Work · Analytic Philosophy
Truth
The meaning of a statement cannot be given by truth conditions that might hold beyond any possible recognition – the starting point of anti-realism.
Introduction
Michael Dummett, an Oxford philosopher, published the paper in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in 1959. He questions both the redundancy theory of truth and the idea, going back to Frege, that knowing the meaning of a sentence consists in knowing its truth conditions. If a statement such as “Jones was brave”, said of a man who died without ever meeting danger, could be true or false although nothing could ever show which, then grasping its meaning cannot consist in grasping such a condition. Dummett compares this with intuitionism in mathematics, where a statement counts as true only if it can be proved. The paper started the debate between realism and anti-realism in analytic philosophy.
Connections
Responds to
- On Sense and Reference1892 · Gottlob Frege
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