TRUTH AND FUNDAMENTALITY: ON MERRICKS'S TRUTH AND ONTOLOGY

Truth and Fundamentality: on Merricks’s Truth and Ontology

Truth and Ontology is a lively book, brimming with arguments, and drawing the reader towards the radical conclusion that what is true does not depend on what there is. If there is a central line of argument, it is that the best account of truthmaking requires truths to be about their truthmakers, but negative existentials, modals, and claims about the past and future are not about what is, but ...

Trenton Merricks’ Truth and Ontology

One of the many remarkable things about Trenton Merricks’ Truth and Ontology is the incredibly wide range of issues discussed therein. I not only enjoyed (and profited from) thinking through the plentitude of always interesting and frequently convincing arguments made throughout the book, but I also discovered (in Fall 2009) that it’s an excellent book to assign for a high-powered class on cont...

Ramsey on Truth and Truth on Ramsey

It is widely held, to the point of being the received interpretation, that Frank Ramsey was the first to defend the so-called Redundancy Theory of Truth in his landmark article ‘Facts and Propositions’ (hereafter ‘FP’) of 1927. For instance, A.J. Ayer cited this article in the context of arguing that saying that p is true is simply a way of asserting p and that truth is not a real quality or re...

Truth, Scientific Understanding and Haugeland’s Existential Ontology

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

This discussion aims to provide the occasional medical expert witness with background knowledge of the adversarial court system and the role of the medical expert witness within it. The parallel evolution of the adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems has been more out of tradition rather than any systematic review of the effectiveness of one system or the other. Both legal systems have the...