27 - 28 September 2024, Workshop on Truth, Definability and Quantification into Sentence Position, Vienna (Austria)

Can truth be defined? Frege argued that it couldn't. Ramsey argued that defining it would be easy if only we had an analysis of judgement. Today Horwich claims that truth cannot be defined explicitly because doing so would require quantification into sentence position and such quantification is not coherent. Instead he proposes a “minimal theory” of truth, which comprises all the unproblematic instances of the equivalence schema. Künne, by contrast, argues that quantification into sentence position is coherent and may actually be part of some natural languages. Künne uses such quantification to define truth explicitly: ∀x (x is true iff ∃p ((x is the proposition that p) & p)). Or in English: a representation (belief, assertion etc) is true just if things are as it represents them as being.

Is truth definable? Is propositional quantification coherent? Do natural languages involve propositional quantification, and in what sense? What do the answers to these questions mean for philosophical attempts to define or explain truth? Is truth redundant if explicitly definable? Not redundant if not explicitly definable? We are interested in these and related questions (broadly conceived).

Confirmed speakers are: Peter Fritz (Australian Catholic University), Paul Horwich (New York University), Wolfgang Künne (University of Hamburg), Poppy Mankowitz (University of Bristol)  and Cheryl Misak (University of Toronto).