TY - JOUR
T1 - Conceptual Marxism and truth
T2 - Inquiry symposium on Kevin Scharp’s Replacing Truth
AU - Greenough, Patrick
N1 - Work on this article has received funding from the project FFI2013-45968-P, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competition (MINECO).
PY - 2019/4/21
Y1 - 2019/4/21
N2 - In Replacing Truth (2013), Scharp takes the concept of truth to be fundamentally incoherent. As such, Scharp reckons it to be unsuited for systematic philosophical theorising and in need of replacement – at least for regions of thought and talk which permit liar sentences and their ilk to be formulated. This replacement methodology is radical because it not only recommends that the concept of truth be replaced (in troublesome domains), but that the word ‘true’ be replaced too. Only Tarski has attempted anything like it before. I dub such a view Conceptual Marxism. In assessing this view, my goals are fourfold: to summarise the many components of Scharp’s theory of truth; to highlight what I take to be some of the excess baggage carried by the view; to assess whether, and to what extent, the extreme methodology on offer is at all called for; finally, to briefly propose a less radical replacement strategy for resolving the liar paradox.
AB - In Replacing Truth (2013), Scharp takes the concept of truth to be fundamentally incoherent. As such, Scharp reckons it to be unsuited for systematic philosophical theorising and in need of replacement – at least for regions of thought and talk which permit liar sentences and their ilk to be formulated. This replacement methodology is radical because it not only recommends that the concept of truth be replaced (in troublesome domains), but that the word ‘true’ be replaced too. Only Tarski has attempted anything like it before. I dub such a view Conceptual Marxism. In assessing this view, my goals are fourfold: to summarise the many components of Scharp’s theory of truth; to highlight what I take to be some of the excess baggage carried by the view; to assess whether, and to what extent, the extreme methodology on offer is at all called for; finally, to briefly propose a less radical replacement strategy for resolving the liar paradox.
KW - Truth
KW - Liar paradox
KW - Conceptual engineering
U2 - 10.1080/0020174X.2017.1287919
DO - 10.1080/0020174X.2017.1287919
M3 - Article
SN - 0020-174X
VL - 62
SP - 403
EP - 421
JO - Inquiry - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
JF - Inquiry - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
IS - 4
ER -