Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Ring of Truth

One thing I've wanted to do for a while is to do a philosophical analysis of vague-sense forms of truth-judgments, i.e., the sort of thing that's expressed by "That has the ring of truth" or "That feels true" or, more broadly, "It seems like that would be true". Who knows whether I'll ever do anything with it (outside my specialization in early modern philosophy, and even to some extent within it, my approach to research is the Method of Whatever Comes Up, or, as I like to call it, the method of divine providence), but it would be interesting to look at what grounds it, how it functions in reasoning, what norms should be put into place to govern it, etc. I also suspect it would tie in with theories of good taste, which, as you know, is one of my longstanding interests. In any case, Chris at "Mixing Memory" has a post on the truth effect, which is the sort of thing that you'd have to look at from the psychological side.