In this paper I present a historiography of the recent emergence of philosophy of chemistry. Special attention is given to the interest in this domain in Eastern Europe before the collapse of the USSR. It is shown that the initial neglect of the philosophy of chemistry is due to the unanimous view in philosophy and philosophy of science that only physics is a proper science (to put in Kant's words). More recently, due to the common though incorrect assumption that chemistry can in principle be reduced to physics, the neglect continued, even when interest in sciences such as biology and psychology entered more strongly in philosophy of science. It is concluded that chemistry is an autonomous science and is perhaps a more ‘typical’ science than physics.

On the neglect of the philosophy of chemistry

In this paper I argue for the thesis that Alfred Tarski’s original defmition of truth, together with its later elaboration in model theory, is an explicate of the classical correspondence theory of truth. In defending Tarski against some of his critics (see also Niiniluoto, 1994), I wish to show how this account of truth can be formulated, understood, and further developed in a philosophically satisfactory way. My overall aim is to employ the non-epistemic correspondence account of truth as a basis of the concept of truthlikeness (verisimilitude), which in turn is an indispensable ingredient of the philosophical programme of critical scientific realism (see Niiniluoto, 1984, 1987, forthcoming).

Tarskian Truth as Correspondence — Replies to Some Objections

In this paper, I speak in favor of hierarchies in the theory of truth. I argue that hierarchies are more well-motivated and can provide better and more workable theories than is often assumed. Along the way, I sketch the sort of hierarchy I believe is plausible and defensible. My defense of hierarchies assumes an ‘inflationary’ view of truth that sees truth as a substantial semantic concept. I argue that if one adopts this view of truth, hierarchies arise naturally. I also show that this approach to truth makes it a very complex concept. I argue that this complexity helps motivate hierarchies. Complexity and hierarchy go together, if you adopt the right view of truth.

Complexity and Hierarchy in Truth Predicates

A theory of truth is supposed to tell us what it is for something to be true or false. But what kind of “something” is at issue here? What are the bearers of truth and falsehood? Philosophical discussions of truth tend to revolve around four broad categories of truth bearers: sentences (utterances), statements (assertions), beliefs (judgments, thoughts), and propositions. The significant differences among these four categories are responsible for a considerable amount of complexity in the theory of truth. It seems unlikely that a single feature could account for ‘x is true’ with ‘x’ ranging over truth bearers of arbitrary type. Instead, a general theory of truth will have to take the form of a disjunction: x is true just in case x is either a true sentence or a true statement or a true belief or a true proposition. Here the general notion of truth is partitioned into four subnotions, sentence-truth, statement-truth, belief-truth, and proposition-truth, each of which will have to be given its own account. Still, the over-all theory will aim to show that the general notion of truth is not just a bare disjunction; it will aim to show that the subnotions are all tied (each in its own manner) to a single explanatory ground. One way to achieve this is by selecting a category of basic truth bearers and taking the associated subnotion of truth as primary, while treating the others as derived. The primary notion has to be explained in terms of some feature that does not itself contain any notion of truth. The derived notions have to be explained in terms of the primary notion together with certain relations that hold between the basic truth bearers, on the one hand, and the non-basic truth bearers on the other. A theory with this structure will give at least some unity to the general notion of truth.

Theories of Truth

Recent philosophy of language has been profoundly impacted by the idea that mainstream, model-theoretic semantics is somehow incompatible with deflationary accounts of truth and reference. The present article systematizes the case for incompatibilism, debunks circularity and “modal confusion” arguments familiar in the literature, and reconstructs the popular thought that truth-conditional semantics somehow “presupposes” a correspondence theory of truth as an inference to the best explanation. The case for compatibilism is closed by showing that this IBE argument fails to rule out two kinds of deflationism: the position Field famously accused Tarski of having; and a less familiar version of the view that defines reference in terms of a deflated notion of truth. Finally, the distinction between unifying and constitutive explanation is used to forestall the response that correspondence theory is literally part of mainstream semantics.

Peter Weatherall

Papers

Tarski's theory of truth and field's solution to the problem of intentionality