The Taming of the True [Hardcover]

The Taming of the Truedefends and develops global semantic anti-realism. Neil Tennant argues compellingly that every truth is knowable, and that manifestationism in the theory of meaning entails logical reform. He extends semantic anti-realism to empirical discourse, developing new accounts of the analytic/synthetic distinction, cognitive significance and constructive falsifiability. The book has important consequences for the philosophy of mathematics and logic, the theory of meaning, metaphysics, and epistemology.

1:. Introduction
2:. The Realism Debate
3:. Irrealism
4:. Against Meaning Skepticism
5:. Avoiding Strict Finitism
6:. Meaning as Graspable
7:. Truth as Knowable
8:. Analyticity and Syntheticity
9:. Finding the Right Logic
10:. Cognitive Significance Regained
11:. Defeasibility and Constructive Falsifiability

This is an extremely ambitious book. The list of topics it addresses is a selection of major philosophical controversies of the twentieth century: the nature of realism, skepticism, the relations between knowledge, truth and understanding, the status of classical logic, the analytic/synthetic distinction, and the empiricist criterion of cognitive significance. on each of these topics, Tennant offers a number of valuable insights, and the book as a whole is a fine example of clarity and rigor in philosophy. --The Philosophical Review

[Tennant's} book addresses a number of important issues in contemporary philosophy, and the reader has much to gain from a careful study of the development. Few stones are left unturned...this rich study...presents a delightful and compelling holistic argument against 'Kripke's meanining-sceptic'...'a new, improved version' of the manifestation argument, and 'provides a revival of the positivist notion of cognitive significance '. The author provides a rigorous criterion aimed at demarcating 'the empirically meaningful from the metaphysically mló#