Pretense and Pathology

Bradley Armour-Garb is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University at Albany, State University of New York and a Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He is co-editor of and a contributor to several books including The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays (2004), Deflationism and Paradox (2005), and Deflationary Truth (2005). He is also the editor of and a contributor to The Relevance of the Liar (forthcoming). James A. Woodbridge is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of 'Truth as a Pretense' in Fictionalism in Metaphysics (2005). He has also published articles with Bradley Armour-Garb in journals including Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Analysis, Philosophical Studies, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and in edited collections such as New Waves in Truth (2010), Recent Trends in Philosophical Logic (2014), and Unifying the Philosophy of Truth (2015).

'This book not only offers about the best account I have seen of what is distinctive about philosophical fictionalism, but also offers a compelling argument in favour of the authors' own thoroughgoing 'semantic pretence' version of fictionalism. A remarkable achievement.' F. W. Kroon, University of Auckland

• Preface; 1. Philosophical fictionalism; 2. Semantic pretense-involving fictionalism and existence-talk; 3. Propositional realism and a SPIF account of proposition-talk; 4. T-deflationism and a SPIF account of truth-talk; 5. Diagnosing and treating the Liar Paradox and other apparent alethic pathologies; 6. SPIF accounts of reference-talk and predicate-satisfaction-talk and apparent non-alethic semantic pathology; 7. Extensions and objections; Bibliography; Index.