Deflationism and the Invisible Power of Truth

In recent decades deflationary theories of truth have been challenged with a technical argument based on the notion of conservativeness. In this paper, I shall stress that conservative extensions of theories and expandability of their models are not equivalent notions. Then, I shall argue that the deflationary thesis of the unsubstantiality of truth is better understood as leveraging on the stronger notion of expandability of models. Once expandability is involved in the argument, some notable consequences follow: the strategy proposed by Hartry Field in response to the conservativeness objection is strongly undermined and even simpler proposals (such as theories based on standard t-sentences) are shown to be quite problematical