Workshop on Truth, Definability and Quantification into Sentence Position

Can truth be defined? Frege argued that it couldn't. Ramsey argued that defining it would be easy if only we had an analysis of judgement. Today Horwich claims that truth cannot be defined explicitly because doing so would require quantification into sentence position and such quantification is not coherent. Instead he proposes a “minimal theory” of truth, which comprises all the unproblematic instances of the equivalence schema. Künne, by contrast, argues that quantification into sentence position is coherent and may actually be part of some natural languages. Künne uses such quantification to define truth explicitly: 

∀x (x is true iff ∃p ((x is the proposition that p) & p)). Or in English: a representation (belief, assertion etc) is true just if things are as it represents them as being. Künne claims also to find this definition in Frank Ramsey’s posthumous work, which, as an exegetical claim, is not uncontroversial.

Is truth definable? Is propositional quantification coherent? Do natural languages involve propositional quantification, and in what sense? What do the answers to these questions mean for philosophical attempts to define or explain truth? Is truth redundant if explicitly definable? Not redundant if not explicitly definable?

This workshop is supported by the FWF Cluster of Excellence project "Knowledge in Crisis", the FWF project "Truth is Grounded in Facts" and the University of Vienna.

Programme

27 September 2024
Room 3B, NIG third floor

10:00 – 11:30 Wolfgang Künne 
Spelling Out a Truism about Truth 

chair: Max Kölbel

11:45 – 13:00 Poppy Mankowitz 
Higher-Order Quantification in Natural Language

chair: Max Kölbel

Lunch Break

14:45 – 16:00 Torsten Odland 
Does Sentential Quantification Tell Us What Truth Is?

chair: Julio de Rizzo

16:15 – 17:30 Peter Fritz (talk cancelled)
Plural Propositional Quantification and Truth 

chair: Julio de Rizzo

28 September 2024
Room 3B, NIG third floor

09:00 – 10:15 Cheryl Misak
Ramsey on the Indefinability of Truth

chair: Matt Dougherty

10:30 – 11:45 Arvid Båve 
Deflationism and propositional quantification

chair: Matt Dougherty

12:00 – 13:15 James Woodbridge & Bradley Armour-Garb 
Sentential-Variable Deflationism and Adverbial Quantification

chair: Benjamin Schnieder

Lunch break

15:15 – 16:30 Paul Horwich
Deflationary Accounts of Truth

chair: Benjamin Schnieder