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 Eleven of the essays are previously unpublished or substantially revised.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. Contributors include Linda Martín Alcoff, William P. Alston, J. L. Austin, Brand Blanshard, Marian David, Donald Davidson, Michael Devitt, Michael Dummett, Hartry Field, Michel Foucault, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta, Martin Heidegger, Terence Horgan, Jennifer Hornsby, Paul Horwich, William James, Michael P. Lynch, Charles Sanders Pierce, Hilary Putnam, W. V. O. Quine, F. P. Ramsey, Richard Rorty, Bertrand Russell, Scott Soames, Ernest Sosa, P. F. Strawson, Alfred Tarski, Ralph C. Walker, Crispin Wright. ~ Product Description

Table of Contents

• • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: The Mystery of Truth    1
• I    Realism and the Correspondence Theory    7
  • 1    Truth and Falsehood    17
  • 2    Truth    25
  • 3    A Realist Conception of Truth    41
  • 4    Contextual Semantics and Metaphysical Realism: Truth as Indirect Correspondence    67
• II    Coherence Theories    97
  • 5    Coherence as the Nature of Truth    103
  • 6    The Coherence Theory    123
  • 7    The Case for Coherence    159
• III    Pragmatism and Verificatonism    183
  • 8    How to Make Our Ideas Clear    193
  • 9    Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth    211
  • 10    Truth    229
  • 11    Two Philosophical Perspectives    251
  • 12    Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright    259
• IV    Phenomenological and Postmodernist Conceptions    287
  • 13    On the Essence of Truth    295
  • 14    Truth and Power    317
• V    Tarski’s Theory and Its Importance    321
  • 15    The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics    331
  • 16    Tarski’s Theory of Truth    365
  • 17    What Is a Theory of Truth?    397
• VI    Deflationary Views and Their Critics    419
  • 18    The Nature of Truth    433
  • 19    Truth    447
  • 20    Truth    473
  • 21    Correspondence Truth, Disquotational Truth, and Deflationism    483
  • 22    The Prosentential Theory: Further Reflections on Locating Our Interest in Truth    505
  • 23    A Critique of Deflationism    527
  • 24    A Defense of Minimalism    559
  • 25    The Metaphysics of Truth    579
• VII    Primitivism, Identity Theory, and Alethic Pluralism    613
  • 26    The Folly of Trying to Define Truth    623
  • 27    Epistemology and Primitive Truth    641
  • 28    Truth: The Identity Theory    663
  • 29    Truth as Identity and Truth as Correspondence    683
  • 30    The Face of Cognition    705
  • 31    A Functionalist Theory of Truth    723
  • 32    Minimalism, Deflationism, Pragmatism, Pluralism    751
  • Contributors    789
  • Index    793