Second Philosophy

Abstract

The relation a true sentence bears to the world is often considered the central word-world connection, based perhaps on a relation of reference between the parts of the sentence and parts of the world. We’ll start by reading a series of articles focused on a lively contemporary debate between those who accept this common-place, who regard the analysis of this robust correspondence between a true sentence and the world as an important philosophical problem, and those who reject it (at least as the correspondence theorists intend it), holding instead that ‘truth’ is a simple syntactic device with no underlying nature in need of investigation. Much of our focus will be on understanding the ‘disquotational’ or ‘deflationary’ theory stemming from the writings of W. V. Quine, Hartry Field and Stephen Leeds, but we’ll also take a look at the ‘minimalism’ of Crispin Wright, Patricia Marino’s ‘modest correspondence theory’, and some related issues in the philosophy of mathematics.