Non-True, False, and True Norms. An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Non-Truth

The adjective ‘false’ is usually considered antonymic to ‘true’. The present paper brings linguistic evidence that the antonymic relation doesn’t hold for some relevant meanings of ‘true’. De re truth and de re falsehood (which are predicated of res) are distinguished from de dicto truth and de dicto falsehood (which are predicated of dicta), thus showing that the philosophy of falsehood deosn’t tally nor exhaust the philosophy of non-truth. This distinction is then applied to the question of the truth of norms. It is often maintained that norms are not capable of being true or false? But, in what sense of ‘true’, in what sense of ‘false’? Two different theories of de dicto truth of norms are taken into account, and a common de re presupposition of these two theories is elicited: the (debatable) presupposition that norms are dicta, sentences.