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

In the first part of the paper, I investigate the relations between three Italian words belonging to the semantic field of “non-truth”: non-vero (‘non-true’), falso (‘false’), finto (‘fake’) through the test of the (intra-linguistic) translatability of the first one into the others. I will argue that the philosophy of non-truth is not merely specular (is not symmetric) to the philosophy of truth and is not reducible to the philosophy of falsehood, and I will show the relevance of a distinction between de dicto non-truth and de re non-truth. In the second part of the paper I will show how the non-coincidence of non-truth and falsehood, as well as the distinction of de re non-truth from de dicto non-truth, may contribute to throw some light on a vexata quaestio of the philosophy of norms: the question of truth of norms.