Reconsidering Jamin Asay's Primitivist Theory of Truth

Philosophy Compass, 2022

Primitivists about truth maintain that truth cannot be analysed in more fundamental terms. Defences of primitivism date back to the early years of analytic philosophy, being offered by G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gottlob Frege. In more recent years, a number of contemporary philosophers—including Donald Davidson, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Douglas Patterson, and Jamin Asay—have followed suit, defending their own versions of primitivism. I'll begin by offering a brief history of primitivism, situating each of these views within the landscape of primitivist truth theories and detailing some of their core motivations and apparent shortcomings. To close the discussion, I'll offer a diagnosis of the prospects of primitivism, focusing on the mystery challenge, which has loomed large throughout the history of primitivist truth theories, and the methodology that should be used in evaluating primitivist (and other) truth theories going forward.

The Philosophical Quarterly

Primitivist theories of truth have been defended by some of the luminaries of analytic philosophy, including the early Moore and Russell, Frege, Davidson, and Sosa. In this paper, I take up a contemporary primitivist theory that has been systematically developed throughout a sizeable body of work but has yet to receive sustained critical attention--Jamin Asay's primitivist deflationism. Asay's major ambitions are to defend a novel primitivist account of the concept TRUTH and to harmonise that account with a deflationary theory of the property truth. I will elaborate a thoroughgoing critique of primitivist deflationism, arguing that we have reason to doubt all of the five theses that constitute the view. Along the way, I will also highlight a number of possible escape routes for the primitivist deflationist, explaining how they can make the view more resilient even as they compel us to rework some of its central commitments.

2018

This work presents a version of the correspondence theory of truth based on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Russell’s theory of truth and discusses related metaphysical issues such as predication, facts, and propositions. Like Russell and one prominent interpretation of the Tractatus, it assumes a realist view of universals. Part of the aim is to avoid Platonic propositions, and although sympathy with facts is maintained in the early chapters, the book argues that facts as real entities are not needed. It includes discussion of contemporary philosophers such as David Armstrong, William Alston, and Paul Horwich, as well as those who write about propositions and facts and a number of recent students of Bertrand Russell. It will interest teachers and advanced students of philosophy who are interested in the realist conception of truth and in issues in metaphysics related to the correspondence theory of truth and those interested in Russell and the Tractatus.

Synthese 117: 133-72, 1999

The classical debate on truth gave us the three theories of truth that constitute a large part of the background for contemporary philosophy of truth: the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, and the pragmatist theory. The classical notion of correspondence truth may be found, for example, in Chapter XII of Russell’s "The Problems of Philosophy", where we read the following characterizations: ‘a belief is true when there is a corresponding fact, and is false when there is no corresponding fact’; ‘a belief is true when it corresponds to a certain associated complex, and false when it does not’. Whatever else it may involve, the classical notion of correspondence – also known as Cambridge correspondence–at least involves the notion of fact, and does so in a way that renders the theory metaphysically robust rather than innocent. Russell was one of the chief advocates of the classical notion, but his road to it was far from easy. Originally, he advocated truth primitivism, a position according to which ‘truth and falsehood […] are ultimate, and no account can be given of what makes a proposition true or false’. In this paper, I’ll do several things. Firstly, I’ll provide a sketch of Russell’s version of truth primitivism. This will be done by a comparison with Frege’s views on truth; second, I’ll provide an account of the philosophical reasons that led Russell to reject the earlier account of truth in favour of truth as correspondence. A large part of Russell’s reasons, so I shall argue, had to do with his growing realisations of the implication of truth-primitivism for the problem of the unity of the proposition. Thirdly, I’ll provide an outline of some of the later developments that took place in Russell’s correspondence theories of truth and relate to the multiple-relation theory of judgment and the psychological theory of propositions that he began to work out around 1918–19. The story that is told here focuses on Russell’s attempts to formulate a correspondence theory of truth that (i) accounts for the unity of the proposition and (ii) explains false belief ‘without assuming the existence of the non-existent’.

American Philosophical Quarterly, 2016

Mind, 2005

1995

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2010