Truth: Its criteria and conditions is an in-depth critical-and-constructive inquiry in almost equal measure. The theories of the nature of empirical truth critically considered include two forms of the traditional correspondence theory; truth as appraisal; truth as identity of proposition and truth; en emotive theory of truth; P.F. Strawson’s performative theory, and N. Rescher’s novel theory of a coherentist criterion of truth. The constructive parts include an analysis of the concept of “a fact,” the meaning and uses of ‘true’ and ‘false’ in empirical statements, together with the various sorts of conditions for their correct application; the appraisive/evaluative uses of true and false statements; and the performative-cum-cognitive uses of ‘true’ empirical statements; and the conditions of the performative uses of ‘true.’ A significant claim about the concept of truth is its indefinablity; albeit for quite different reasons from Gottlob Frege’s reason based on his argument against the correspondence theory of truth.

"A delightful book … I should like to have written it myself." — Bertrand Russell First published in 1936, this first full-length presentation in English of the Logical Positivism of Carnap, Neurath, and others has gone through many printings to become a classic of thought and communication. It not only surveys one of the most important areas of modern thought; it also shows the confusion that arises from imperfect understanding of the uses of language. A first-rate antidote for fuzzy thought and muddled writing, this remarkable book has helped philosophers, writers, speakers, teachers, students, and general readers alike. Mr. Ayers sets up specific tests by which you can easily evaluate statements of ideas. You will also learn how to distinguish ideas that cannot be verified by experience — those expressing religious, moral, or aesthetic experience, those expounding theological or metaphysical doctrine, and those dealing with a priori truth. The basic thesis of this work is that philosophy should not squander its energies upon the unknowable, but should perform its proper function in criticism and analysis.

Having outlined a theory of bullshit and falsehood, Harry G. Frankfurt turns to what lies beyond them: the truth, a concept not as obvious as some might expect.Our culture's devotion to bullshit may seem much stronger than our apparently halfhearted attachment to truth. Some people (professional thinkers) won't even acknowledge "true" and "false" as meaningful categories, and even those who claim to love truth cause the rest of us to wonder whether they, too, aren't simply full of it. Practically speaking, many of us deploy the truth only when absolutely necessary, often finding alternatives to be more saleable, and yet somehow civilization seems to be muddling along. But where are we headed? Is our fast and easy way with the facts actually crippling us? Or is it "all good"? Really, what's the use of truth, anyway?With the same leavening wit and commonsense wisdom that animates his pathbreaking work On Bullshit, Frankfurt encourages us to take another look at the truth: there may be something there that is perhaps too plain to notice but for which we have a mostly unacknowledged yet deep-seated passion. His book will have sentient beings across America asking, "The truth—why didn't I think of that?"

At the centre of the traditional discussion of truth is the question of how truth is defined. Recent research, especially with the development of deflationist accounts of truth, has tended to take truth as an undefined primitive notion governed by axioms, while the liar paradox and cognate paradoxes pose problems for certain seemingly natural axioms for truth. In this book, Volker Halbach examines the most important axiomatizations of truth, explores their properties and shows how the logical results impinge on the philosophical topics related to truth. In particular, he shows that the discussion on topics such as deflationism about truth depends on the solution of the paradoxes. His book is an invaluable survey of the logical background to the philosophical discussion of truth, and will be indispensable reading for any graduate or professional philosopher in theories of truth.

The book offers a characterization of the meaning and role of the notion of truth in natural languages and an explanation of why, in spite of the big amount of proposals about truth, this task has proved to be resistant to the different analyses. The general thesis of the book is that defining truth is perfectly possible and that the average educated philosopher of language has the tools to do it. The book offers an updated treatment of the meaning of truth ascriptions from taking into account the latest views in philosophy of language and linguistics.

Contemporary analytic philosophy can generally be characterized by the following tendencies: commitment to first-order predicate logic as the only viable formal logic; rejection of correspondence theories of truth; a view of existence as something expressed by the existential quantifier; a metaphysics that doesn’t give the world as a whole its due. This book seeks to offer an alternative analytic theory, one that provides a unified account of what there is, how we speak about it, the underlying logic of our language, how the truth of what we say is determined, and the central role of the real world in all of this. The result is a robust account of reality. The inspiration for many of the ideas that constitute this overall theory comes from such sources as Aristotle, Leibniz, Ryle, and Sommers.

In this book the author is concerned with the foundations of knowledge. He approaches his subject through a discussion of language and a look into how knowledge of the structure of language helps our understanding of the structure of the world.