Truth, Deflationism, Correspondence

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.

Alethic functionalism, as propounded by Michael Lynch, is the view that there are different ways to be true, but that these differences nevertheless contain enough unity to forestall outright pluralism. This view has many virtues. Yet, since one could conceivably apply Lynch's "one and many" strategy to other debates, I try show to how his argumentative steps can be used to solve—not just the controversy pertaining to truth—but any controversy that surrounds a "What is X?" question.

Les pragmatistes soupçonnent la distinction entre vérité et justification d'être une de ces distinctions qui ne font pas de différence. L'objet de ce texte est d'établir que ce soupçon n'est pas fondé et combien au contraire est nécessaire, en pratique, l'usage du prédicat de vérité - aussi nécessaire que l'activité réflexive elle-même. En adoptant pour notre démonstration une conception logique de la vérité définie comme la notion la plus faible satisfaisant un "principe de décitation", le chemin parcouru est aussi une invitation à ne pas sous-estimer la valeur que les thèses dont s'est réclamé un certain  "déflationnisme" confèrent paradoxalement à la notion de vérité.

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Cette version en ligne est une version très légèrement corrigée de la version publiée en juin 2019 dans le volume Figures de la vérité dirigé par F. Rivenc.

Les corrections portent sur quelques formulations en particulier p.2 et p.15.

I want to motivate an account of what it is for an object to have a property, which may as well be called a deflationary view about properties. Such a view follows from a conception of predication I ground in the work of Donald Davidson, some of which remains unpublished. I 1 claim that if we take seriously Davidson's account of predication, by maintaining that sentences are the primary linguistic unit, we can define properties in terms of predicates. The aim of this 2 paper is twofold. First, I argue that this account is present in Davidson's systematic treatment of the problem of predication. Second, I claim that this account is serviceable and economical, as it can accommodate a wide scope of properties and abstract objects without appealing to entities such as truthmakers or joints in nature.

The central claim of this essay is that many deflationary theories of truth are variants of the correspondence theory of truth. Essential to the correspondence theory of truth is the proposal that objective features of the world are the truthmakers of statements. Many advocates of deflationary theories (including F. P. Ramsay, P. F. Strawson and Paul Horwich) remain committed to this proposal. Although T-sentences (statements of the form “s is true iff p”) are presented by advocates of deflationary theories of truth as truisms or analytic truths, T-sentences are often understood as entailing commitment to the central proposal of the correspondence theory.

In this paper I investigate the substantiality of Gottlob Frege’s truth predicate. After a quick glance at his semantics (first section of the paper), I examine the redundancy of his truth and conclude that Frege’s T-like sentences are not meant to present truth as an insubstantial notion (second section). In the third section, I highlight the substantial aspects of Frege’s conception, which turn out to be of a correspondence-theoretical nature. After reaching this conclusion, I go back to Frege’s own criticism of correspondence, and consider a solution that allows for both his explicit rejection, and his tacit adherence to the correspondence-theoretical paradigm.

Two central themes of Douglas Edwards's The Metaphysics of Truth are anti-deflationism and substantial pluralism. In Part I of this paper I discuss Edwards's grounds for rejecting deflationism and suggest a few additional grounds. In Part II I discuss Edward's truth-pluralism and respond to his criticism of my correspondence-pluralism. While these pluralisms share significant features, their differences also raise several important questions.

In this commentary piece, I argue that Asay's accounts of truth and truthmaking in A Theory of Truthmaking give no role to the idea that truth depends on being. In fact, some of the positions taken in the book are in tension with this idea that has been central to truthmaker theory. I consider how three aspects of Asay's account relate to the idea that truth depends on being.