TRUTH AND REPRESENTATION

Truth and Representation is an original critique of the concept of truth aligned with an innovative account of verbal meaning. Their application in furthering the understanding of the nature of both human knowledge and forms of artistic representation is explored.

Traditional philosophical accounts of truth in terms of correspondence between statements and facts are replaced by a much wider understanding of truth that aims to reflect its central place in human life while accommodating the thrust of the correspondence account. That involves a thoroughgoing analysis of the relationships between truth and language, including an original account of the basic features of verbal meaning. It also extends to accounts of truth in artistic representation, numbers and philosophical analysis itself. These form a large part of the book (Part Four The Truth of Representation). While based in the preceding analyses of truth and verbal meaning, the accounts are essay-like and may to an extent be read in their own right.

A very detailed Table of Contents has been provided to help the reader to navigate the wide range of material covered.

Main themes include:

• understanding truth as the illusion that the world corresponds with language;
• the four basic ways the words in sentences mean;
• stated truth understood as statements of word meanings eg "Snow is white";
• how human sensory experience is bound to its verbal articulation;
• delineation of a fundamental distinction between oral and written discourse in relation to truth;
• how writing means beyond the spoken word;
• the truth of forms of discourse (scientific, historical, media etc);
• truth in artistic and numerical representation.

This last includes original analyses, within the philosophical account of meaning and truth in the book, of the basic nature and "truth" of poetry, fiction, painting, numbers, music, drama, film, opera and philosophical analysis.

Corrigendum

The schematic table at pp 220-21 of the paperback missed out some of the latter part of the text when the manuscript was converted to the printed format. The affected text should read as follows.

If it is an activity constituted by a verbally interactive relationship, it involves either:

representational truth or practical truth (eg giving directions, buying and selling).

Representational truth is either:

representation of truth through semantic ascent (unstated) or true statements (stated) as statements of word-meanings.

Oral truth represented through semantic ascent either is based in or leads to written truth (as a lecture is delivered from notes, what is said in a police interrogation is for the record and discussions at "meetings" involve written documents).

Informal oral discourse

In the case of informal oral discourse, there is: a verbally constituted activity (rather than an extra-verbal one); based not in truth (either as practical truths or through semantic ascent), but in verbally interactive relationships and implicatures; with semantic ascent leading to comments and judgments; and, where there is, incidentally, truth, it is in the form of true statements relating to word meanings.

Anyone purchasing the paperback is asked to print out this amending text. The wording in the eBook version is complete.

The table provides a summary of the diagnosis of oral discourse as set out in the book.