ABSTRACT. " In this talk, I will try to home in on a conception of truth which makes the title of the talk unsatisfiable (by any p/S).  This will involve looking at different putative examples which have been claimed to satisfy (some precisification of) the talk's title.  Some of these are easily dismissed, as they clearly involve moral, pragmatic, all-things-considered, or subjective epistemic "ought"s.  After clearing this ground, I will try to motivate three claims: (1) that there is an objective (alethic) epistemic ought, (2) when "true" is understood as being (necessarily) co-extensional with this ought, the title of the talk is unsatisfiable (by any p/S), and (3) that this is a reason to accept a non-deflationist conception of truth that aligns with this particular epistemic ought.  I will conclude with two applications of the proposal: (a) the normativity of (classical) logic, and (b) some paradoxes of self-reference.
----

Branden Fitelson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. Before teaching at Northeastern, Branden held teaching positions at Rutgers, UC-Berkeley, San José State, and Stanford and visiting positions at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU-Munich and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. Branden got his MA & PhD in philosophy from UW-Madison. Before entering philosophy, Branden studied math & physics at Wisconsin, and he worked as a research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and as a NASA contractor.

The Sapientia Lecture Series is funded by The Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy.