Abstract

From the popular view that the property of truth adds nothing not already inherent in its bearers it has been inferred that classical theories of truth are thereby refuted. Taking as representative a version of deflationism based on a certain way of interpreting the Tarskian schema convention T–and popularly called "disquotational"–I argue that the view is beset by fatal difficulties. These include: an unavoidable awkwardness in handling indexicals; an inability to accept anything more than a too anemic notion of a truth condition, leaving it defenseless against clearly inadequate alternatives; and an incapacity to show that its characteristic biconditional can support any acceptable dependency claims (made evident by replacing the biconditional with 'because'). Finally, were there no predicate on the order of 'is true', this would not annihilate the property of being true or the current grounds for philosophical inquiries about it. This is an important clue to why deflationary approaches in general are dead ends