Alethic pluralism is the view that there is more than one way for propositions to be true. This paper examines three ways of understanding this idea and argues that each has significant flaws. It concludes by suggesting a way for the pluralist to construct a more plausible position. Such theories, in other words, are monist : truth is identical to some single first-order property of propositions; and the truth concept univocally expresses that property.
Theories that seem plausible when applied to propositions about the physical world around us such as the correspondence theory are less plausible when applied to propositions about norms. And theories that seem plausible when applied to the propositions about norms such as, perhaps, the coherence theory seem much less convincing when applied to propositions about the physical world.
Indeed, and as a number of philosophers have suggested, the history of the debate over truth suggests that for any sufficiently robustly characterized truth property F, there appears to be some kind of propositions K which lack F but which are intuitively true or capable of being true.
This can be called the scope problem [Lynch, ] 1. Those adopting the first strategy hold fast to their favored theory of truth and deny that various troublesome propositions are true, or even capable of being true. This is the strategy favored by expressivists, error-theorists, fictionalists and so on.
The second strategy dismisses the whole project of giving a metaphysical theory of truth, and declares that all propositions are equally apt for truth in a uniform but entirely thin sense. This is the deflationary strategy. This is alethic pluralism. Pluralism has been getting an increasing amount of attention, and perhaps it is not hard to see why 2. If the pluralist position can be made coherent, then there is more to say about truth than the deflationist believes, but the more there is to say depends on the type of proposition in question 3.
