Truth-making and Performativity

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (University of Oulu)

Truth is an enigmatic concept. Despite this, it holds a special place in our culture. The idea of truth-making theories is a relatively recent attempt to explicate, why our claims and other potential truth-bearers are true. It is that something independent of our theories and us makes them true. In this lecture, I assess the idea of truth-making and use it to express, why truth-making and truth more generally is problematic in historiography. Regarding truth, my position had shifted towards deflationary theories of truth. A still better way to express this is to say that the role of truth-talk is to provide epistemic authority to what is claimed. The focus shifts therefore on the mechanisms that make our claims authoritative.