Ecumenical alethic pluralism

ABSTRACT

Ecumenical Alethic Pluralism (EAP) is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright’s Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists.

KEYWORDS:

• Truth
• pluralism
• deflationism
• relativism
• inflationary argument
• normativity
• taste

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefitted enormously from exchanges with many colleagues and friends. We are particularly grateful to: Elke Brendel, Stefano Caputo, Massimo Dell'Utri, Douglas Edwards, Patrick Greenough, Paul Horwich, Michael Lynch, Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen, Eva Picardi, Gila Sher, Erik Stei, Joe Ulatowski, Giorgio Volpe, Chase Wrenn, Cory Wright, Jeremy Wyatt, and two anonymous referees from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Last, but not least, very special thanks to Crispin Wright for his extraordinary personal and intellectual encouragement and, of course, for having introduced us to alethic pluralism.

Ferrari would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG – BR 1978/3–1) for sponsoring my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bonn.

While working on the paper, both authors benefitted from participation in the Pluralisms Global Research Network (National Research Foundation of Korea grant no. 2013S1A2A2035514). This support is also gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Wright (2013).

2. Some authors advocate non-inflationary truth pluralism. Beall (2013) develops deflationary pluralism in reply to paradoxes. Kölbel (2013) cites questionnaires to support the idea that people deploy two distinct truth concepts: one inflationary, the other non-inflationary. These are non-domain-based pluralisms, and thus differ significantly from EAP. See Barnard and Ulatowski Forthcoming for data concerning the empirical adequacy of a domain-based alethic pluralism with a non-inflationary truth.

3. Wright (1992, Forthcoming; unpublished manuscript).

4. We focus on basic taste judgements, e.g. ‘this sushi is delicious’. For simplicity, we will omit ‘basic’ from now on.

5. Lynch (2009).

6. See Chan (2013).

7. We focus on propositional justification.

8. We take Horwich (1998) to be a paradigmatic example of a view endorsing these commitments.

9. Wright (1992). We offer our own reconstruction of the arguments.

10. Wright (1992, 18).

11. We ignore the possibility of a truth-value gap for p – see Wright (1992, 61–4) for discussion. To meet intuitionistic anxieties, ne can be reformulated as the principle that (necessarily) it is not the case that neither p nor not-p are in the in the extension of the truth-property.

12. We assume that ‘it will be the case that p’ and ‘it was the case that p’ express, respectively, the propositions that it will be the case that p and that it was the case that p.

13. An earlier discussion of the truth-value links can be found in Wright (1993).

14. The totality of taste-facts relative to a subject constitutes her world of taste.

15. Our metaphysical relativism is related to Fine’s external relativism. See Fine (2005, 278–84). See also Einheuser (2008), and Spencer (2016).

16. See Ferrari and Moruzzi Forthcoming for a version of (RRD) compatible with non-classical semantics.

17. These principles impose a transparency condition on gustatory experience in relation to justification. Williamson (2000, 24–7) defines transparency in relation to knowledge. We are committed to holding that the mental state of having a gustatory experience is transparent. However, it is not obvious that it is plausible to assume, as Williamson (2000, ch.4) does in his anti-luminosity argument for the experience of cold, that a series of indiscriminable differences in the supervenience base of basic taste properties can produce a sorites-like sequence for gustatory experiences.

18. See Wollheim (1980).

19. Note that both the absence of a gustatory experience and the presence of a pleasant experience are sufficient conditions for enforcing the negation of the left-hand-side of RRD. The production of a contrary experience (distastefulness), or the absence of any experience, are conditions that are incompatible with the right-hand-side of RRD – i.e. with the existence of a pleasant experience.

20. These arguments can be generalized to taste properties (e.g. being distastefulness).

21. Wright (Forthcoming; unpublished manuscript).

22. Ibid.

23. PRIME is an intuitive formulation of the Prime Number Theorem, which describes the asymptotic distribution of the prime numbers among the positive integers. A first elementary proof – i.e. a proof that can be carried within first-order Peano Arithmetic – was given by Atle Selberg in 1949.

24. Lynch (2009, 32–6, 41–9).

25. E.g. Lynch (2009, Ch. 3, and Ch. 7).

26. Benacerraf (1973).

27. Coherence with the axioms of PA is just one model of truth in arithmetic that provides a metaphysically more acceptable account than correspondence. Of course, we do not wish to claim that this is the only, or even the best, model of truth for arithmetic: we just want to provide an example of a viable alternative to an account of truth that is widely considered inadequate for arithmetic.

28. Four of them are prominent: i) the so-called Success Argument – Putnam (1978), Damnjanovic (2005); ii) the Semantic Argument – Bar-On, Horisk and Lycan (2000), Patterson (2005); iii) the Indeterminacy Argument – Horwich (2005), Field (2009); iv) the Axiological Argument – Horwich (2006), Lynch (2009) and Ferrari (2018).

29. E.g. Wright (1998), Lynch (2000), (Lynch 2009), Pedersen (2010), and Edwards (2013).

30. This methodology has been adopted by, e.g. Jackson (1998), Lewis (1970) and Wright (1998).

31. Core principles about truth are generally taken to be tacit beliefs that folks have reflecting and systematizing their ordinary understanding of truth – e.g. Lynch (2009, 7–8) – or the philosophers’ ordinary understanding of truth reached through a process of critical philosophical reflection – e.g. Wright (2013, 128–9).

32. Examples of lists of core principles concerning the truth concept are in Wright (1998), and Lynch (2009).

33. Wright (1998) holds onto both Strict Conception and Strict Requirement. Lynch (2009, 13) departs from the Strict Requirement.

34. See Jackson (1998, 2–5).

35. See Lynch (2009, 10), and Pedersen and Wright (2013). Edwards (2013) assumes truth to be normative by taking seriously the analogy between truth and winning. We think that Wright’s IAS’s are the main reason for the widespread idea among pluralists that truth is normative.

36. See Wright (1998) and Edwards (2013, 113).

37. Pedersen and Wright (2013).

38. Lynch (2000).

39. Lynch (2009).

40. Edwards (2013).

41. Analogous points can be made for Simple Determination Pluralism. It is less clear that the abandonment of Strict Requirement makes EAP incompatible with second-order functionalism and alethic disjunctivism.

42. See Ferrari and Moruzzi (Forthcoming; unpublished manuscript) for a detailed discussion of what we call ‘the integration challenge’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG—BR 1978/3–1, ‘Disagreement in Philosophy ’];

Notes on contributors

Filippo Ferrari

Filippo Ferrari has recently completed his PhD thesis at the University of Aberdeen on the topic of the normativity of truth and disagreement, under the supervision of Crispin Wright and Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins. Ferrari is currently a Research Fellow in philosophy at the University of Bonn, working within the remit of the DFG founded project “Disagreement in Philosophy–Conceptual and Semantic Foundations”. Before taking up his position at Bonn University, Ferrari held a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen. His research focuses primarily on two clusters of topics: (i) the normative aspects of enquiry, with a special emphasis on disagreement and retraction, and (ii) the debate about the nature of truth, particularly with respect to deflationism, relativism and pluralism.

Sebastiano Moruzzi

Sebastiano Moruzzi has received his PhD in 2005 from the University of Eastern Piedmont “Amedeo Avogadro”, with a thesis on anti-realist epistemic approaches to vagueness supervised by Eva Picardi. He is currently a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bologna. Before taking up his position at Bologna University, Moruzzi held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Arché Research Centre, University of St Andrews, conducting research within a project on vagueness (PI Crispin Wright).His current research focuses on (i) truth-relativism and its normative and semantic aspects (especially as they pertain to disagreement); (ii) truth pluralism and its connections to disagreement and other forms of pluralism; (iii) vagueness.