A pluralist theory of truth is a
theory of truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs ...
which posits that there may be more than one
property
Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, r ...
that makes a
proposition
In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
true.
Overview
Most traditional theories of
truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...
are
monist: that is, they hold that there is one and only property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth deny this assumption. According to pluralism, ethical propositions might be true by more than one property, for example by virtue of coherence; propositions about the physical world might also be true by corresponding to the objects and properties they are about. Pluralism, in short, holds out the prospect that propositions might be "true in more than one way".
Crispin Wright
Crispin James Garth Wright (; born 21 December 1942) is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean (neo-logicist) philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skep ...
is the most well-known advocate of pluralism about truth. In his 1992 book ''Truth and Objectivity'', Wright argued that any
predicate
Predicate or predication may refer to:
* Predicate (grammar), in linguistics
* Predication (philosophy)
* several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic:
**Predicate (mathematical logic)
**Propositional function
**Finitary relation, o ...
which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a
truth predicate
In formal theories of truth, a truth predicate is a fundamental concept based on the sentences of a formal language as interpreted logically. That is, it formalizes the concept that is normally expressed by saying that a sentence, statement or idea ...
. In some discourses, Wright argued, the role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of
superassertibility.
Michael Lynch (philosopher)
Michael Patrick Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also the director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. As director of the Humanities Institute, he has headed a Templeton-funded project ...
has recently advocated a different type of pluralism about truth. In a series of articles and in his 2009 book ''Truth as One and Many'' Lynch argues that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence.
See also
*
Criteria of truth
In epistemology, criteria of truth (or tests of truth) are standards and rules used to judge the accuracy of statements and claims. They are tools of verification, and as in the problem of the criterion, the reliability of these tools is disputed ...
*
Degrees of truth
In classical logic, propositions are typically unambiguously considered as being true or false. For instance, the proposition ''one is both equal and not equal to itself'' is regarded as simply false, being contrary to the Law of Noncontradiction; ...
References
External links
*
Theories of truth
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