Truth and Belief: Case Studies in Conceptual Engineering

Although the concepts of truth and belief are fundamental in philosophy, in recent years they have come under attack from various quarters. I argue that philosophers have been too quick to find these concepts problematic and in need of being replaced. For example, the Liar Paradox is sometimes taken to show that the concept of truth is inconsistent, and thus unsuitable for rigorous inquiry. But I develop a solution that gives a consistent account of this concept, allowing us to retain it in spite of the paradox. I argue that when the word ‘true’ occurs in such a sentence, it undergoes a one-off aberration in its reference, failing to refer to truth. Thus, Liar sentences and their kin fail to say what they pre-theoretically appear to say. However, there is no need to conclude that these sentences are meaningless; rather, I illustrate how these sentences come very close to saying what they appear to say, in spite of the aberrations they witness. As with the concept of truth, intentional concepts like those of belief, meaning, and reference have been subject to skepticism and attempts at excision. I show that the content of the claim that the use of intentional concepts can be eliminated from scientific explanations depends on broader issues about how one conceives of explanations. Then I argue that intentional concepts, in particular the concept of belief, play an ineliminable role in the explanation of behavior: when we learn what someone believes, we get some information about how she would react to a variety of possible scenarios. This information that is useful in everyday life, and would be important in a science whose aim was to improve on our folk-psychological explanations. But so far, explanations that avoid talk of beliefs have failed to replicate this distinctive kind of informativeness. Thus, we have reason to think that belief-attributions are indispensable when it comes to explaining people’s behaviors, and so we have reason to retain the notion of belief

Replacing truth

Kevin Scharp proposes an original account of the nature and logic of truth, on which truth is an inconsistent concept that should be replaced for certain theoretical purposes. He argues that truth is best understood as an inconsistent concept; develops an axiomatic theory of truth; and offers a new kind of possible-worlds semantics for this theory

Truth and Aletheic Paradox

My objective is to provide a theory of truth that is both independently motivated and compatible with the requirement that semantic theories for truth should not demand a substantive distinction between the languages in which they are formulated and those to which they apply. I argue that if a semantic theory for truth does not satisfy this requirement, then it is unacceptable. The central claim of the theory I develop is that truth is an inconsistent concept: the rules for the proper use of truth are incompatible in the sense that they dictate that truth both applies and fails to apply to certain sentences (e.g., those that give rise to the liar and related paradoxes). The most significant challenge for a proponent of an inconsistency theory of truth is producing a plausible theory of inconsistent concepts. Accordingly, I first construct a theory of inconsistent concepts, and then I apply it to truth. On the account I provide, inconsistent concepts are confused concepts. A concept is confused if, in employing it, one is committed to applying it to two or more distinct types of entities without properly distinguishing between them; that is, an employer of a confused concept thinks that two or more distinct entities are identical. I propose a semantic theory for predicates that express confused concepts, and a new many-valued relevance logic on which the semantic theory depends. This semantic theory serves as the basis for my theory of inconsistent concepts. Given this account of inconsistent concepts and my claim that truth is inconsistent, I am committed to the view that truth is confused. I use the semantic theory for confused predicates as a semantic theory for truth. On the account I advance, a proper theory of truth requires a distinction between several different types of truth predicates. I propose an account of each truth predicate, and I advocate using them as consistent replacements for the concept of truth. The result is a team of concepts that does the work of the inconsistent concept of truth without giving rise to paradoxes

The Aesthetics of Paradoxism (Second Edition)

In the history of thought and creation, the decisive events, the great and significant moments, the strongly affirmative stages - then the imposition of the optimizing novelties - have depended on the name and prestige of a personality. Referring to those, we personalize further on. The examples are extremely numerous, even in our nearest past. When we mention a creation - in the largest sense of the term - with the name of the personality who illustrates it most extensively at a given time, we state precisely the specific importance of it; we give it, with other words, the identity to which we can refer continuously with full knowledge and without causing any confusion among the receivers. The facts are called with the name of the man who produced them, and in this way we can compose a parallel onomastic dictionary, in which the work is included in the person’s space, keeping its content. The consecrated proper names evolve through quickly imposed habits, a large range of increments that announce the essential outline of their peak production. No space for ambiguity remains when we address to readers or listeners who are somewhat acquainted with the subject and we use such terms as Aristotelianism, Platonism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, Proustianism, Eminescianism, Barbianism, etc. We have even the advantage of a centered communication when we suggest with a sole notion the work as well as its dominant features, linked with the renown of the concerned author. There is no doubt that this way of denomination, when practiced a long time, has become a reflex and now is part of the habits of a correct expression. And neither the semantic objectification of works by a person nor the inherent axiological sanction disturb anybody. Personification being inevitable in creation, the history of art can be superposed to the history of the authors or, at, least gets tangled very strongly with them. It is precisely the case with the recent literary movement of Paradoxism, conceived in Romania and affirmed in the United States, which is closely bound to the temperament, inclination, taste and creative disposition of its initiator and organizer, the poet-mathematician Florentin Smarandache (paradoxism = smarandachism, in an “internal” and already notorious interpretation)

Paul Ricoeur\u27s Hermeneutics of the Self: Living in the Truth

This dissertation focuses on the relationship of selfhood and ethics from the competing philosophical frameworks developed by Paul Ricoeur and Alain Badiou. Seeking “nothing short of a full victory” on the “battlefield” of history, Badiou argues that Ricoeur deceives his readers by hiding the relationship of the self to history. The purpose of this deception is to defend a definition of history that allows for a Providential sense of history whereby the past could be actively forgotten whereby crimes could be forgiven. In this work I examine Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self as developed in Oneself as Another (Soi-même comme un autre, 1990) as well as its relationship to his positions regarding memory, history, forgetting, and forgiveness developed in Memory, History, Forgetting (La Mémoir, l’histoir, l’oubi, 2002). Thematically, I focus on the experience of forgiveness for three reasons. First, it is a non-physical experience within a reflective consciousness that connects to our experience of freedom. Secondly, forgiveness is a sufficiently rich experience of ethical evil. Third, forgiveness has a temporal dimension (like that of promising) that informs our understanding of memory as well as human self-identity. Ricoeur’s conceptions of selfhood, history, evil, ethics, and truth will be examined from the critical perspective offered by Badiou. Over the course of this dissertation I demonstrate that Ricoeur provides conceptions of selfhood and history that disarm Badiou’s criticism of Ricoeur by means of a critical analysis of his theory of subjectivity, as well as his conception of ethics

Reasoning Studies. From Single Norms to Individual Differences.

In review. Submitted for habilitation in psychology

H.P. Blavatsky, theosophy, and nineteenth-century comparative religion

Although H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder of the Theosophical Society, has featured prominently in histories of Western esotericism, her engagement with late nineteenth-century comparative religion has not been appreciated. This thesis offers the first sustained analysis of H. P. Blavatsky's theosophical comparative religion. Despite the fact that one of the original goals of the Theosophical Society was advancing comparative religion, H. P. Blavatsky has been excluded from standard accounts of the field. This thesis draws on a range of theoretical resources - Richard Rorty's pragmatic theory of knowledge, Alun Munslow's analysis of narrative in history, Thomas Gieryn's critique of boundary-making in science, and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's history of objectivity - to argue for the inclusion of H. P. Blavatsky in the history of comparative religion. Substantial chapters analyse H. P. Blavatsky's major works, from Isis Unveiled (1877) to The Secret Doctrine (1888), to uncover the theoretical template that she developed for analysing religion and comparing religions. The thesis highlights H. P. Blavatsky's interpretative strategies in fashioning a theosophical comparative religion. In developing a comparative religion, H. P. Blavatsky referred to leading figures in the emerging field of the academic study of religion, such as F. Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, and Herbert Spencer, in positioning her theosophical comparative religion in the context of late nineteenth-century production of knowledge about religion and religions. This thesis demonstrates that H. P. Blavatsky's comparative religion was reasoned, literary, rhetorical, coherent, and strategic. By analysing H. P. Blavatsky's theoretical work on religion and religions in its late nineteenth-century context, this thesis contributes to the ongoing project of broadening our understanding of the complex and contested history of the study of religion