A debate has been raging especially fiercely in the philosophy of science over a realist or antirealist interpretation of scientific theories. The heart of the issue consists in questions about the autonomy and accessibility of theoretical facts. Professor Horwich's aim in this research is to present a theory of truth which he will show is independent of these matters. He will then defend this approach against a wide variety of objections, and elaborate its implications for some long-standing problems in the philosophy of science. The theory of truth will be highly deflationary, involving little more than claims of the form, '"Quarks exist" is true if and only if quarks exist,' and implying that being true is a descriptive property of sentences (such as, for example, 'correspondence with reality' or 'verifiability') -- so that the traditional search for its underlying nature is a pseudo-problem. This point of view will be defended against criticisms of four types: (1) that the theory cannot be adequately formulated given difficulties raised by foreign languages, indexical expressions, and the 'liar' paradoxes; (2) that the theory is inconsistent with the uses of truth in semantics and logic; (3) that the explanatory function of truth in cognitive science implies that truth does have an underlying nature; and (4) that the role of the notion of truth in the philosophy of science cannot be accommodated. In the course of responding to these objections the substantial philosophical import of the theory will be displayed. Professor Horwich's general strategy is first to argue that many issues traditionally thought to revolve around the concept of truth do not really do so; and second, to show that the clarity and simplification gained by this insight is significant enough to enable solutions finally to be found. The primary application of this strategy will be to the problem of scientific realism. In particular, he argues that the main sources of difficulty in resolving questions over scientific realism have been confusion stemming from a distorted picture of the relationships between meaning and truth, and between confirmation and truth. A good account of truth will provide the basis for an accurate view of these relationships -- which will in turn enable us to achieve a proper understanding of the autonomy and accessibility of theoretical facts, and thereby to resolve the central questions in the realism/antirealism debate.
