Disquotational theories of truth, that is, theories of truth based on the T-sentences or similar equivalences as axioms are often thought to be deductively weak. This view is correct if the truth predicate is allowed to apply only to sentences not containing the truth predicate. By taking a slightly more liberal approach toward the paradoxes, I obtain a disquotational theory of truth that is proof theoretically as strong as compositional theories such as the Kripket probe the compositional axioms.

In this article, the prospects of deflationism about the concept of truth are investigated. A new version of deflationism, called inferential deflationism, is articulated and defended. It is argued that it avoids the pitfalls of earlier deflationist views such as Horwich’s minimalist theory of truth and Field’s version of deflationism.

I define T-schema deflationism as the thesis that a theory of truth for our language can simply take the form of certain instances of Tarski's schema (T). I show that any effective enumeration of these instances will yield as a dividend an effective enumeration of all truths of our language. But that contradicts Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem. So the instances of (T) constituting the T-Schema deflationist's theory of truth are not effectively enumerable, which casts doubt on the idea that the (...) T-schema deflationist in any sense has a theory of truth. (The argument in section 2 of "Semantics for Deflationists" supercedes this paper.). (shrink)

Sections 3.16 and 3.23 of Roger Penrose's Shadows of the mind (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994) contain a subtle and intriguing new argument against mechanism, the thesis that the human mind can be accurately modeled by a Turing machine. The argument, based on the incompleteness theorem, is designed to meet standard objections to the original Lucas-Penrose formulations. The new argument, however, seems to invoke an unrestricted truth predicate (and an unrestricted knowability predicate). If so, its premises are inconsistent. The usual (...) ways of restricting the predicates either invalidate Penrose's reasoning or require presuppositions that the mechanist can reject. (shrink)

Proofs of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem are often accompanied by claims such as that the gödel sentence constructed in the course of the proof says of itself that it is unprovable and that it is true. The validity of such claims depends closely on how the sentence is constructed. Only by tightly constraining the means of construction can one obtain gödel sentences of which it is correct, without further ado, to say that they say of themselves that they are unprovable (...) and that they are true; otherwise a false theory can yield false gödel sentences. (shrink)

In defense of the minimalist conception of truth, Paul Horwich(2001) has recently argued that our acceptance of the instances of the schema,`the proposition that p is true if and only if p', suffices to explain our acceptanceof truth generalizations, that is, of general claims formulated using the truth predicate.In this paper, I consider the strategy Horwich develops for explaining our acceptance of truth generalizations. As I show, while perhaps workable on its own, the strategy is in conflictwith his response to (...) the liar paradox. Something must give. I consider and reject variousalternatives and emendations to the strategy. In order to resolve the conflict,I propose an alternative approach to the liar, one that supports Horwich's strategywhile leaving minimalism maximally uncompromised. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially explained in terms of the speech act of rejection. We implement the deflationist insight in a bilateral theory by taking (...) the meaning of the truth predicate to be explained by its inferential relation to assertion. We combine this account of the meaning of the truth predicate with a new diagnosis of the liar paradox: its derivation requires the truth rules to preserve evidence, but these rules only preserve commitment. The result is a novel inferential deflationist theory of truth, which solves the liar paradox in a principled manner. We end by showing that our theory and simple extensions thereof have the resources to axiomatize the internal logic of several supervaluational hierarchies, including Cantini’s. This solves open problems of Halbach (2011) and Horsten (2011). (shrink)