Exact Truthmaking, Hyperintensionality, and Paradoxes

Abstract

This thesis is structured into three main parts, providing a comprehensive examination of truthmaking semantics within contemporary philosophical contexts. The first chapter, ‘Truth, Semantics, and Truthmaking Semantics’ lays the groundwork by positioning our study within the broader scope of truth-conditional semantics and detailing the modeling of exact truthmaking for propositional and first-order languages. In the second chapter, ‘The Algebra of Exact Entailment’, we undertake an algebraic examination of the Logic of Exact Entailment, which is grounded in the exact truthmaking paradigm. Our exploration encompasses proof-theoretical facets of the logic, characterizes it as a hyperintensional logic, and delves into the study of its algebraic properties. In the final part, ‘Formal Theories of Truthmaking’, we construct and analyze families of models for languages rich enough to talk about their own truthmaking semantics. Collectively, these sections provide a technical exploration of fundamental features of the paradigm of exact truthmaking semantics.

Date of Award	23 Jan 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Johannes Stern (Supervisor) & Philip D Welch (Supervisor)