Concept of Truth: The Israel Lectures

Anil Gupta here offers a systematic account of the concept of truth, with a particular focus on the role this concept plays in metaphysics. He examines functions the concept serves in everyday thinking and mounts, on their basis, an argument for a particular logic of truth. This logic enables, he argues, a new and powerful critique of deflationism--of the idea that the concept of truth is fit to serve only a logical role. The logic shows that deflationist claims about the contents of truth-attributions have only limited validity, and consequently, the accounts deflationists provide of truth are untenable. His book goes on to offer novel accounts of "appearance" and "phenomenon" and uses them, in conjunction with the newly improved understanding of the concept of truth, to clarify the metaphysical quest to understand reality. Gupta argues that the metaphysical inquiry into the nature of reality can equally well be described as an inquiry into the nature of truth.

It is a distinctive merit of his book that Gupta brings together three streams of thinking about truth, streams that often run parallel to one another: the logical, the linguistic, and the metaphysical streams. He shows that ideas in the linguistic stream help overcome impasse in the logic of truth, and gains made in the latter help overcome stubborn misconceptions about the meaning and function of "'true". These gains, in turn, help correct metaphysical claims about the nature of truth, and indeed they help illuminate the metaphysical enterprise itself.