Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

According to strong alethic pluralism, there is no single truth property possessed by all truths. Instead there are several ways of being true, and none of them can account for truth across all truth-apt discourse. Truth for discourse about medium-sized dry goods might reduce to correspondence while truth for mathematical discourse might reduce to coherence with the axioms of arithmetic. A number of seemingly devastating objections confronts so-called strong alethic pluralism. Perhaps for this reason it is not a widely held view. This paper has two aims. The first aim is to defuse the main objections leveled against strong alethic pluralism. The second is to offer two arguments in favour of the view. We start by stating the main objections to strong pluralism and then proceed to respond to them. Having done so, we present two versions of what we call the “No Resemblance Argument”. The first version aims to show that there is no truth property that applies across all truth-apt domains. The second version aims to establish a more modest conclusion: if there is a truth property that applies across all truth-apt domains, it is less fundamental—and, we want to say, less real—than properties like correspondence, coherence, and superassertibility. Considerations on naturalness and fundamentality lie at the heart of both versions of the argument. We label our second argument the “Dispensability Argument”. This argument aims to show that the generic truth property endorsed by moderate pluralists is explanatorily dispensable. The explanatory work that truth needs to do can be done without appealing to a generic truth property. To the extent that indispensability is a necessary condition for existence, this gives us a reason to think that pluralists should not buy into the existence of a generic truth property.