I argue that deflationary theories of truth reveal an important lesson for the broader theory of truth: although the notion of truthmaking has played an essential role in many traditional theories of truth, it can be separated from and survive the rejection of substantive theories of truth. I argue that many of the traditional substantive theories of truth are unified in defining truth in terms of the ontological grounds that (...) are needed to account for truth. Deflationists reject the idea that a theory of truth needs such metaphysical implications, but in so doing they need not rule out the possibility of developing an independently motivated theory of truthmaking. I argue that deflationists can and should embrace truthmaker theory, once it is shorn from its connection to the traditional project of defining truth. (shrink)

Theodore de Laguna develops and argues for a deflationary view of truth well before the publication of what many have taken to be its source, or at least its inspiration, namely Frank P. Ramsey’s paper ‘Facts and Propositions’. I outline de Laguna’s view of truth and the arguments he offers for it; I also discuss its role in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. My outline and discussion serve as an introduction to de Laguna’s ‘A Nominalistic Interpretation of (...) Truth’, a paper he originally wrote in English but which has hitherto only been published in French. (shrink)

The article first rehearses three deflationary theories of reference, (1) disquotationalism, (2) propositionalism (Horwich), and (3) the anaphoric theory (Brandom), and raises a number of objections against them. It turns out that each corresponds to a closely related theory of truth, and that these are subject to analogous criticisms to a surprisingly high extent. I then present a theory of my own, according to which the schema “That S(t) is about t” and the biconditional “S refers to (...) x iff S says something about x” are exhaustive of the notions of aboutness and reference. An account of the usefulness of “about” is then given, which, I argue, is superior to that of Horwich. I close with a few considerations about how the advertised theory relates to well-known issues of reference, the conclusions of which is (1) that the issues concern reference and aboutness only insofar as the words “about” and “refer” serve to generalise over the claims that are really at issue, (2) that the theory of reference will not settle the issues, and (3) that it follows from (2) that the issues do not concern the nature of aboutness or reference. (shrink)

The concept of truth is a fundamental philosophical inquiry that transcends time and cultural boundaries. This paper is aimed at illuminating the nature of truth and its intricate connection to the fabric of reality through an extensive bibliography. The reader will have at his disposal the most important references on the subject with a short abstract. The references are under the various theories of truth, even knowing the difficulties in classifying the authors under a label as (...) those proposed by the various theories of truth such as the correspondence, pragmatic, deflationary, constructivist, ontological, and semantic. (shrink)

Minimalism is currently the received deflationary theory of truth. On minimalism, truth is a transparent concept and a deflated property of truth bearers. In this paper, I situate minimalism within current deflationary debate about truth by contrasting it with its main alternative―the redundancy theory of truth. I also outline three of the primary challenges facing minimalism, its formulation, explanatory adequacy and stability, and draw some lessons for the soundness of its conception of (...) class='Hi'>truth. (shrink)

This paper by Theodore de Laguna presents and argues for the deflationary theory of truth. The paper was first published in French in 1922. The version published here is the original, English version of the paper and has been edited by Joel Katzav.

The metaphysical dispute between moral realists and antirealists is cast in terms of properties: the realist holds that moral properties exist, the antirealist denies this claim. There is a longstanding philosophical dispute over the nature of properties, and the obscurity of properties may make the realist/antirealist dispute even more obscure. In the spirit of deflationary theories of truth, we can turn to a deflationary theory of properties in order to clarify this issue. One might reasonably worry (...) that such an account of properties would not be capable of properly characterizing disputes regarding the existence or nonexistence of genuine moral properties. In this paper, I will show that, within this framework, the traditional disputes over the existence of moral properties can be characterized in a far clearer fashion than is usually the case. A deflationary account of properties, along with an explanatory hierarchy of properties, makes the dispute in ontology clear. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to (...) deflationism as the provenance of the suspicion that Truth doesn't exist. But it would be hasty to simply classify the account as deflationary. Each of the 'truth-like' properties that it recognizes is highly substantive--that is, complex and explanatorily potent. So we should deflate Truth by recognizing that it doesn't exist, but we should also recognize that one of the most vital tasks in truth theory is to discover the essences of the many truth-like properties. My aim here is to do precisely this. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Haig and Borsboom explore the relevance of the theory of truth for psychological science. Although they conclude that correspondence theories of truth are best suited to offer the resources for making sense of scientific practice, they leave open the possibility that other theories might accomplish those same ends. I argue that deflationary theories of truth, which deny that there is any substantive property that unifies the class of truths, makes (...) equally good sense of scientific practice as the correspondence theory, but at lesser theoretical cost. I also argue that the considerations Haig and Borsboom draw on are better thought of as issues relevant to realism, and thus separate from the theory of truth. I conclude that while they are correct to engage questions about what makes true the various claims that arise in psychological research, they may do so without saddling themselves with a correspondence theory. (shrink)

A theory of truth is an explanation of the nature of truth and set of rules that true things obey. A theory of truth is basically an attempt to enlighten on the nature of truth and formulate a set of laws that ‘true’ things follow. When we recall a memory, or analyze a statement, or appeal to evaluate within our brain, in fact, we are in quest for truth. Different theories of truth try (...) to understand it from different perspectives. Attempts to analyze truth down the history can neatly be divided into two: Classical and Contemporary theories. The classical or otherwise known as the traditional theories of truth are, Correspondence theory, Coherence theory, Pragmatic theory. Contemporary theories or otherwise known as modern theories of truth are mostly deflationary theories. Over and above these two categories we shall discuss a new theory of truth known as Functional theory of truth. When we analyze contemporary theories of truth, such as functionalist theory of truth, specifically alethic pluralism which commits the problem of mixed compound and also suggest the solution for the same. (shrink)

By a classical result of Kotlarski, Krajewski and Lachlan, pathological satisfaction classes can be constructed for countable, recursively saturated models of Peano arithmetic. In this paper we consider the question of whether the pathology can be eliminated; we ask in effect what generalities involving the notion of truth can be obtained in a deflationary truth theory (a theory of truth which is conservative over its base). It is shown that the answer depends on the notion of (...) pathology we adopt. It turns out in particular that a certain natural closure condition imposed on a satisfaction class—namely, closure of truth under sentential proofs—generates a nonconservative extension of a syntactic base theory (Peano arithmetic). (shrink)

In this paper, we present what we call the argument from accidental truth, according to which some instances of deflationist schemata, even those carefully reformulated and adjusted by Field and Horwich to accommodate the truth of utterances, are falsified due to accidental truths. Since the folk concept of truth allows for accidental truths, the deflationary theory of truth will face a serious problem. In particular, it follows that the deflationist schema fails to capture the proper (...) extension of truth by precluding accidental truths of utterances. Even though the argument uses the contextualist cases, this conclusion does not require so much as the truth of contextualism, but only two assumptions, the existence of context-relative non-literal contents of utterances (or speech acts), and the existence of accidental truths, both of which are widely accepted by folks and theorists. We will also consider various responses to the argument, including the revisionary deflationist position, all of which we argue are unsatisfactory or committed to a highly implausible view. (shrink)

One of the popular explications of the deflationary tenet of ‘thinness’ of truth is the conservativeness demand: the declaration that a deflationary truth theory should be conservative over its base. This paper contains a critical discussion and assessment of this demand. We ask and answer the question of whether conservativity forms a part of deflationary doctrines.

It is widely believed that deflationary truth has no explanatory power. I will argue that it does. Specifically, I will consider some objections to deflationary truth having explanatory power, and argue that they fail. The position which will emerge is that the deflationary concept of truth is analogous to the concept of an average. Scientists take averages to be explanatory, and I will argue that the concept of deflationary truth is explanatory in (...) the same way. I then argue that this deflationary _concept_ of truth motivates a theory of the _property_ of truth which is metaphysically disunified, but that this is no obstacle to explanation. This leads to a way of understanding the deflationary/substantive distinction in terms of grounding. (shrink)

I argue that there is no metaphysically substantive property of truth. Although many take this thesis to be central to deflationism about truth, it is sometimes left unclear what a metaphysically substantive property of truth is supposed to be. I offer a precise account by relying on the distinction between the property and concept of truth. Metaphysical substantivism is the view that the property of truth is a sparse property, regardless of how one understands the (...) nature of sparse properties. I then offer two new arguments against metaphysical substantivism that employ ideas involving recombination and truthmaking. First, I argue that there are no theoretically compelling reasons to posit the existence of a metaphysically substantive property of truth. Secondly, I argue that if we do posit the existence of such a property, then we end up with a view that is either contradictory or unmotivated. What we’re left with is a metaphysically deflationary account of the property of truth that fully respects the metaphysical ambitions of truthmaker theory, and that is consistent with both the view that truth is a deflated, explanatorily impotent concept and the view that truth is an explanatorily powerful concept. (shrink)

What requirements must deflationary formal theories of truth satisfy? This chapter argues against the widely accepted view that compositional and Tarskian theories of truth are substantial or otherwise unacceptable to deflationists. First, two purposes that a formal truth theory can serve are distinguished: one descriptive, the other logical (i.e., to characterise the correctness of inferences involving ‘true’). The chapter argues that the most compelling arguments for the incompatibility of compositional and Tarskian theories concern (...) descriptive theories only. -/- Second, two requirements that any deflationist truth theory intended to serve a logical purpose must satisfy are put forward. These requirements, it is argued, suggest that (i) many well-known compositional and Tarskian theories are acceptable from a deflationist standpoint (including CT); (ii) certain other popular theories of truth (including KF and FS) are not similarly acceptable; (iii) there are no conclusive reasons to impose a conservativeness requirement on deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher has argued for a causal correspondence view of truth, as against a deflationary view, on the grounds that the former is better poised than the latter to explain systematically successful patterns of action. Though Kitcher is right to focus on systematically successful action, rather than singular practical successes, he is wrong to conclude that causal correspondence theories are capable of explaining systematic success. Rather, I argue, truth bears no explanatory relation to systematic practical success. (...) Consequently, the causal correspondence view is not in a better position to explain success than the deflationary view; theories of truth are the wrong place to look for explanations of systematic practical success. (shrink)

Truth is a matter of interest not only to philosophers, but to scientists and other researchers in various branches of knowledge. This paper examines Davidson’s views of the concept of truth. In the first section, I provide a brief account of the basic ideas of Davidson’s philosophy. An understanding of Davidson’s philosophy is essential for anyone who wishes to follow recent debates in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of (...) the mind. I give also a brief sketch of the leading traditional theories of truth, i.e., coherence, correspondence and pragmatic theories. In the second section, I give a comprehensive account of Davidson’s main contributions to the truth - the conditions theory of meaning. That the meaning of a sentence can be given by stating the conditions under which it is true, is not a novel idea. It is at least as old as the work of Frege. In addition to Frege, this idea has been held by, among others, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine and - as its leader apologist and most recent proponent - Davidson. Before I look at the details of Davidson’s contributions, I show how they relate to the work of Frege, Tarski, and Quine, all of whom greatly influenced Davidson’s theory. Putnam, Dummett, Rorty and many other philosophers rank Davidson among the deflationists. They all think that Tarski’s truth predicates completely capture the concept of truth. This is a mistake. The third section is concerned with this mistake. In the fourth section, I explain Davidson’s criticisms of what he regards as the main other anti-deflationary attempts to characterize truth: views which epistemologize truth on the one hand, and the correspondence theory of truth, on the other hand. Finally, in the fifth section, I make some remarks about Davidson’s treatment of the concept of truth. (shrink)

Aristotle’s words in the Metaphysics: “to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true” are often understood as indicating a correspondence view of truth: a statement is true if it corresponds to something in the world that makes it true. Aristotle’s words can also be interpreted in a deflationary, i.e., metaphysically less loaded, way. According to the latter view, the concept of truth is contained in platitudes like: (...) ‘It is true that snow is white iff snow is white’, ‘It is true that neutrinos have mass iff neutrinos have mass’, etc. Our understanding of the concept of truth is exhausted by these and similar equivalences. This is all there is to truth. In his book Truth (Second edition 1998), Paul Horwich develops minimalism, a special variant of the deflationary view. According to Horwich’s minimalism, truth is an indefinable property of propositions characterized by what he calls the minimal theory, i.e., all (nonparadoxical) propositions of the form: It is true that p if and only if p. Although the idea of minimalism is simple and straightforward, the proper formulation of Horwich’s theory is no simple matter. In this paper, I shall discuss some of the difficulties of a logical nature that arise. First, I discuss problems that arise when we try to give a rigorous characterization of the theory without presupposing a prior understanding of the notion of truth. Next I turn to Horwich’s treatment of the Liar paradox and a paradox about the totality of all propositions that was first formulated by Russell (1903). My conclusion is that Horwich’s minimal theory cannot deal with these difficulties in an adequate way, and that it has to be revised in fundamental ways in order to do so. Once such revisions have been carried out the theory may, however, have lost some of its appealing simplicity. (shrink)

In this paper we confront a challenge to truthmaker theory that is analogous to the objections raised by deflationists against substantive theories of truth. Several critics of truthmaker theory espouse a ‘deflationary’ attitude about truthmaking, though it has not been clearly presented as such. Our goal is to articulate and then object to the underlying rationale behind deflationary truthmaking. We begin by developing the analogy between deflationary truth and deflationary truthmaking, and then show (...) how the latter can be found in the work of Dodd, Hornsby, Schnieder, Williamson, and others. These philosophers believe that the ambitions of truthmaker theory are easily satisfied, without recourse to ambitious ontological investigation—hence the analogy with deflationary truth. We argue that the deflationists’ agenda fails: there is no coherent deflationary theory of truthmaking. Truthmaking, once deflated, fails to address the questions at the heart of truthmaking investigation. Truthmaking cannot be had on the cheap. (shrink)

I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to (...) be unambiguous. Ch. 2 is a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier. (shrink)

This essay offers an account and defense of conceptual primitivism about truth: the view that the concept of truth is a fundamental concept that cannot be analyzed or defined in terms of concepts that are more fundamental. It considers three arguments in defense of primitivism, and meets a familiar objection that fundamental concepts are by their nature obscure and mysterious. It concludes by considering the ways in which primitivism is similar to and different from other theories of (...) truth, both substantive and deflationary. (shrink)

For many years there has been a debate in truthmaking theory between proponents of the substantive and deflationary approaches. Substantivists about truthmaking maintain that we need entities called truthmakers, while deflationists of truthmaking argue that the asymmetric form of the T-schema is sufficient. In contrast to incompatibilists, who argue that one should adopt only one of these approaches, I propose a compatibilist theory of truthmaking in which the two approaches complement each other through the distribution of different functions of (...) truthmaking. I find that this helps to solve the problem of truthmaking of certain contentious truths, such as negative truths. (shrink)

Constructive empiricism, the scientific anti-realism championed by Bas van Fraassen, claims to offer an adequate reconstruction of the aim and practice of scientific inquiry without adopting the inflationary metaphysical excesses of scientific realism. In articulating the positions of the realist and the empiricist, van Fraassen freely makes use of the concept of truth. Theories of truth come in a variety of flavors, some more metaphysically stark than others. Deflationary theories of truth, for instance, boast (...) of the ability to offer a full account of the nature of truth without having to succumb to the supposed metaphysical extravagances accompanying more substantive accounts. Constructive empiricism and deflationism about truth seem, then, to form a natural pair. My contention is that such a pairing is not possible— constructive empiricism requires a more substantive account of truth than can be offered by the deflationist. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the (...) final section, we look at the underinvestigated interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here. (shrink)

A raft of new philosophical problems concerning truth have recently been discovered by several theorists. These problems concern the question of how ascriptions of truth are to be grounded. Most previous commentators have taken the problems to shed light on the theory of ground. In this paper, I argue that they also shed light on the theory of truth. In particular, I argue that the notion of ground can be deployed to clearly articulate one strand of (...) class='Hi'>deflationary thinking about truth, according to which truth is “metaphysically lightweight.” I offer a ground-theoretic explication of the lightness of truth and show how it yields a novel solution to the problems concerning how truth is grounded. So, the theory of truth and the theory of ground interact fruitfully: we can apply the notion of ground to offer a clear explication of the deflationist claim that truth is “metaphysically lightweight” that both captures the motivations for that claim and solves the problems. (shrink)

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)

It's often said that according to deflationary theories of truth, truth is not a ‘substantial’ property. While this is a fine slogan, it is far from transparent what deflationists mean (or ought to mean) in saying that truth is ‘insubstantial’. Focusing so intently upon the concept of truth and the word ‘true’, I argue, deflationists and their critics have been insufficiently attentive to a host of metaphysical complexities that arise for deflationists in connection with (...) the property of truth. My aim is to correct several misunderstandings as to what deflationists are after here—including some harboured by deflationists themselves—and to offer an account of the commitments about truth's nature that they ought to undertake. In developing this account, I focus particularly upon the issue of what metaphysics of truth a Horwichian minimalist ought to adopt. (shrink)

It has been argued by several philosophers that a deflationary conception of truth, unlike more robust conceptions of truth, cannot properly account for the nature of moral discourse. This is due to what I will call the “quick route problem”: There is a quick route from any deflationary theory of truth and certain obvious features of moral practice to the attribution of truth to moral utterances. The standard responses to the quick route problem are (...) either to urge accepting a conception of truth more robust than deflationism (Boghossian 1990), or to revise deflationary accounts in order to block straightforward attribution of truth to moral utterances (Field 1994). I contend that neither of these standard responses is well-motivated, for it is a merit of deflationary accounts rather than a defect that such accounts present a quick route to moral truth. (shrink)

The theme of this special issue is minimalism about truth, a conception which has attracted extensive support since the landmark publication of Paul Horwich's Truth (1990). Many well-esteemed philosophers have challenged Horwich's alethic minimalism, an especially austere version of deflationary truth theory. In part, this is at least because his brand of minimalism about truth also intersects with several different literatures: paradox, implicit definition, bivalence, normativity, propositional attitudes, properties, explanatory power, meaning and use, and so (...) forth. Deflationist sympathizers have introduced a few developments and emendations, while critics and other interlocutors have generated objections that have required further responses. Some of these works appeared in the first few years following the publication of the first edition of Truth. But others have appeared only in the last five or ten years, indicating that interest in the minimalist conception continues to bloom and be a highly fecund source for new ideas. Some of those new ideas are collected here, in a special issue celebrating collectively the 25th anniversary of Horwich's Truth in 2015 and the 20th anniversary of the revised edition in 2018. The intent of the issue is overwhelmingly prospective rather than retrospective; however, it presents original work and fresh perspectives, including a new contribution by Paul Horwich himself, that jointly offer au currant reflections on the current status and future promise of the minimal conception. (shrink)

The paper proposes a strategy for understanding metaphysical grounding in deflationary terms and, more generally, proposes a form of methodological deflationism with respect to the notions of ground. The idea is to define a deflationary is grounded in-predicate by appeal to the two-place non-causal connective ‘because’ and a deflationary truth predicate. To this end, we discuss the explanatory role of the truth-predicate in non-causal explanations and develop a theory of truth for the language of (...) the ‘because’-connective. We argue that at least from a logical perspective our deflationary notion of ground is up to the task. (shrink)

Conservativeness has been proposed as an important requirement for deflationary truth theories. This in turn gave rise to the so-called ‘conservativeness argument’ against deflationism: a theory of truth which is conservative over its base theory S cannot be adequate, because it cannot prove that all theorems of S are true. In this paper we show that the problems confronting the deflationist are in fact more basic: even the observation that logic is true is beyond his reach. (...) This seems to conflict with the deflationary characterization of the role of the truth predicate in proving generalizations. However, in the final section we propose a way out for the deflationist — a solution that permits him to accept a strong theory, having important truth-theoretical generalizations as its theorems. (shrink)

When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the source of disagreement in controversial (...) ones; it gives a nice story about the evidential relevance of modal, mereological and set-theoretic facts to ontological dependence; and it makes sense of debates over the relation's formal properties. One important upshot of the deflationary account is that questions of ontological dependence are generally less deep and less interesting than usually thought. (shrink)

In their recent paper, “Epistemology for Beginners: Two to Five-Year-Old Children’s Representation of Falsity,” Olivier Mascaro and Olivier Morin study the ontogeny of a naïve understanding of truth in humans. Their paper is fascinating for several reasons, but most striking is their claim (given a rather optimistic reading of epistemology) that toddlers as young as two can, at times, recognize false from true assertions. Their Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis holds that children seem to have an innate capacity to represent a (...) state of affairs truthfully. In the following paper, I investigate the problems this research poses for deflationist theories of truth. Richard Rorty and Huw Price hold that the best way to understand truth or “the truth” is to understand the necessary conditions required for assertoric practice. Both philosophers present unique and very different deflationary theories when it comes to construing truth. I argue that neither philosopher’s approach is successful because they focus on truth and fail to recognize truthfulness as a norm of assertoric practice. I show that truthfulness is the elusive third norm of claim-based discourse and is consistent with Mascaro and Morin’s findings. (shrink)

This paper was part of a special online issue on Truth. I critically discuss Peter Geach's paper "Truth and God".

An object-based correspondence theory of truth holds that a truth-bearer is true whenever its truth conditions are met by objects and their properties. In order to develop such a view, the principal task is to explain how truth-bearers become endowed with their truth conditions. Modern versions of the correspondence theory see this project as the synthesis of two theoretical endeavours: basic metasemantics and compositional semantics. Basic metasemantics is the theory of how simple, meaningful items (e.g. (...) names and concepts) are endowed with their contributions to truth conditions, and compositional semantics is the theory of how the meanings of simple items compose to generate (among other things) the truth conditions of sentences. Understanding truth along these broad lines was once popular; it was first championed by Field (1972). However, the once-popular conception of its tasks included an over-ambitious view of basic metasemantics. It was thought that reference needed to be analyzed (or reduced a posteriori) in terms of more fundamental, non-semantic relations (e.g. causal relations, indication, or teleological relations, in the case of mental representation). Obstacles in providing such an analysis engendered skepticism towards this understanding of truth and eventually gave way to its deflationary competitors. This dissertation aims to defend the modern, object-based correspondence theory against its rivals—especially deflationism. Chapter one provides a historically-grounded overview of the theory. Chapter two identifies two points of contrast between the correspondence theorist and the deflationist: they employ different orders of explanation for the variety of semantic phenomena, and they (traditionally) take different attitudes towards the prospects of reduction. Situating the dialectic in this way allows me to develop a middle ground: a moderate version of inflationism that takes the inflationary explanatory structure and combines it with a non-reductive, pluralist approach to basic metasemantics. Chapter three expands on the details of this pluralist account of reference. Chapter four contrasts the view with another rival approach to basic metasemantics: metasemantic interpretationism. And finally, chapter five applies the theory to answer another question of broad philosophical interest: what role does our conception of truth play in inquiry about the world? (shrink)

Tarski’s pioneering work on truth has been thought by some to motivate a robust, correspondence-style theory of truth, and by others to motivate a deflationary attitude toward truth. I argue that Tarski’s work suggests neither; if it motivates any contemporary theory of truth, it motivates conceptual primitivism, the view that truth is a fundamental, indefinable concept. After outlining conceptual primitivism and Tarski’s theory of truth, I show how the two approaches to truth (...) share much in common. While Tarski does not explicitly accept primitivism, the view is open to him, and fits better with his formal work on truth than do correspondence or deflationary theories. Primitivists, in turn, may rely on Tarski’s insights in motivating their own perspective on truth. I conclude by showing how viewing Tarski through the primitivist lens provides a fresh response to some familiar charges from Putnam and Etchemendy. (shrink)

Metasemantic inferentialismhas gained popularity in the last few decades. Traditionally, inferentialism is combined with a deflationary attitude towards semantic terms such as truth and reference, i.e., many inferentialists hold that when we use these semantic terms we do not purport to refer to substantive properties. This combination makes inferentialism attractive for philosophers who see themselves as antirealists. Although the attractions of combining inferentialism and deflationism are easy to see, deflationism is also a controversial position. For one, deflationists maintain (...) that truth is an insubstantive property, but it is not altogether clear what an insubstantive property is. Secondly, as deflationists maintain that truth does not play an explanatory role, it is incompatible with the position that truth can explain the normativity of truth talk. Given that deflationism faces these objections, it would be preferable if the success of inferentialism did not depend on the deflationist’s ability to respond to these objections. I argue that someone attracted to inferentialism for its ability to accommodate antirealist intuitions about a domain (e.g. morality) is not committed to deflationism about truth. More specifically, I will show that inferentialism combined with a straightforward account of inferentialist truth-conditions is compatible with a version of truth pluralism. I call this position Inferentialist Truth Pluralism. (shrink)

Pluralism about truth is the view that there are many properties, not just one, in virtue of which things are true. Pluralists hope to dodge the objections that face traditional monistic substantive views of truth, as well as those facing deflationary theories of truth. More specifically, pluralists hope to advance an explanatorily potent understanding of truth that can capture the subtleties of various realist and anti-realist domains of discourse, all while avoiding the scope problem. (...) I offer a new objection to pluralism that challenges its fundamental commitment to there being a set of alethic properties in virtue of which claims are true. In its place I offer an alternative view that merges standard truthmaker theory with a primitivist conception of truth. This combination of views satisfies the theoretical desires that pluralists claim for themselves, but without taking on pluralism's host of challenges and problems. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Künne’s Modest Theory of truth, and develop a variation on a worry that Field expresses with respect to Horwich’s related view. The worry is not that deflationary accounts are false, but rather that, because they take propositions as truth-bearers, they are not philosophically interesting. Compatibly with the intuitions of ordinary speakers, we can understand proposition so that the proposals do account for a property that such truth-bearers have. Nevertheless, we saliently apply (...) the truth-concept also to entities such as utterances or assertions , and the de flationary accounts do not provide a similarly deflationary account for those applications. In fact, there are good reasons to suspect that no such account would be forthcoming; we need something more substantive or in flationary there. (shrink)

Infectious logics are systems that have a truth-value that is assigned to a compound formula whenever it is assigned to one of its components. This paper studies four-valued infectious logics as the basis of transparent theories of truth. This take is motivated as a way to treat different pathological sentences differently, namely, by allowing some of them to be truth-value gluts and some others to be truth-value gaps and as a way to treat the semantic (...) pathology suffered by at least some of these sentences as infectious. This leads us to consider four distinct four-valued logics: one where truth-value gaps are infectious, but gluts are not; one where truth-value gluts are infectious, but gaps are not; and two logics where both gluts and gaps are infectious, in some sense. Additionally, we focus on the proof theory of these systems, by offering a discussion of two related topics. On the one hand, we prove some limitations regarding the possibility of providing standard Gentzen sequent calculi for these systems, by dualizing and extending some recent results for infectious logics. On the other hand, we provide sound and complete four-sided sequent calculi, arguing that the most important technical and philosophical features taken into account to usually prefer standard calculi are, indeed, enjoyed by the four-sided systems. (shrink)

Arguments pro and contra convergent realism - underdetermination of theory by observational evidence and pessimistic meta-induction from past falsity- are considered. It is argued that, to meet the counter-arguments challenge, convergent realism should be considerably changed with a help of modification of the propositions from this meta-programme’s “hard core” and “protecting belt”. Maybe one of the ways out is to turn to the coherent theory of truth. Some of the works of Hegel (as interpreted by Merab Mamardashvili and Alexandre (...) Kojev), Husserl and Heidegger can help to dig still deeper into the background of this theory. Key words: Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, convergent realism, internal realism, coherent theory of truth. -/- . (shrink)

This dissertation explores the prospects of postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth. Postdeflationary theories define the concept of truth or the property of being a true truthbearer in a way that respects the deflationary desiderata of clarity, purity, and permissiveness with truth-aptness, without a necessary commitment to the core negative thesis of the deflationary approach. Postdeflationary substantive theories further acknowledge the complexity and explanatory utility of truth in understanding and defining other concepts and (...) phenomena. The motivation for pursuing this study arises from the so-called contemporary crisis of truth, where a substantive understanding of truth is subjected to widespread skepticism, critique, and even cynicism both inside and outside of philosophy in formal and mundane discourse. To better understand this crisis, particular attention is directed towards the deflationary critique of substantive theories of truth, which is a prevalent point of discussion in contemporary literature on western analytic philosophy. By exploring the limits and philosophical sustainability of deflationary critique of substantive accounts of truth, valuable insight is gained about the contemporary crisis of truth and the potential for substantive theorizing about truth in general. This dissertation composes of an introduction and four original research publications that address two connected themes: exploration of the philosophical sustainability of deflationary critique of substantive theories of truth, and exploration of the prospects for development of the now popular substantive pluralist theories of truth. These themes constitute both negative and positive aspects in relation to analyzing the prospects of postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth. The first part of this dissertation focuses on arguing against the widespread deflationary readings of W.V.O. Quine’s truth, who is widely interpreted as a prominent and influential deflationist in both the secondary literature on his philosophy and contemporary truth-theoretic debates more broadly conceived. The first essay demonstrates that Quine’s immanent conception of truth involves commitments that are incompatible with general and theory-specific framings of the deflationary thesis. The second essay demonstrates conflicts between Quine’s views and what has in recent literature been argued as strong and moderate variants of the deflationary thesis. In conclusion, these essays demonstrate that the widespread deflationary readings of Quine’s truth are mistaken, thus removing a prominent thinker from the deflationists ranks while simultaneously casting suspicion towards the philosophical sustainability of the deflationary approach in general. The second part of this dissertation explores the prospects of postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth by analyzing the limits and prospects for development of the increasingly popular substantive pluralist theories. The third essay explores different ways in which semantic ambiguity poses trouble for current pluralist models. The fourth essay argues that to achieve the theoretical desiderata that pluralists ask from discourse domains, the latter ought to be individuated on ontological rather than topical grounds. In conclusion, these essays demonstrate that while current pluralist models involve shortcomings, they encompass potential for development and provide a viable prospect for sustainable postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth. (shrink)

Conceptual primitivism is the view that truth is among our most basic and fundamental concepts. It cannot be defined, analyzed, or reduced into concepts that are more fundamental. Primitivism is opposed to both traditional attempts at defining truth (in terms of correspondence, coherence, or utility) and deflationary theories that argue that the notion of truth is exhausted by means of the truth schema. Though primitivism might be thought of as a view of last resort, (...) I believe that the view is independently attractive, and can be argued for directly. In this paper I offer what I take to be the strongest argument in favor of conceptual primitivism, which relies upon the Fregean doctrine of the omnipresence of truth. (shrink)

Epistemic theories of truth, such as those presumed to be typical for anti-realism, can be characterised as saying that what is true can be known in principle: p → ◊Kp. However, with statements of the form “p & ¬Kp”, a contradiction arises if they are both true and known. Analysis of the nature of the paradox shows that such statements refute epistemic theories of truth only if the the anti-realist motivation for epistemic theories of (...) class='Hi'>truth is not taken into account. The motivation in a link of understandability ans meaningful- ness suggests to change the above principle and to restrict the theory to logically simple sentences, in which case the paradox does not arise. This suggestion also allows to see the deep philosophical problems for anti-realism those counterexamples are pointing at. (shrink)

The paper discusses what kind of truth bearer, or truth-ascription, a deflationist should take as primary. I first present number of arguments against a sententialist view. I then present a deflationary theory which takes propositions as primary, and try to show that it deals neatly with a wide range of linguistic data. Next, I consider both the view that there is no primary truth bearer, and the most common account of sentence truth given by deflationists (...) who take propositions as primary, and argue that they both attribute an implausible type of ambiguity to “true”. This can be avoided, however, if truth-ascriptions to sentences are taken as a certain form of pragmatic ellipses. I end by showing how this hypothesis accommodates a number of intuitions involving truth-ascriptions to sentences. (shrink)

Kripke’s Wittgenstein is standardly understood as a non-factualist about meaning ascription. Non-factualism about meaning ascription is the idea that sentences like “Joe means addition by ‘plus’” are not used to state facts about the world. Byrne and Kusch have argued that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not a non-factualist about meaning ascription. They are aware that their interpretation is non-standard, but cite arguments from Boghossian and Wright to support their view. Boghossian argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incompatible with a (...) class='Hi'>deflationary theory of truth. Wright argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incoherent. To support the standard interpretation, I’ll respond to each argument in turn. To the degree that my responses are successful, Byrne and Kusch have an unmotivated interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein. Wilson provides a factualist interpretation that is not based on Boghossian and Wright’s arguments. Miller argues for a non-factualist interpretation against Wilson, but I’ll show that Miller’s interpretation faces a dilemma. Miller’s argument cannot be maintained if a coherent interpretation of the skeptical solution is to be provided. I’ll show how this dilemma can be avoided and provide an independent argument against Wilson so that a non-factualist interpretation of the skeptical solution can be maintained. (shrink)

This paper attempts to address the question what logical strength theories of truth have by considering such questions as: If you take a theory T and add a theory of truth to it, how strong is the resulting theory, as compared to T? Once the question has been properly formulated, the answer turns out to be about as elegant as one could want: Adding a theory of truth to a finitely axiomatized theory T is more or (...) less equivalent to a kind of abstract consistency statement. A large part of the interest of the paper lies in the way syntactic theories are 'disentangled' from object theories. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce Horwich’s deflationary theory of truth, called ‘Minimalism’, and I present his proposal of how to cope with the Liar Paradox. The proposal proceeds by restricting the T-schema and, as a consequence of that, it needs a constructive specification of which instances of the T-schema are to be excluded from Minimalism. Horwich has presented, in an informal way, one construction that specifies the Minimalist theory. The main aim of the paper is to present and (...) scrutinize some formal versions of Horwich’s construction. (shrink)