Idealism and the Identity Theory of Truth

Abstract

In a recent article, Hofweber (2019) presents a new, and surprising, argument for idealism. His argument is surprising because it starts with an apparently innocent premiss from the philosophy of language: that ‘that’-clauses do not refer. I do not think that Hofweber's argument works, and my first aim in this paper is to explain why. However, I agree with Hofweber that what we say about ‘that’-clauses has important metaphysical consequences. My second aim is to argue that, far from leading us into idealism, denying that ‘that’-clauses refer is the first step toward a kind of direct realism about belief.

Higher‐order metaphysics

“…It is not clear, however, whether this marks a genuine difference in the notion that the respective theorists are trying to capture. In fact, it has been argued that the higher‐order setting collapses any distinction between ‘representational’ propositions and ‘worldly’ facts (see Trueman, 2020), which, if correct, would suggest that we are concerned here only with a verbal difference.…”

“…Those higher‐orderists about propositions who follow, in varying degrees of proximity, the Priorian suggestion (Jones, 2019; Rosefeldt, 2008; Trueman, 2018, 2020, 2021) have claimed two advantages over the first‐order conception.…”

Higher-order metaphysics and the tropes versus universals dispute

“…In this spirit, higher-order resources have recently been brought to bear on a diverse list of topics, including unrestricted quantification (Williamson 2003), essence (Correia 2006), the internalism versus externalism debate (Besson 2009), the contingentism versus necessitism debate (Stalnaker 2012;Williamson 2013;Fritz and Goodman 2017), generalized identity (Rayo 2013;Dorr 2016), propositions (Trueman 2018(Trueman , 2020Jones 2019) and grounding (Correia and Skiles 2019).…”