Alexander Pruss's Blog

It is well-known—a feature and not a bug—that Tarski’s definition of truth needs to be given in a metalanguage rather than the object langua...

The most common argument that mathematical truth is not provability uses Tarski’s indefinability of truth theorem or Goedel’s first incomple...

For years in my logic classes I’ve been giving a rough but fairly accessible sketch of the fact that there are unprovable arithmetical truth...

In a lovely paper , Leon Porter shows that semantic naturalism is false. One way to put the argument is as follows: If semantic naturalism...

For a while, I’ve been thinking of a teleological/normative account of representation. The basic idea is that: State S represents reality...

I’ve often defended a probabilistic objection to open future views on which either future-tensed contingents are all false or are neither tr...

Suppose you pursue truth for its own sake. As we learn from Aristotle, it does not follow that you don’t pursue truth for the sake of someth...

A scoring rule assigns a score to a credence assignment (which can but need not satisfy the axioms of probability), where a score is a rando...

One might think that being closer to the truth is guaranteed to get one to make better decisions. Not so. Say that a probability assignment ...

A credence assignment c on a space Ω of situations is a function from the powerset of Ω to [0, 1], with c ( E ) representing one’s degree...

Two soccer teams are facing off, with a billion fans watching on TV. Brazil has a score of 2 and Belgium has a score of 0, and there are 15 ...

Normally, our overt behavior has the presumption of moral permissibility: an action is morally permissible unless there is some specific rea...

The Math Tea argument is an argument that there are real numbers that can’t be defined. The idea is this: there are only countably many defi...

Is there a set of all set-theoretic truths? This would be the set of sentences (in some encoding scheme, such as Goedel numbers) in the lang...

If we are created by a loving God, there is good reason to expect that what is good for us to believe—maybe even good for us as moral agents...

Consider the non-bivalent logic solution to the problem of vagueness where we assign additional truth values between false and true. If the ...

Consider this thesis: Every positive true proposition has a truthmaker. This seems plausible. But I think it is only reasonable to accep...

I used to think that the following would be an uncontroversial example of truthmaking: Any elephant is a truthmaker for the proposition th...

Suppose Alice has an inconsistent probabilistic assignment P A . Then, famously, there is a series of bets on single propositions (call thes...

If presentism and most, if not all, other versions of the A -theory are true, then propositions change in truth value. For instance, on pres...