Abstract

My project is to bring out the tendentious ideas that drive various objections to deflationary views of truth. This project requires a clear formulation of the deflationary view. Against Boghossian, I argue that deflationism can be coherently formulated as the thesis that the only important use of a truth predicate is for framing generalisations that cannot otherwise be framed, and that such a predicate is defined for the sentences of an object language in a stronger metalanguage. I then show that Boghossian's more interesting objection to this position takes as primitive a vague notion of factuality that the deflationist should reject. In subsequent chapters, I examine some more sophisticated anti-deflationist objections. Davidson objects that the evidential constraints on meaning-theories reveal what truth predicates have in common. I show that these evidential constraints are no less language-specific than the truth predicates. Friedman holds that the epistemological task of testing the reliability of our current inductive methods requires a physically reduced truth predicate, and Field thinks that such a predicate is needed to explain organisms' successful behaviour. I argue that the deflationist can accommodate these epistemological and psychological explanations, and hence I reject the claim that there is a language-transcendent, physically reducible concept of truth as a far-fetched, explanatorily idle hypothesis. Behind Wright's 'inflationary argument' is the idea that a reconstrual of realist/anti-realist debates as disputes about the content of a truth predicate requires a non-deflationary view of truth. I argue that, unlike Dummett, Wright does not sketch a plausible account of how different views of truth issue in opposing metaphysical conceptions. Putnam rejects deflationism because he thinks it ignores the relation between truth and assertion. I argue that Putnam's objection fails against deflationists like Quine, who hold that truth plays no role in an explanation of use. Putnam's anti-deflationism ultimately leads away from the problem of truth to the problem of appraising the different conceptions of meaning found in the writings of Dummett, McDowell, Putnam, and Quine