The truth about predicates and connectives
pp. 63-78
in: Anne Reboul (ed), Mind, values, and metaphysics I, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
In his rich "The Truth Predicate vs. the Truth Connective. On taking connectives seriously.'' Kevin Mulligan (2010) starts an inquiry into the logical form of truth ascriptions and challenges the prevailing view which takes truth ascriptions to be of subject predicate form, that is a truth predicate applied to a name of a proposition or sentence. In this chapter we shall first discuss Mulligan's proposal from the perspective of linguistics and, especially, syntax theory. Even though theory of syntax provides little evidence for Mulligan's view, we shall argue that this does not disqualify the thesis that it is a truth connective (or operator as we shall frequently say) which figures in the logical form of truth ascriptions. We shall then look at the distinction between sentential predicates and sentential operators from a more logical point of view. It is often thought that we should opt for modal operators so the self-referential paradoxes are avoided. We argue that whether paradox will arise is not a question of grammatical category but of the expressive power of the approach.
