About

Jamin Asay is a Professor and Interim Head of Philosophy at Purdue University. Prior to his current position, he served as Chairperson in Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and has taught at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holds an M.A. from Northern Illinois University, and a B.A. from Whitman College. His research focuses on metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, with particular interest in the nature of truth and its connection to other areas of philosophy. Currently, he is researching the role of truth in political speech, the viability of conceptual engineering as a research program, and contemporary accounts of truth that attempt to downplay its importance in our cognitive architecture.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Russell on Truth

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2026-02-24

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  Abstract The topic of truth was one that Russell returned to throughout his lifetime. His shifting views on the nature of truth reflected the development of his broader metaphysical and epistemological positions, and he was keen to observe how one’s theory of truth implicates one’s other philosophical views. This chapter covers Russell’s major writings on the subject of truth. It begins with Russell’s initial defense of the primitivist position that the property of truth is indefinable. Then it covers Russell’s critical objections against the coherence theory and pragmatism. Finally, it turns to the various forms of correspondence he defended, in connection to both his logical atomism and critique of verificationism.

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• Can’t Help Falling in Love (with Truth)

  Australasian Philosophical Review · 2025-01-02 · 2 citations

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• The metaphysics of conceptual engineering

  Inquiry · 2025-08-07 · 1 citations

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  This paper argues that the movement known as conceptual engineering cannot constitute a substantial methodological program for philosophy. The thought that conceptual engineering could be a revolutionary and/or revisionary method for philosophy rests on inaccurate understanding of the role that concepts play in philosophy. After showing how philosophy is ultimately interested in various phenomena, not the concepts capturing them, I argue that the practice most often touted by conceptual engineers—the revision of our entrenched concepts—is in fact impossible. What is possible—the development of new concepts—is typically downplayed by conceptual engineers, and cannot serve as substantive methodology for philosophy. I then argue that while there is room for some activity deserving the name ‘conceptual engineering’, there is no intellectual project associated with ‘conceptual ethics’. I conclude by offering a new way of thinking about amelioration in philosophy in light of the limits of conceptual engineering.

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• Experimenting with Truth

  Review of Philosophy and Psychology · 2024-03-25 · 2 citations

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• Concepts of truth?

  Asian Journal of Philosophy · 2024-09-05

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• Irreplaceable truth

  Synthese · 2024-03-02 · 1 citations

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• Truthmaking

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-01-20 · 19 citations

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  Truthmaking is the metaphysical exploration of the idea that what is true depends upon what exists. Truthmaker theorists argue about what the truthmaking relation involves, which truths require truthmakers, and what those truthmakers are. This Element covers the dominant views on these core issues in truthmaking. It also explores some key metaphysical topics and debates that are usefully approached by employing the tools of truthmaker theory: the debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of entities from the past, and the debate between actualists and possibilists over merely possible states of affairs. In the final section, the Element explores how to think about truthmakers for truths involving social constructions.

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• Deflationism, truth, and desire

  Ratio · 2022-05-12 · 1 citations

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  Abstract Deflationists about truth generally regard the contribution that “true” makes to utterances to be purely logical or expressive: it exists to facilitate communication, and remedy our expressive deficiencies that are due to ignorance or finitude. This paper presents a challenge to that view by considering alethic desires. Alethic desires are desires for one's beliefs to be true. Such desires, I argue, do not admit of any deflationarily acceptable analysis, and so challenge the deflationist's austere view about the semantic role of “true”. I consider a number of deflationist proposals for analyzing alethic desires, and find them all problematic.

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• Arne Næss’s experiments in truth

  Erkenntnis · 2022-08-31 · 5 citations

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• Replies to critics

  Asian Journal of Philosophy · 2022-04-09

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Frequent coauthors

• Sam Baron

  University of Melbourne

  5 shared

• S. Seth Bordner

  University of Alabama

  1 shared