Corso di laurea magistrale in Filosofia

This year's course focuses on truth and paradoxes. The aim of the course is to enable all students to think rigorously about the fundamental features of the notion of truth and semantic paradoxes, and to present their own views clearly and systematically.

By the end of this course, students are expected to be able to: (i) show a clear understanding of the contemporary debate in theories of truth, in both their formal and philosophical aspects; (ii) articulate the relative merits and defects of the main theories of truth and paradox, across a wide range of logical frameworks; (iii) develop in a sustained manner their own criticisms of some of these ideas and arguments, and initiate original lines of thought; (iv) show a deep understanding of the connections between theories of truth and other areas of philosophy (notably logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language); (v) have deepened their ability to make complex ideas understandable in both speaking and writing. 

Frontal instruction.

The exam consists in writing a short paper on one of the course's topics. The topic will be chosen by the students. The paper will have to be between 4.000 and 5.000 words long (including notes but excluding the references). The paper will have to include a word count, and  points will be subtracted for papers that are too short (< 4.000 words) or too long (> 5.000 words). Finally, the paper will have to reference (and discuss) at least 6 new papers in the bibliography, that is 6 papers that have not been previously discussed in the course. Students are encouraged to make use of J. Pryor's excellent guide to writing a philosophy paper: http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html

Once ready, the paper will be discussed at the oral examination. Therefore, students who want to take the Epistemology exam will have to write the paper and go to the oral examination. However, only the paper determines the final grade -- the oral examination is only intended to provide feedback to students, and it is necessary to register the final grade. The paper will have to be sent one week before the selected exam date at the latest. 

The course consists in 12 lectures, of 3 hours each. Here below the weekly breakdown, together with the assigned readings. Please note that the program might change during the course. 

1. Introduction to the course.  

2. Semantic paradoxes 
- The Liar Paradox. Montague's Paradox. 
- Curry's Paradox.  
- The paradoxes of naïve validity. 

Reading: Beall, JC and Glanzberg, M. (2008), "Where the Paths Meet: Remarks on Truth and Paradox", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 32, pp. 169-199.

3. The expressive role of truth.   
- Agreement and disagreement.  
- Adequacy requirements. 

Reading: Leitgeb, H. (2007), "What theories of truth should be like and cannot be", Philosophy Compass 2(2), pp. 276-290.

4. Some non-formal theories of truth. Towards formal approaches. 
- Triviality approaches.  
- "No-proposition-expressed" views.
- Towards formal theories: technical preliminaries.  

Reading: Chihara, C. (1979), "The semantic paradoxes: A diagnostic investigation", The Philosophical Review, 88(4), pp. 590-618.

5. Classical theories: disquotational theories and compositional, symmetric theories (typed and type-free)  
- TB, UTB (Tarski Biconditionals, Uniform Tarski Biconditionals)
- CT^-, CT (Restricted Compositional Truth, Compositional Truth)
- FS (Friedman-Sheard)

Reading: Halbach, V. (2014), Axiomatic Theories of Truth, Second edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, chapters: 7, 8 (until §8.1 excluded), 9 (until §9.2 excluded), 14 (until §14.2 excluded).

6. Classical compositional asymmetric theories. 
- Kripke's construction, fixed-point models.  
- The closing-off of a fixed point.  
- KF (Kripke-Feferman), KF + Cons, KF + Comp

Reading: Kripke, S. (1975), "Outline of a theory of truth", Journal of Philosophy 72, pp. 690-716.

7. Non-classical structural theories.  
- Paracomplete theories.  
- Paraconsistent theories.  
- Extensions.

Reading: Horsten, L. (2011), "Levity", Mind, 118, 471.

8. Non-classical sub-structural theories.  
- Non-transitive theories. 
- Non-reflexive theories. 
- Non-contractive theories (if time permits)

Readings:
- Cobreros, P., Égré, P., Ripley, D. and van Rooij, R.: 2013, "Reaching transparent truth", Mind 122, pp. 841-866.
- Nicolai, C. and Rossi, L.: (2018), "Principles for object-linguistic validity: from logical to irreflexive", Journal of Philosophical Logic, 47(3), pp. 549-577.

9. Revenge paradoxes. 
- Meta-theoretic revenge arguments. 
- Object-linguistic revenge arguments.  
- Generalized revenge. 

Reading: Shapiro, L. (2011) "Expressibility and the Liar’s Revenge", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(2), pp. 297-314.

10. Contextualism
- Contextualist analysis of paradoxes. 
- Parsons-Glanzberg contextualist theories. 
- Expressibility and quantifiers. 

Reading: Parsons, C. (1974), "The Liar paradox", Journal of Philosophical Logic, 3(4), pp. 381-412.

11. Bicontextualism 
- Generality relativism vs. generality absolutism. 
- Bipartite semantics. 

Reading: Rossi, L. (2022), ‘Bicontextualism’, draft.

12. Guest lecture (Prof. Javier De Donato Rodriguez, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela): Deflationism: explanatory power, semantics, and (meta-)ontology.

Readings: 

- Bradley, D. (2022) ‘The Explanatory Power of Defationary Truth', Erkenntnis.

- Marschall, B. and Schindler, T. (2021), ‘Semantic deflationism and meta-ontological deflationism', The Philosophical Quarterly 71(1).

Inserire qui il testo in inglese (massimo 4000 caratteri). Non eliminare l’indicazione “English” tra le parentesi quadre; è necessaria per la creazione dell’etichetta di visualizzazione del testo in inglese. Una volta inseriti i testi eliminare queste indicazioni in modo che non risultino visibili agli studenti.

- The course textbook is "Truth and Paradox in Context" (J. Murzi and L. Rossi), forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Drafts of the book chapters will be provided by the lecturer.