Truth Tellers in Bradwardine's Theory of Truth

March 2018

“Truth Tellers in Bradwardine's Theory of Truth,” pages 143-154 in Modern Views of Medieval Logic, edited by Christoph Kann, Benedikt Loewe, Christian Rode and Sara L. Uckelman, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales—Bibliotheca. Peeters Publishers, 2018

Stephen Read’s work on Bradwardine’s theory of truth is some of the most exciting work on truth and insolubilia in recent years. Read brings together modern tools of formal logic and Bradwardine’s theory of signification to show that medieval distinctions can give great insight into the behaviour of semantic concepts such as truth. In a number of papers, I have developed a model theory for Bradwardine’s account of truth. This model theory has distinctive features: it serves up models in which every declarative object (any object signifying anything) signifies its own truth. This leads to a puzzle: there are good arguments to the effect that if anything is a truth-teller, it is false. This is a puzzle. What distinguishes paradoxical truth-tellers from benign truth tellers? It is my task in this paper to explain this distinction, and to clarify the behaviour of truth-tellers, given Bradwardine’s account of signification.

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