Bare Facts and Naked Truths

Book excerpt: The very idea of truth as a substantial and meaningful concept has been under attack recently from advocates of New Age and postmodern theories. In this book Englebretsen defends the notions of truth and objectivity as key to the scientific view of the natural world and presents an original defence of the 'commonsense' correspondence theory of truth. Englebretsen's approach overcomes the traditional difficulties of correspondence theories of truth with providing adequate and convincing accounts of truth-bearers, truth-makers and the correspondence relation between them by taking truth-bearers to be propositions and facts as constitutive properties of the world. This accessibly written book surveys all of the major competing theories of truth (coherence, pragmatic, redundancy, semantic, deflationary, disquotational, minimalist) before formulating the new defence of the correspondence theory and then exploring the consequences of the theory for issues in epistemology and ontology. The book concludes by showing how the idea of 'propositional depth' can be used to dissolve the Liar paradoxes.