New Frontiers in Truth

Although philosophers have been concerned with truth since at least the age of Plato, the last thirty years have witnessed a veritable explosion of the philosophical debate on this topic. The touchpaper which lit the fuse for this was undoubtedly the Deflationist Renaissance (half a century after the seminal work of Ramsey) due, in the Seventies, to the development of the prosentential theory of truth by D. Grover, J. Kamp and N. Belnap (1975), followed by the Quinean disquotational interpretation of the Tarskian truth definitions (Quine 1970), and, from the second half of the Eighties onwards, to the forceful defences of deflationary conceptions provided by H. Field (1986, 1994) and P. Horwich (1990). The philosophical struggle on deflationism has been thought-provoking: by arguing on the merits and shortcomings of such a conception, philosophers have come to broaden and deepen the discussion on truth beyond the boundaries of deflationism. The varieties of problems tackled by the essays in this book and their thought-provoking insights highlight how the land of Truth is still far from having been totally explored, and how, in this intellectual endeavour, real progresses can be achieved.