A Review of William Alston’s A Realist Conception of Truth

Abstract

A Realist Conception of Truth has been generally praised as a serious and insightful work on epistemology. This William P. Alston’s text is directed at those who are concerned with epistemological studies, those interested in how to contemplate on truth, and those epistemologists seeking for justification of beliefs, statements, sentences and propositions. In this text, the problem of truth receives a critical exploration in Alston’s polemic of realism. Alston’s goal is to defend a version of realism. Ultimately, he argues that the most defensible version of realist theories is alethic realism, which suggests simply that, “A statement is true if and only if what the statement is about is as the statement says it is. Alternatively in terms of propositions, the conception is such that the schema ‘it is true that p if and only if p yields a (necessary, conceptually, analytically) true statement for any substitution instance” (Alston, 1997: 1). As a matter of fact, the author’s view is a cross reference to the issue of truth discussed from the days of Socrates to Edmund Gettier; then to our time.