Can claims about the future be true now?

Can there be some algorithm for finding truth some recipe or procedure for deciding, for any claim in
the system of, say, arithmetic, whether the claim is true?
Can the predicate "is true" be completely defined in other terms so that it can be eliminated, without
loss of meaning, from any context in which it occurs?
To what extent do theories of truth avoid paradox?
Is the goal of scientific research to achieve truth?
Who is the bearer of truth?
Correspondence, Semantic, and Deflation is the most widely accepted. Furthermore, the
coherence and pragmatic theories are competing theories.
What is the nature of truth? Answers this. They are truths and the question that to be
answered would be in the nature of the truth.
Truths problem? What it is and what it makes it true and what things can be true.
Is truth a property of sentences or is truth a property of propositions.
Sentences are linguistic items: they exist in some language or other, either in a natural language
such as English or in an artificial language such as a computer language. However, the term
"sentence" has two senses: sentence-token and sentence-type.
Sentence-tokens are concrete objects. They are composed of ink marks on paper, or sequences
of sounds, or patches of light on a computer monitor, etc. Sentence-tokens exist in space and
time; they can be located in space and can be dated. Sentence-types cannot be. They are
abstract objects.
So, might sentence-tokens be the bearers of truth-values? It depends.
One reason to favour tokens over types is to solve the problems involving so-called
"indexical" terms such as "I" and "here" and "now". If someone said l like chocolate, if
sentence-types were the ones with the truth-value, then it is true and false at the same time,
an unacceptable contradiction.
A second reason for arguing that sentence-tokens, rather than sentence-types, are the bearers
of truth-values has been advanced by nominalist philosophers. Nominalists are intent to allow
as few abstract objects as possible. Insofar as sentence-types are abstract objects and
sentence-tokens are concrete objects, nominalists will argue that actually uttered or written
sentence-tokens are the proper bearers of truth-values.
CONTRADICTIONS: if there are no languages in the world, will there any is truth? Same goes to
beliefs; if there is no conscious creatures will there any is truth? Also, if there are languages,
there are some sentences that will never been said or had been said.
So both sentences have encounter difficulties. How about propositions? Most favoured theory.
Only declarative sentences express propositions. Principle of Identity, principle of non-
contradiction and principle of excluded middle. NC vs. inconsistency
Problems:
o Sentences containing non-referring expressions
o Predictions of future events
o Liar Sentences
o Sentences that state moral, ethical, or aesthetic values
 o No proposition to king PH but argued to be a false proposition.
o perhaps more powerful, motivation for adopting this view is the belief that if sentences
involving future human actions were to express propositions, i.e., were to express
something that is now true or false, then humans would be determined to perform
those actions and so humans would have no free will. To defend free will, these
philosophers have argued, we must deny truth-values to predictions.
o No truth value in the now. However argued that if we know the values, we could not
assess the argument with validity or not or worse, not really an argument at all.
o Paradoxical. No proposition, no truth value. In truth-value gap.
o Moral values.
Correspondence
o True is the things one say or believe if and only if they represent as the facts or the way
really things are.
o Origin: If modern history, at the turn of the 20 th century
o Prominent philosophers: Moore, Russell
o Back then, it was identity theory of truth by Moore and Russell.
o Truth is a property of propositions but the property of truth is a simple unanalysed
property.
o There are true propositions and false ones, and facts just are true propositions.
o According to the identity theory, a true proposition is identical to a fact. They are also
the bearer of truth and have the truth-value.
Propositions are what are believed, and give the contents of beliefs. Propositions
are abstract entities and not concrete objects; they do not exist in space and
time. They are even not mental entities.
o When a proposition is true, it is identical to a fact, and a belief in that proposition is
correct.
o But they rejected it by 1910s in favour of correspondence because they came to doubt
that there could be any such things as false propositions, and then concluded that there
are no such things as propositions at all.
o Roughly, the identification of facts with true propositions left them unable to see what a
false proposition could be other than something which is just like a fact, though false. If
such things existed, we would have fact-like things in the world, which Moore and
Russell now see as enough to make false propositions count as true. Hence, they cannot
exist, and so there are no false propositions. As Russell (1956, p. 223) later says,
propositions seem to be at best curious shadowy things in addition to facts.
o From the rejection of propositions a correspondence theory emerges. The primary
bearers of truth are no longer propositions, but beliefs themselves. In a slogan: A belief
is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact.
o Correspondence theory, at its core, is an ontological thesis: a belief is true if
there exists an appropriate entitya factto which it corresponds. If there is no such
entity, the belief is false.
o Facts are entities in their own right.
o Propositions is true iff p corresponds to a fact.
o that truth is a certain relationshipthe relationship that holds between a proposition
and its corresponding fact.
o Permits facts as mind-dependent entities like Kant while mind-independent like Russell.
 o A true proposition can't be a fact if it also states a fact, so what is the ontological
standing of a fact? Is the fact that corresponds to "Brutus stabbed Caesar" the same fact
that corresponds to "Caesar was stabbed by Brutus", or is it a different fact?
o It might be argued that they must be different facts because one expresses the
relationship of stabbing but the other expresses the relationship of being stabbed,
which is different.
o These questions illustrate the difficulty in counting facts and distinguishing them. The
difficulty is well recognized by advocates of the Correspondence Theory, but critics
complain that characterizations of facts too often circle back ultimately to saying facts
are whatever true propositions must correspond to in order to be true.
o facts really are the true statements themselves; facts are not named by them, as the
Correspondence Theory mistakenly supposes.
o Sense can be made of the term "correspondence", some say, because speaking of
propositions corresponding to facts is merely making the general claim.
o The sentence, "Snow is white", means that snow is white, and (ii) snow actually is white,
and so on for all the other propositions. Therefore, the Correspondence theory must
contain a theory of "means that" but otherwise is not at fault.
Tarskis Semantic Theory
o talk of correspondence and of facts is eliminated.
o Truth is a property of a sentence.
o "Under what conditions is that proposition true?"
o The proposition expressed by the German sentence "Schnee ist weiss" is true if and only
if snow is white. (*the to true,1; iff, 2; siw,3*)
o 1 is about truth while 3 is assertion of a claim about the nature of the world. Thus it is a
substantive claim.

o In the example we have been using, namely, "Schnee ist weiss", it is quite clear that the
T-proposition consists of a containing (or "outer") sentence in English, and a contained
(or "inner" or quoted) sentence in German: The proposition expressed by the German
sentence "Schnee ist weiss" is true if and only if snow is white.
o There are, we see, sentences in two distinct languages involved in this T-proposition. If,
however, we switch the inner, or quoted sentence, to an English sentence, e.g. to "Snow
is white", we would then have: The proposition expressed by the German sentence
"Schnee ist weiss" is true if and only if snow is white.
o In this latter case, it looks as if only one language (English), not two, is involved in
expressing the T-proposition. But, according to Tarski's theory, there are still two
languages involved: (i) the language one of whose sentences is being quoted and (ii) the
language which attributes truth to the proposition expressed by that quoted sentence.
The quoted sentence is said to be an element of the object language, and the outer (or
containing) sentence which uses the predicate "true" is in the metalanguage.
o to avoid contradiction in his semantic theory of truth, Among other restrictions, it is the
metalanguage alone that contains the truth-predicates, "true" and "false"; the object
language does not contain truth-predicates.
o The idea is to define the predicate "is true" when it is applied to the simplest (that is,
the non-complex or atomic) sentences in the object language (a language, see above,
which does not, itself, contain the truth-predicate "is true"). The predicate "is true" is a
predicate that occurs only in the metalanguage, i.e., in the language we use to describe
the object language.
o the theory must work for more complex propositions by showing how the truth-values
of these complex propositions depend on their parts, such as the truth-values of their
constituent propositions.
o the theory must work for more complex propositions by showing how the truth-values
of these complex propositions depend on their parts, such as the truth-values of their
constituent propositions.
o Many philosophers divide the class of propositions into two mutually exclusive and
exhaustive subclasses: namely, propositions that are contingent (that is, those that are
neither necessarily-true nor necessarily-false) and those that are noncontingent (that is,
those that are necessarily-true or necessarily-false).
o The contrasting class of propositions comprises those whose truth (or falsehood, as the
case may be) is dependent, according to the Semantic Theory, not on some specific way
the world happens to be, but on any way the world happens to be. (examples)
o Some philosophers who accept the Semantic Theory of Truth for contingent
propositions, reject it for noncontingent ones. They have argued that the truth of
noncontingent propositions has a different basis from the truth of contingent ones.
o Contingent truths, on this account, are said to be true by definition or as a matter of
the meanings of the sentences expressing the propositions.
o It is apparent, in this competing account, that one is invoking a kind of theory of
linguistic truth. In this alternative theory, truth for a certain class of propositions,
namely the class of noncontingent propositions, is to be accounted for not in their
describing the way the world is, but rather because of certain features of our human
linguistic constructs.
o this view, what distinguishes noncontingent truths from contingent ones is not that
their truth arises as a consequence of facts about our language or of meanings, etc.; but
that their truth has to do with the scope (or number) of possible circumstances under
which the proposition is true. Contingent propositions are true in some, but not all,
possible circumstances (or possible worlds). Noncontingent propositions, in contrast,
are true in all possible circumstances or in none. There is no difference as to
the nature of truth for the two classes of propositions, only in the ranges of
possibilities in which the propositions are true.
o How we ascertain, find out, determinethe truth-values of noncontingent propositions
may (but need not invariably) be by nonexperiential means; but from that it does not
 follow that the nature of truth of noncontingent propositions is fundamentally different
from that of contingent ones.
o On this latter view, the Semantic Theory of Truth is adequate for both contingent
propositions and noncontingent ones.
o Indeed, one very important consequence of the Semantic Theory of Truth is that it
allows for the existence of propositions whose truth-values are in principle unknowable
to human beings.
o How is it that mathematics is able to be used to explain the nature of the world? On the
Semantic Theory, the answer is that the noncontingent truths of mathematics correctly
describe the world.
*INSERT OTHER THEORIES HERE*
RELATED ISSUES
o "How could a proposition be true unless we know it to be true?"
o Advocates of the Correspondence Theory and the Semantic Theory have argued that a
proposition need not be known in order to be true. Truth, they say, arises out of a
relationship between a proposition and the way the world is. No one need know that
that relationship holds, nor for that matter need there even be any conscious or
language-using creatures for that relationship to obtain. In short, truth is an objective
feature of a proposition, not a subjective one.
o To be known, it must be justified by belief. For a proposition to be justified it must, at
the very least, cohere with other propositions that one has adopted
o An account of what "true" means does not have to tell us what is true, nor tell us how
we could find out what is true. Similarly, an account of what "bachelor" means should
not have to tell us who is a bachelor, nor should it have to tell us how we could find out
who is. However, it would be fascinating if we could discover a way to tell, for any
proposition, whether it is true.
o Perhaps some machine could do this. If we were to build a machine that produces one
by one all the many sentences, then eventually all those that express truths would be
produced. We also know how to build a machine that will generate only sentences that
express truths. For example, we might program a computer to generate "1 + 1 is not 3",
then "1 + 1 is not 4", then "1 + 1 is not 5", and so forth. However, to generate all and
only those sentences that express truths is quite another matter.
o Leibniz said "How much better will it be to bring under mathematical laws human
reasoning which is the most excellent and useful thing we have."
o This would enable one's mind to "be freed from having to think directly of things
themselves, and yet everything will turn out correct.
o Can "is true" be defined so that it can be replaced by its definition? Unfortunately for
the clarity of this question, there is no one concept of "definition".
o if one were to adopt this older view of definition, one might be inclined to demand of a
theory of truth that it provide a definition of "is true" which permitted its elimination in
all contexts in the language. Tarski was the first person to show clearly that there could
never be such a strict definition for "is true" in its own language.
o Can a Theory of Truth Avoid Paradox? The brief answer is, "Not if it contains its own
concept of truth."
o If the language is made precise by being formalized, and if it contains its own so-
called global truth predicate, then Tarski has shown that the language will enable us to
reason our way to a contradiction. Some of our beliefs about truth, and about related
concepts that are used in the argument to the contradiction, must be rejected, even
though they might seem to be intuitively acceptable.
o The best solutions to the paradoxes use a similar methodology, the "systematic
approach". That is, they try to remove vagueness and be precise about the ramifications
of their solutions, usually by showing how they work in a formal language that has the
essential features of our natural language.
o Is the goal of Scientific Research to achieve truth? Except in special cases, most
scientific researchers would agree that their results are only approximately true.
Nevertheless, to make sense of this, philosophers need adopt no special concept such as
"approximate truth." Instead, it suffices to say that the researchers' goal is to achieve
truth, but they achieve this goal only approximately, or only to some approximation.
o Other philosophers believe it's a mistake to say the researchers' goal is to achieve
truth. These "scientific anti-realists" recommend saying that research in, for example,
physics, economics, and meteorology, aims only for usefulness. They would say atomic
theory isn't true or false but rather is useful for predicting outcomes of experiments and
for explaining current data.
o Some philosophers recommend saying science aims for the best available
"representation", in the same sense that maps are representations of the landscape.
Maps aren't true; rather, they fit to a better or worse degree. Similarly, scientific
theories are designed to fit the world. Scientists should not aim to create true theories;
they should aim to construct theories whose models are representations of the world.