Abstract

This chapter discusses formal theories of truth: the redundancy theory and its ilk, distinguished by the attempt to characterize truth in terms of its structural properties, in the context of the position adopted by Putnam in his John Dewey Lectures, here styled ‘Common-sense Realism’. This position is described, combining two principles called the Thesis of the Internality and the Thesis of World-Embeddedness, with a formal account of truth. It is argued that Common-sense Realism, along with all theories comprising a formal account of truth, should be committed to the flames, because they are cut off from exploiting the Fregean model of meaning, based on a recursion on truth.