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Or, then, do all questions involving the substitute for "is true" in some or another truth theory, exist as meaningful questions? So that any of the following is admissible on its own terms (on its own merits):

  1. "Does S cohere with an ideal set of other sentences/propositions?"
  2. "Is S the limit of an ideal inquiry?"
  3. "Is S identical to some fact?" (Maybe have "B" instead, for beliefs, with the possibility of a strong overlap between the inherent content of B and the content of some fact, as with beliefs about beliefs, perhaps.)
  4. "Is S (or B) constituted by some fact?"
  5. "Does S satisfy the truth axioms for some axiomatic theory of truth?"
  6. "S is p?" (instead of, "Is, 'S is p,' true?" for deflationism).

Is it more or less efficient/useful to ask, "Is S true?" instead of whether S satisfies specific substituted characterizations of "is true"? Or then can questions of truth be "paraphrased away" into an ensemble of other such questions, and none of those questions is to be dismissed out of hand a priori (even if some individual S conform to only some of (1) through (6), e.g. perhaps moral claims never substantively correspond to facts but do nontrivially cohere with ideal proposition sets, or whatever)?


Or, to frame the issue I'm having a little differently, can Quine's dictum about logic be expressed as, "Change the metalogic, change the (meta-)subject"? So that coherence theories of truth turn out to not be about truth at all (coherence seems like an outlier when compared to correspondence vs. constitution/identity, while pragmatic/inquiry-based theories can accommodate correspondence).

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  • Didn't Plato pose this about math and the physical world? Math can't represent (depict versimilitudinously) because of the divided ontology, but must correspond to be helpful in the physical realm, which it clearly is.
    – J Kusin
    Jul 6 at 17:47
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    To me correspondence still survives without an elementary idea of truth because something still bears on which propositions or statements to apply, and it might be mostly in the thing itself (reducing pragmatic concerns)--in a way that doesn't have to deal with overall cohering, and is less stringent than constitutive requirements. But maybe it does get subsumed by pragmatics, or maybe Plato has a way between truth and pragmatics. Curious what others will say to your general question
    – J Kusin
    Jul 6 at 19:14
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    If you are asking, is it worth trying to understand 'true' in terms of other properties such as satisfaction and reference, then yes. Our understanding of truth has gained a lot from the work of Tarski and Kripke. If you are asking about whether truth requires correspondence to facts, then not for the antirealist. A moral antirealist might perhaps want to claim that some moral judgments are true, even though there are no moral facts. Putnam has argued that a deflationary theory of truth is antirealist.
    – Bumble
    Jul 6 at 20:00
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    Hi Kristian, that's another fantastic KB question that I'll have to mull-over for several hours before I can even start to figure out how what I think about it! Jul 6 at 21:09
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    I'll just cheer from the sidelines :-)
    – Scott Rowe
    Jul 7 at 10:37

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