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Contact us at: mark.wheeler@sdsu.edu

Last Update: December 14, 2011

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We invite you to apply to our seminar “Aristotle on Truth and Meaning,” a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar for university and college teachers, to be held at San Diego State University in San Diego, California, from 21 June until 16 July, 2010.

Our seminar will be devoted to the study of Aristotle’s semantic conception of truth and falsehood, both in light of his account of how human language and thought represent the world and in relation to other conceptions of truth and falsehood from those of his predecessors to those of leading contemporary philosophers. In Aristotle’s model of language and thought, linguistic assertions signify beliefs in the minds of language users. These beliefs represent the world and true beliefs represent the world the way it actually is (while false beliefs fail to do so). Aristotle’s theory of linguistic signification, representational thought, and truth are neatly integrated and provide a highly sophisticated account of how we represent the world. In order to understand his theory better, we shall examine relevant texts from his logical works, his physical and biological works, and his psychological works. The objective of our study of Aristotle's theory of truth is to better understand how, exactly, Aristotle conceived of the relationship between language, thought, and reality. His theory will also be considered in the light of recent research in the related fields of philosophical semantics, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. We will undertake a careful study of Aristotle’s texts and the most recent scholarship in these fields.

Aristotle’s theory of truth is important for a number of reasons. First, it is interesting in its own right and informs other central areas of Aristotle’s philosophy. In particular, the way truth is construed and false judgment explained has important implications for understanding meaning and reference. Second, careful consideration of Aristotle’s account of truth provides an excellent vantage point from which to consider some of the most important parts of his philosophical system--his logic, his epistemology, and his ontology. Third, Aristotle's central thesis is that truth is saying of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not--often called the “correspondence theory of truth.” Some version of this thesis has dominated Western thought about language, mind, and knowledge for two millennia, and Aristotle’s version has a number of virtues.

The fifth century sophist Protagoras--in defending his “Man is the measure” doctrine--challenged realist theories of meaning and truth. Plato--in the Cratylus--sketched both a conventionalist and a realist account of meaning only to argue that both are hopelessly flawed. He formulated--in both the Cratylus and the Sophist--a definition of truth similar to Aristotle’s and he highlighted--in the Theatetus and Sophist–the difficulties, given this definition, involved in accounting for false judgment. Aristotle, preeminent among Plato’s students and the first real historian of philosophy, provides us with unsurpassed insight into these earlier conceptions of truth, falsehood, language and thought.

Yet another reason it is important to study Aristotle’s theory of truth is that it profoundly influenced subsequent theories of truth and meaning, both in substance and method (we would go so far as to say that there has been no serious rival to Aristotelian semantics until relatively recent times). In the medieval period, for instance, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, and others begin with Aristotelian positions on these issues; we can understand much of the epistemology done in the Renaissance and Modern periods as an effort to respond to skeptical challenges without forsaking a correspondence conception of truth. If we understand Aristotle’s theory, we can better appreciate these later developments and grasp more easily the reasons given by some for rejecting them. We believe that Aristotle’s theory of truth may suggest new directions for contemporary research in the philosophy of language and mind, linguistics and cognitive science.

Thinkers such as Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, Quine, Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein either rejected the correspondence conception or radically reconceived it. But it was never without advocates, and recently researchers interested in developing a naturalistic account of language and thought have returned to Aristotle for inspiration and guidance. A growing number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and others now recognize the importance of his contribution for contemporary research.