English

On Classical Determinate Truth

Logic 2026-01-14 v2

Abstract

The paper proposes and studies new classical, type-free theories of truth and determinateness with unprecedented features. The theories are fully compositional, strongly classical (namely, their internal and external logics are both classical), and feature a \emph{defined} determinateness predicate satisfying desirable and widely agreed principles. The theories capture a conception of truth and determinateness according to which the generalizing power associated with the classicality and full compositionality of truth is combined with the identification of a natural class of sentences -- the determinate ones -- for which clear-cut semantic rules are available. Our theories can also be seen as the \emph{classical closures} of Kripke-Feferman truth: their ω\omega-models, which we precisely pinned down, result from including in the extension of the truth predicate the sentences that are satisfied by a Kripkean closed-off fixed point model. The theories compare to recent theories proposed by Fujimoto and Halbach, featuring a primitive determinateness predicate. In the paper we show that our theories entail all principles of Fujimoto and Halbach's theories, and are proof-theoretically equivalent to Fujimoto and Halbach's \cdplus\cdplus. {We also show establish some negative results on Fujimoto and Halbach's theories: such results show that, unlike what happens in our theories, the primitive determinateness predicate prevents one from establishing clear and unrestricted semantic rules for the language with type-free truth.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.04316,
  title  = {On Classical Determinate Truth},
  author = {Luca Castaldo and Carlo Nicolai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04316},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:36:33.353Z