Linguistique de l’écrit

Revue internationale en libre accès

Revue | Volume | Article

236699

Superassertibility and the equivalence schema

a dilemma for Wright's antirealist

Deborah C. Smith

pp. 129-139

Résumé

Crispin Wright champions the notion of superassertibility as providing a truth predicate that is congenial to antirealists in many debates in that it satisfies relevant platitudes concerning truth and does so in a very minimal way. He motivates such a claim by arguing that superassertibility can satisfy the equivalence schema: it is superassertible that P if and only if P. I argue that Wright’s attempted proof that superassertibility can satisfy this schema is unsuccessful, because it requires a premise that has not been properly motivated and is prima facie implausible. I further argue that, even if the dubious premise is accepted, the resulting proof is intuitionistically invalid. This is problematic, because a proponent of superassertibility as a truth predicate has independent reasons to affect a logical revision in the direction of intuitionism. The resulting dilemma suggests that superassertibility may not be an adequate truth candidate for any significant ranges of discourse.

Détails de la publication

Publié dans:

(2007) Synthese 157 (1).

Pages: 129-139

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-006-9037-9

Citation complète:

Smith Deborah C., 2007, Superassertibility and the equivalence schema: a dilemma for Wright's antirealist. Synthese 157 (1), 129-139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9037-9.