Speaker: Simone Picenni
Title: A Formal Theory of Self-Applicable Truth and Truthmaking
Date:
Time:
16:00
- 17:30
Location: SP107 F1.15 (ILLC Seminar Room)
In recent years, exact truthmakers have garnered significant attention in philosophical logic and semantics. A state—such as a state of affairs, an action, or an event—serves as an exact truthmaker for a statement Q if it necessitates Q's truth and is wholly relevant to it. This notion of exact truthmaking underpins a fine-grained semantics called exact truthmaking semantics, which individuates the semantic content of sentences via their exact truthmakers. While this approach has shown theoretical promise across various areas, several technical and philosophical challenges remain.
In particular, echoing Barwise, I contend that a sufficiently comprehensive theory of truth and semantics must be capable of being ‘turned on itself, and provide an account of its own [semantic] content, or rather, of the statements made by the theorist using the theory’. Although exact truthmaking semantics has furnished valuable insights across various domains, it has yet to adequately address this challenge.
In particular, echoing Barwise, I contend that a sufficiently comprehensive theory of truth and semantics must be capable of being ‘turned on itself, and provide an account of its own [semantic] content, or rather, of the statements made by the theorist using the theory’. Although exact truthmaking semantics has furnished valuable insights across various domains, it has yet to adequately address this challenge.
This work seeks to address it. I will show how to construct a semantic theory of self-applicable truth and truthmaking, grounded in exact truthmaking semantics. Specifically, I will show how to construct exact truthmaking models for languages that include the resources to talk about their own syntax, about 'worldly circumstances ' (states, events, their possibility or impossibility, their occurrence or non-occurrence...) and the exact truthmaking relations these circumstances bear to the statements of the language itself.