Inferentialism and Grounded Truth

GALLOVICH, CAMILA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 17th CLMPST: Science and Values in an Uncertain World; 2023

UNESCO and IUHPST

The thought that our attributions of truth and falsity must be grounded in non-semantic facts constitutes an important semantic intuition. According to Yablo in "Grounding, Dependence, and Paradox", this intuition is two-sided. Its first aspect---inheritance---draws on the way in which a complex statement inherits its meaning from certain simpler statements. Its second aspect---dependence---shows the way in which the meaning of a complex statement depends on simpler statements. Paradigmatically, the fixed-point construction given by Kripke in his "Outline of a Theory of Truth" provides an inheritance-style characterization of grounding, whereas the dependence-based construction introduced by Yablo (1982) provides a dependence-style characterization of it. Yablo´s article states a further result: "any collection with an inheritance-style characterization admits a canonically related dependence-style characterization" (Id. p.119). That is to say that the characterizations of the notion of grounding provided by these approaches are coextensive. The guiding question of this talk is if it is possible to maintain Yablo´s result for languages enriched by means of additional semantic predicates other than Tr(x). The talk will run as follows. First, I will show how to set up a dependence-based construction for a language extended with a paradoxicality predicate, Par(x). Then, I will state that the resulting dependence-style characterization of truth and paradoxicality is coextensive with the inheritance-style characterization recently provided by Rosenblatt (2021) and by Rosenblatt and Gallovich (2022) in the context of the fixed-point conception. Hopefully, this will settle the question affirmatively.References:- Kripke, S. (1975). "Outline of a theory of truth". Journal of Philosophy, 72(19): 690–71.- Rosenblatt, L. (2021). "Paradoxicality Without Paradox". Erkenntnis, forthcoming.- Rosenblatt, L. and Gallovich, C. (2022) "Paradoxicality in Kripke´s theory of truth". Synthese, 200(71).- Yablo, S. (1982). "Grounding, Dependence, and Paradox". Journal of Philosophical Logic, 11(1): 117-137.