the photo-essay "Unfamiliar Mexico," which I will discuss below, challenge images that position Mexicans' bodies as ineradicably other. In the first part of this article, I examine two stories, "The Vine-Leaf" and "The Gold Vanity Set," in order to show how Mena undermines such imperialist practices. In these stories, Mena implicitly destabilizes the status of the image as bearer of truth. That is, she exposes images—including the photograph, which tends to carry an objective truth value—as manipulable, biased, and, therefore, suspect. Yet while Mena debunks exoticizing myths—those that would emphasize the difference of Mexicans, representing them, whether textually or visually, as other—she is more overtly concerned with the threat of sameness inherent in the tangible processes of imperialism and globalization. The characters in her stories consistently confront the infiltration of US values and market goods—including the imported, generic white Anglo body itself—into their daily lives, and this confrontation sets in motion a renegotiation of identity, both psychological and corporeal. Therefore, in the second half of this essay, I will shift gears, turning to stories in which Mena articulates this danger of sameness. This issue...

ANSELMO DE CANTUÁRIA SOBRE A VERDADE DO PENSAMENTO

Este artigo desenvolve a hipótese de que a doutrina anselmiana da verdade é esclarecedora de modo decisivo para bem compreender o seu argumento a favor da existência de Deus no Proslogion. Partindo de uma interpretação básica do unum argumentum, e após expor de forma resumida os principais aspectos do diálogo De veritate, procura-se investigar em especial a “verdade do pensamento”. Ao final, a análise e a comparação dos sentidos de cogitare e de cogitatio, no Proslogion e na obra De veritate, mostram ser úteis tanto para elucidar elementos centrais do argumento quanto para melhor entender o que Anselmo, no De veritate, efetivamente quis dizer ao tematizar a cogitatio como um tipo de portador de verdade.

“But I Thought. …” An Examination of Assumptions in The Mentoring Relationship

Mike, a young new assistant school principal, approached veteran principal, Kenyon, about being his mentor. Kenyon replied, don't know how much I can help you, but I'll tell you everything I know. The mentoring relationship began, but Mike soon lost interest in meeting with Kenyon. When asked why he had discontinued his mentoring sessions, he replied, Dr. Kenyon was very willing to meet with me, and he had some great stories about his experiences, but I thought I would get more out of our sessions that would actually help me achieve my professional goals, and develop the skills and expertise I needed in order to be successful in my new position. Kenyon acted on his assumption that mentoring meant telling. He did not understand that being an effective mentor involves facilitating the learning of the mentee, rather than simply transferring knowledge. Kenyon's assumption led him to behave as a lecturer in the mentoring sessions. The mismatch of the unspoken assumptions between Mike and Kenyon resulted in a less than satisfactory mentoring relationship for Mike. What is an Assumption? When mentors and mentees enter a mentoring relationship, they bring their assumptions with them. An assumption is a belief one possesses that is thought to be tree and from which a conclusion can be drawn (Collins Essential English Dictionary, 2006). It can also be a belief that someone should behave in a particular way. Often unspoken, these assumptions are powerful predictors of success or subtle forces contributing to failure in the mentoring process. Therefore, it is important to examine the role of assumptions in adult learning relationships. Assumptions held by a mentor and mentee are influenced by many factors. Prior life experiences, fears, cultural interpretations, myths, and core values are wrapped up in the personal packages adults bring into the mentoring relationship. We explore each of these below. Prior Experiences Prior experiences are a prime source of assumptions. Basing assumptions on prior experiences results in the tendency to believe that past experiences apply to all similar future situations. Even when individuals know facts to be different, they may disregard that knowledge and continue to assume that prior experiences are timeless truth bearers. The following example illustrates how past experiences influence current assumptions. Jen signed on to be a volunteer mentor in an after-school program at an elementary school in a high poverty area of her city, but she had some misgivings. When asked about those hesitations, it became clear that her prior experiences were the source of some assumptions she was making about the situation. She grew up in a white, upper middle class family, attended a private school that was devoid of diversity, went to a prestigious college, joined a sorority, and was academically successful. She said, am afraid if I meet the parents of these children, they are going to think oh, here's a little rich white do-gooder who will come tutor my child for a while, then leave and go back to her snobby suburb. Her personal lack of contact with children living in poverty caused her to assume that she might not be successful as a mentor or she might become too emotionally overwhelmed by the children's different life circumstances. Jen overcame her initial uncertainty and full) engaged in weekly mentoring at the school. After her first semester, Jen shared that the mentoring experience had been valuable for her, despite the fact that she thought at first it might be a disaster. Past experiences with mentoring also influence future assumptions about mentoring. It is likely that a mentee will base future assumptions about all mentors on interactions with a first mentor. If the experience with the mentor has been positive, the mentee may assume that the next relationship will also be positive. Conversely, if a mentor has had a difficult mentee once, the mentor might bring an assumption to each new mentoring relationship that not all mentees are serious about their personal growth and learning. …

Deflationism and the primary truth bearer

The paper discusses what kind of truth bearer, or truth-ascription, a deflationist should take as primary. I first present number of arguments against a sententialist view. I then present a deflationary theory which takes propositions as primary, and try to show that it deals neatly with a wide range of linguistic data. Next, I consider both the view that there is no primary truth bearer, and the most common account of sentence truth given by deflationists who take propositions as primary, and argue that they both attribute an implausible type of ambiguity to “true”. This can be avoided, however, if truth-ascriptions to sentences are taken as a certain form of pragmatic ellipses. I end by showing how this hypothesis accommodates a number of intuitions involving truth-ascriptions to sentences.

Validity Now and Then

It is often said that an argument is valid if and only if it is impossible for its premises to be jointly true and its conclusion false. Usually there is little harm in saying this but it places the concept of truth at the very heart of logic and, given how complex and obscure that concept is, one might wonder if trouble arises from this.It does - in at least two contexts. One of these was explored in the first half of the fourteenth century by Jean Buridan and by the mysterious figure known as the Pseudo-Scotus of the Questions on the Prior Analytics printed in the edition of Scotus's works edited by Luke Wadding. Buridan thought that the bearers of truth were particular sentence-tokens; he thought of ttuth as a property of those tokens and he thought that nothing had properties unless it existed.

In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance,” and Public History

In the last few decades the nature of history making, especially that regarding the contemporary era, has been transformed, changing not only the pasts that are being related but the way in which many people relate to those pasts. The shift in the nature of historical knowledge and historical sensibility owes much to both popular and academic forms of history; indeed, it is largely the outcome of a convergence of the interests and approaches of elite history and culture with those of popular history and culture. Generally speaking, history making has been democratized, but more particularly there has been an unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testimony. People who have experienced an event and bear witness to it have come to be regarded as the most authentic bearers of truth about the past, indeed as the embodiment of history, and their accounts are increasingly received by many as a substitute for the history of the professional historian who seeks to record and explain a past event. This phenomenon owes much to the fact that we live in a global world in which an ideal of human rights has triumphed, a politics of recognition calling for acknowledgment of the collective experience and identity of minority groups has flourished, new institutions and technologies providing a sense of immediacy have expanded, and a culture of intimacy has become dominant in public institutions, not least in the media. Together, these changes have placed the personal at the center of public culture and put emotion on display; the