Truth Deflationism

ABSTRACT: Minimalists about truth contend that traditional inflationary theories systematically fail to explain certain facts about truth, and that this failure licenses a 'reversal of explanatory direction'. Once reversed, they purport that their own minimal theory adequately explains all of the facts involving truth. But minimalists' main objection to inflationism seems to misfire, and the subsequent reversal of explanatory direction, if it can be made sense of, leaves minimalism in no better explanatory position; and even if the objection were serviceable and the reversal legitimate, minimalists' adequacy thesis is still implausible.

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 harbored 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.

A new approach to truth is offered which dispenses with the truth predicate, and replaces it with a special kind of quantifier which simultaneously binds variables in sentential and nominal positions. The resulting theory of truth for a (first-order) language is shown to be able to handle blind truth ascriptions, and is shown to be compatible with a characterization of the semantic and syntactic principles governing that language. Comparisons with other approaches to truth are drawn. An axiomatization of AU-quantifiers and a model theory for them is given, and an appendix contains a completeness proof.