Understanding truth (Q2723852)

This book discusses truth-bearers (arguing that propositions should play this role), skepticism about truth, Tarski's and Kripke's theories, the Liar paradox (arguing that we should reject that the sentence is true and also that it is not true), vagueness and the Sorites (as another example of truth-value gappiness) and finally some of the work on deflationism (whether truth is a property). What it does, it does very well indeed. It presupposes almost no knowledge of logic, mathematics, or philosophy, and it is a model of clarity and carefulness. The presentation of Kripke's theory of truth in particular is splendid. So is the criticism of \textit{P. A. Boghossian}'s [``Status of content'', Philos. Rev. 99, 157-184 (1990)] arguments against deflationism.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe book does not, however, live up to its main aim, which it says is ``to integrate and extend the most important insights on truth from a variety of sources'' (p. 4). It omits far too many important discussions: Skyrms, Barwise and Etchemendy, Yablo, Priest and paraconsistency, \dots . (The last is crucial, since a consistency requirement is frequently appealed to; but if truth-value gaps, why not gluts?) \textit{D. L. Grover, J. L. Camp} and \textit{N. D. Belnap}'s, ``A prosentential theory of truth'' [Philos. Stud. 27, 73-125 (1975)] and its ``descendants'' (presumably including \textit{R. Brandom}, Making it explicit (Cambridge MA, Harvard Univ. Press) (1994)) are dismissed in a single footnote, p. 256 n. 7.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEWhat it does, it does very well, but it omits too much to be considered an adequate guide to current thinking on truth.