Alethic Pluralism and Minimalism

Abstract

Among various recent approaches to truth one should distinguish a large family of minimalist accounts, which emphasize that the notion of truth is less substantial than it was traditionally taken for granted. Some philosophers (including, among others, Crispin Wright and Michael P. Lynch) propose to combine this minimalism about the notion of truth with pluralism of some kind, namely the idea that "what property serves as truth may vary from discourse to discourse". Briefly, there is one minimal notion of truth but many properties satisfying it. I consider and contrast two ways of elaborating this interesting and promising view, defended respectively by Wright and Lynch. For Wright the common minimal notion of truth does not express any single property; the notion is simply multiple realized by various properties in different discourses. Lynch amends this view by claiming that the common notion of truth expresses a single property after all: it is a supervenient role property. I argue that more minimalistic Wright's alethic pluralism has certain advantages over functional-supervenient alethic pluralism advocated by Lynch.