Substantive Perspectivism ─ An Essay on Philosophical Concern With Truth

This book is an inquiry into the philosophical concern with truth as one joint subject in philosophy of language and metaphysics and presents a theory of truth, substantive perspectivism (SP). Emphasizing our basic pre-theoretic understanding of truth (i.e., what is captured by the axiomatic thesis of truth that the nature of truth consists in capturing the way things are), and in the deflationism vs. substantivism debate background, SP argues for the substantive nature of non-linguistic truth and its notion’s indispensable substantive explanatory role, both of which are not only intrinsically beyond what the linguistic function of the truth predicate can tell but are fundamentally related to the raison d’etre of the truth predicate. Taking a holistic approach, SP endeavors to do justice to various reasonable perspectives, which are somehow contained in many competing accounts of truth, through a coordinate system: SP interprets such perspectives as distinct but related perspective-elaboration principles that distinctively (regarding distinct dimensions of the truth concern and/or for the sake of distinct purposes) elaborate, but are also unified by, the truth axiom thesis. To look at the issue from a broader vision, the book also takes a cross-tradition approach exploring the relationship between Daoist thinking of truth and thinking about truth in analytic philosophy.This book will enhance our systematic understanding of the issue through its holistic approach, broaden our vision on the issue via its cross-tradition approach, and enrich the conceptual and explanatory resources in treating the issue.

Bo Mou is Professor of Philosophy [effective in May 2009] and Director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy at San Jose State University in California, USA. After receiving B.S. in mathematics, Mou obtained graduate degrees in philosophy from Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (M.A.) and from University of Rochester, USA (M.A. and Ph.D.). Mou was President (2002-5) of the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP). He has published widely in analytic philosophy, Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy, concerning philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophical methodology and ethics. His scholarly articles appear in such journals as Synthese, Metaphilosophy, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy East & West, Asian Philosophy, the Journal of Chinese Philosophy and Polylog. He is contributing editor of Two Roads to Wisdom? –Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions (Open Court, 2001), Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy (Ashgate, 2003), Davidson’s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement (Brill, 2006), Searle’s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement (Brill, 2008), and History of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge, 2009). He is author of Chinese Philosophy A-Z (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and editor (primary translator) of Truth, Meaning, and Method: Selections from the Philosophical Writings of Donald Davidson (Commercial Press, 2008) (in Chinese). Mou is currently finishing a monograph on reference and predication concerning the relation of language to objects and thought.