Friday, 15 September 2006
Some Dirty Little Secrets About Truth
Paul Teller, University of California, Davis, Department of Philosophy
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning

Abstract: We evaluate representations for success in representing things the way they are. In the case of analog representations, such as maps, what counts as success is adequate, and so context relative, precision and accuracy. I suggest that truth, representational success for statements, functions more like that for analog representations than we usually appreciate – even in science we never get statements that are both perfectly precise and perfectly accurate. The appearance of completely unqualified truth arises from the circumstance that we use an analog of epistemic contextualism, what I call semantic contextualism, in which we generally operate from “platforms”, collections of representations which are defeasibly treated as “completely adequate”