Deflationary Theories of Meaning

Disquotationalism is the view that the only notion of truth we really need is one that can be wholly explained in terms of such trivialities as: “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. The 'Classical Disquotational Strategy' attempts to establish this view case by case, by showing that each extant appeal to truth, in philosophical or scientific explanations, can be unmasked as an appeal only to disquotational truth. I argue here that the Classical Strategy fails in at least (...) two cases: attributions of truth to context-dependent utterances and uses of truth psychological explanations of behavioral success or, more fundamentally, appeals to falsity in psychological explanations of behavioral failure. -/- It's my intention to turn this paper into two papers. It's become quite unwieldy as it is---not unlike "The Strength of Truth Theories". (shrink)

It has been known for some time that context-dependence poses a problem for disquotationalism, but the problem has largely been regarded as one of detail: one that will be solved by the right sort of cleverness. I argue here that the problem is one of principle and that extant solutions, which are based upon the notion of translation, cannot succeed.

Methodological deflationism is a policy about how we should conduct ourselves when it comes to theories of truth: in particular, a deflationary theory of truth should be taken as one’s starting point, and the notion of truth should be inflated only as necessary. This policy is motivated, in part, by the need to balance the theoretical virtue of parsimony with that of explanatory sufficiency. In this article, the case is made that the methodological deflationist is in no position to properly (...) balance those virtues—a point made evident by tracing the relationship between semantic theories and the explanatory needs of theories of truth. Furthermore, methodological deflationism threatens to unduly influence semantic theorizing and, in doing so, displays an inappropriate bias towards deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam’s Realism with a Human Face began with a quotation from Rilke, exhorting us to ‘try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue’. Putnam followed this advice throughout his life. His love for the questions permanently changed how we understand them. In Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity – published only a few weeks after his death – Putnam continued to explore central questions concerning realism and perception, from the (...) perspective of ‘liberal naturalism’. The volume’s thirteen papers were written over the past fifteen years (only one paper is new), and they show a man who fully inhabited the questions he loved. And the main significance of this book is that it shows – implicitly, but very clearly – quite how much of Putnam’s contribution to his philosophy is continuous with his ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’. (shrink)

What do you know when you know what a sentence means? According to some theories, understanding a sentence is, in part, knowing its truth-conditions. Dorit Bar-On, Claire Horisk, and William Lycan have defended such theories on the grounds of an “epistemic determination argument”. That argument turns on the ideas that understanding a sentence, along with knowledge of the non-linguistic facts, suffices to know its truth-value, and that being able to determine a sentence’s truth-value given knowledge of the non-linguistic facts is (...) knowing its truth-conditions. I argue that the EDA withstands the objections recently raised by Daniel Cohnitz and Jaan Kangilaski, but fails for other reasons. It equivocates between a fine-grained and a coarse grained conception of “facts.”. (shrink)

Drawing on a rich pragmatist tradition, this book offers an account of the different kinds of ‘oughts’, or varieties of normativity, that we are subject to contends that there is no conflict between normativity and the world as science describes it. The authors argue that normative claims aim to evaluate, to urge us to do or not do something, and to tell us how a state of affairs ought to be. These claims articulate forms of action-guidance that are different in (...) kind from descriptive claims, with a wholly distinct practical and expressive character. This account suggests that there are no normative facts, and so nothing that needs any troublesome shoehorning into a scientific account of the world. This work explains that nevertheless, normative claims are constrained by the world, and answerable to reason and argumentation, in a way that makes them truth-apt and objective. (shrink)

В последние два-три года среди многочислен- ных проблем в отношении европейской и американской экономики все чаще стала упоминаться опасность дефляции. При этом в каче- стве примера рассматривается японская экономика, которая уже два десятилетия страдает от дефляции, несмотря на огромные раз- меры финансовых вливаний и усилия правительства разогнать ин- фляцию. В западных экономиках инфляция также низкая, времена- ми нулевая, переходящая в дефляцию. В целом есть основания счи- тать, что страны Европы заболевают «японской болезнью», а также что эта «болезнь» может прогрессировать либо (...) носить хрониче- ский характер. В США, хотя и в меньшей степени, также имеются признаки этой «болезни». В результате финансовые вливания мо- гут стать, как и в Японии, постоянными. В разделе показаны при- чины этой проблемы, объяснена неравномерность процессов инфляции – дефляции в мире, сделаны прогнозы. (shrink)

Primarily a response to Paul Horwich's "Composition of Meanings", the paper attempts to refute his claim that compositionality—roughly, the idea that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of its parts and how they are there combined—imposes no substantial constraints on semantic theory or on our conception of the meanings of words or sentences. Show Abstract.