On the Functionalization of Pluralist Approaches to Truth

Traditional inflationary approaches that specify the nature of truth are attractive in certain ways; yet, while many of these theories successfully explain why propositions in certain domains of discourse are true, they fail to adequately specify the nature of truth because they run up against counterexamples when attempting to generalize across all domains. One popular consequence is skepticism about the efficaciousness of inflationary approaches altogether. Yet, by recognizing that the failure to explain the truth of disparate propositions often stems from inflationary approaches’ allegiance to alethic monism, pluralist approaches are able to avoid this explanatory inadequacy and the resulting skepticism, though at the cost of inviting other conceptual difficulties. A novel approach, alethic functionalism, attempts to circumvent the problems faced by pluralist approaches while preserving their main insights. Unfortunately, it too generates additional problems – namely, with its suspect appropriation of the multiple realizability paradigm and its platitude-based strategy – that need to be dissolved before it can constitute an adequate inflationary approach to the nature of truth. 1. THE INADEQUACY OF TRADITIONAL INFLATIONARY APPROACHES 1.1. The Problem of the Common Denominator1 Despite radical differences in content – ranging from mathematics to Greek mythology, neuropsychopharmacology to applied ethics, etc. – we are prone to think that propositions about the way the world is are correct in virtue of being true, in virtue of having some property picked out by our ordinary concept of truth.2,3 Consider a collection of truth-apt propositions expressing a broad range of thoughts: