For the last century, the dominant philosophical approach in the Anglophone world to the traditional question “What is truth?” has been the Deflationist answer: truth has no substantive nature beyond what is given by disquotational principles. This dissertation clears the way for a non-Deflationist account of truth by focusing on questions that seem to me more tractable: questions about truth-bearers. I motivate and defend the view I call Particularism, according to which the fundamental truth-bearers are concrete particular representations—paradigmatically, mental states like token beliefs. The dissertation is composed of relatively independent papers that develop the Particularist view and draw out its implications for debates in logic, semantics, and theories of representational content.
In Chapter 1, I present the strongest consideration in favor of Particularism: that it offers an attractive solution to the semantic paradoxes. For the Particularist, truth is properly predicated of sentence tokens, and semantic pathology arises as an illegitimate dependency structure among tokens, rather than simply being a function of an interpretation associated with a sentence type. Particularism offers a straightforward account what has been called “The Chrysippus Intuition”—the fact that it is apparently sensible to judge Liar-paradoxical objects to be not true—it is compatible with classical logic, and it preserves a conception of truth as a unified property. Crucially, unlike other broadly “Contextualist” responses to the Liar, I argue that Particularism is not threatened by Revenge Paradoxes.
In Chapter 2, I address what I take to be the deepest objection to Particularism: the view apparently conflicts with other platitudes that are part of our common sense understanding of truth. For instance, it is plausible that there are truths about the Milky Way that have and never will never be thought or stated by anyone. Whatever these truths are, it looks like they cannot be concrete particular representations. I argue that the tension is merely apparent: in addition to particular representations, we derivatively judge representational kinds to be true or false, whether they have been instantiated or not. Following Hanks, I suggest that a representational kind is true if and only if its instantiations would be true if it were instantiated, and I defend this analysis against putative counterexamples.
In Chapter 3, I offer reasons for skepticism regarding Particularism’s main rival—the view that the fundamental truth-bearers are not concrete representations but, rather, the propositional content expressed by those representations. The traditional view of propositional content presupposes that there is a privileged classification of token representations that partitions them with respect to sameness of content. I argue that there is no such thing: we utilize multiple distinct standards of sameness of content, none of which is privileged. My argument is based on the existence of semantic underdetermination. Plausibly, we use expressions (e.g. “sandwich”) that do not have determinate extensions and that are open to precisification in multiple directions. This gives rise to indefinitely many possible cases of content fission, where a semantically underdetermined token is identified as having the same content as two tokens that are precisified in opposite ways. Content fission requires recognizing a huge variety of legitimate notions of sameness of content. This implies a pluralism about “propositional contents” that sits uneasily with the suggestion that propositional contents are the fundamental truth-bearers.
