Various forms of deflationism have been defended in various arenas. On the semantic side, there is deflationism about truth, reference, and meaning, all of which are popular, perhaps even orthodox. On the metaphysical side, there is deflationism about existence, and meta‐ontological deflationism about ontological debates. Unlike their semantic counterparts, these views have gone unnoticed or been widely attacked. The purpose of this chapter is to bring discussion of these sorts of deflationism together. It is argued (...) that semantic deflationism leads to a form of existence deflationism. As a result, it is incoherent to accept semantic deflationism but reject existence deflationism. Moreover, it is argued that existence deflationism leads to a form of meta‐ontological deflationism. Finally, it is argued that once we see how these views form part of a global deflationary package, it becomes evident that they are more defensible than they have often seemed when examined in isolation. (shrink)

How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought (...) goes, while expressivists appeal instead to desire-like mental states in their explanations of meaning. However, I argue that, if we adopt a deflationary approach to representation and other related notions, there need be no such explanatory divide between expressivism and anything recognizable as a plausible notion of normative realism. Any alleged explanatory criterion for realism will either be incompatible with deflationism, or it will fail to capture some standard versions of normative realism. I conclude that, in a deflationary framework, expressivism is compatible with genuine realism. (shrink)

This paper is about the relationship between truthmaking—one of the pillars of contemporary metaphysics—and deflationism about truth—one of the main contenders in the debate about truth, and a key component of the broad anti-metaphysical philosophical approach known as pragmatism. Many philosophers have argued that deflationism and truthmaking are incompatible or in conflict in some interesting way. Some take this to count against deflationism, others to count against truthmaking. In this paper I argue that deflationism and truthmaking (...) are compatible in most of the ways in which they are commonly thought to be incompatible. Deflationism does not render truthmaking unintelligible, avoidable, unmotivated, or trivial. While deflationism is incompatible with certain ideas within mainstream truthmaking, I argue that these ideas result from merely optional assumptions and principles commonly accepted by mainstream truthmaker theorists. (shrink)

Deflationism about truth, what is often simply called “deflationism”, is really not so much a theory of truth in the traditional sense, as it is a different, newer sort of approach to the topic. Traditional theories of truth are part of a philosophical debate about the nature of a supposed property of truth. Philosophers offering such theories often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; truth consists in coherence with a set of beliefs (...) or propositions; truth is what is acceptable in the ideal limit of inquiry. According to deflationists, such suggestions are mistaken, and, moreover, they all share a common mistake. The common mistake is to assume that truth has a nature of the kind that philosophers might find out about and develop theories of. The main idea of the deflationary approach is (a) that all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ or of the concept of truth in our talk and thought, and (b) that, by contrast with what traditional views assume, this role is neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory. For example, according to deflationary accounts, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is in some sense strongly equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary approach, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’. Philosophers looking for some underlying nature of some truth property that is attributed with the use of the expression ‘true’ are bound to be frustrated, the deflationist says, because they are looking for something that isn’t there. Deflationism comprises a variety of different versions, each of which have gone by different names, including at least the following: disquotationalism, minimalism, prosententialism, the redundancy theory, the disappearance theory, the no-truth theory. There has not always been terminological consensus in the literature about how to use these labels: sometimes they have been used interchangeably; sometimes they have been used to mark distinctions between different developments of the same general approach. The actual variety of deflationary views has not always been clear in discussions of this approach, especially in the earlier literature, where important differences are occasionally missed. To help clear this up, we will use ‘deflationism’ to denote the general approach we want to discuss and reserve other names for specific versions of that approach. (shrink)

The conservativeness argument poses a dilemma to deflationism about truth, according to which a deflationist theory of truth must be conservative but no adequate theory of truth is conservative. The debate on the conservativeness argument has so far been framed in a specific formal setting, where theories of truth are formulated over arithmetical base theories. I will argue that the appropriate formal setting for evaluating the conservativeness argument is provided not by theories of truth over arithmetic but by those (...) over subject matters ‘richer’ than arithmetic, such as set theory. The move to this new formal setting provides deflationists with better defence and brings a broader perspective to the debate. (shrink)

Ascriptions of truth give rise to an explanatory asymmetry. For instance, we accept ‘ is true because Rex is barking’ but reject ‘Rex is barking because is true’. Benjamin Schnieder and other philosophers have recently proposed a fresh explanation of this asymmetry : they have suggested that the asymmetry has a conceptual rather than a metaphysical source. The main business of this paper is to assess this proposal, both on its own terms and as an option for deflationists. I offer (...) a pair of objections to the proposal and defend them from counter-objections. To conclude, I discuss how else to explain the asymmetry, and set out the implications for deflationism and correspondence theories of truth. (shrink)

Logical consequence is typically construed as a metalinguistic relation between sentences. Deflationism is an account of logic that challenges this orthodoxy. In Williamson’s recent presentation of deflationism, logic’s primary concern is with universal generalizations over absolutely everything. As well as an interesting account of logic in its own right, deflationism has also been recruited to decide between competing logics in resolving semantic paradoxes. This paper defends deflationism from its most important challenge to date, due to Ole (...) Hjortland. It then presents two new problems for the view. Hjortland’s objection is that deflationism cannot discriminate between distinct logics. I show that his example of classical logic and supervaluationism depends on equivocating about whether the language includes a “definitely” operator. Moreover, I prove a result that blocks this line of objection no matter the choice of logics. I end by criticizing deflationism on two fronts. First, it cannot do the work it has been recruited to perform. That is, it cannot help adjudicate between competing logics. This is because a theory of logic cannot be as easily separated from a theory of truth as its proponents claim. Second, deflationism currently has no adequate answer to the following challenge: what does a sentence’s universal generalization have to do with its logical truth? I argue that the most promising, stipulative response on behalf of the deflationist amounts to an unwarranted change of subject. (shrink)

This chapter argues that deflationism is in the first instance a claim about the explanatory role that the concept of truth and the truth-maker/truth-bearer relationship ought to play in philosophy and kindred disciplines—more specifically, the claim that there is no such role. We propose a strict criterion for what counts as a deflationary theory of truth and we use our strict criterion to distinguish between deflationist and pragmatic theories of truth. We also use it as a tool for sorting (...) out the debate over deflationism and so-called non-factive discourse. We argue that deflationist commitments are orthogonal to debates over the metaphysical status of domains of discourse such as ethics and theoretical science, whose factive _bona fides_ have been called into question. The metaphysical consequences of deflationism are, we argue, quite minimal; we think that both sympathizers and detractors have taken deflationism as having more robust metaphysical consequences than it in fact has. (shrink)

This chapter argues that alethic pluralism has not been successfully motivated. The strategy deployed to demonstrate this contention is to claim, first, that a deflationary version of alethic monism is the default position in the theory of truth and, second, that no pluralist arguments offered up to now have been sufficient to defeat it. Considerations of theoretical economy suggest that some form or other of deflationism is prima facie correct, and, lest it be alleged that no defensible version of (...) deflationism exists, Wolfgang Künne’s modest account—which deploys sentential quantification—is presented as defensible and as neatly side-stepping problems afflicting Horwich’s minimalist theory. From this deflationary perspective, a general counter is made to those with pluralist sympathies, whose arguments are found to be unconvincing. In particular, the deflationist will remain unmoved by the two most prominent attempts in the literature to motivate pluralism: those of Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch. (shrink)

It is widely held that truth and reference play an indispensable explanatory role in theories of meaning. By contrast, so-called deflationists argue that the functions of these concepts are merely expressive and never explanatory. Robert Brandom has proposed both a variety of deflationism — the anaphoric theory —, and a theory of meaning — inferentialism — which doesn’t rely on truth or reference. He argues that the anaphoric theory counts against his (chiefly referentialist) rivals in the debate on meaning (...) and thereby paves the way for inferentialism. In this paper, I give a friendly reconstruction of anaphoric deflationism (section II) and point to a distinguishing feature of the theory with respect to other deflationist proposals. While Brandom simply assumes, but doesn’t earn this feature, I propose a natural argument to justify it (section III). Then, however, I point out a subtle but clear sense in which truth and reference can play a role in explaining meaning, even if the anaphoric theory holds. Thus, anaphoric deflationism will turn out to be neutral in the debate on meaning (section IV). (shrink)

I here argue for a particular formulation of truth-deflationism, namely, the propositionally quantified formula, (Q) “For all p, is true iff p”. The main argument consists of an enumeration of the other (five) possible formulations and criticisms thereof. Notably, Horwich’s Minimal Theory is found objectionable in that it cannot be accepted by finite beings. Other formulations err in not providing non-questionbegging, sufficiently direct derivations of the T-schema instances. I end by defending (Q) against various objections. In particular, I argue (...) that certain circularity charges rest on mistaken assumptions about logic that lead to Carroll’s regress. I show how the propositional quantifier can be seen as on a par with first-order quantifiers and so equally acceptable to use. While the proposed parallelism between these quantifiers is controversial in general, deflationists have special reasons to affirm it. I further argue that the main three types of approach the truth-paradoxes are open to an adherent of (Q), and that the derivation of general facts about truth can be explained on its basis. (shrink)

I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to be unambiguous. Ch. 2 (...) is a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that the interpretivist account of propositional attitudes fails even at the most plausible reading that treats this theory as a version of the deflationary approach to existence coupled with a metaphysical claim about the judgement-dependence of propositional attitudes. It will be argued that adopting a deflationary reading of interpretivism allows this theory to avoid the common charge of fictionalism, according to which interpretivists cannot maintain realism about attitudes as their theory becomes a (...) covert form of mental fictionalism. However, as will be shown, the deflationary version of interpretivism faces a fatal dilemma: either it becomes indistinguishable from generic deflationism about the mental, or it must embrace the metaphysical thesis of judgement-dependence of propositional attitudes. The latter option leads to unacceptable epistemological consequences, as it cannot accommodate intuitions about possibility of error in attribution of attitudes. Thus, it turns out that even a subtle version of interpretivism is not a viable theory of intentional states. (shrink)

Deflationists claim that the truth predicate was introduced into our language merely to full a certain logico-linguistic function. Oddly enough, the question what this function exactly consists in has received little attention. We argue that the best way of understanding the function of the truth predicate is as enabling us to mimic higher-order quantification in a first-order framework. Indeed, one can show that the full simple theory of types is reducible to disquotational principles of truth. Our analysis has important consequences (...) for our understanding of truth. In this paper, we can only touch on one of them: we will argue that the insubstantiality of truth does not imply a conservativity requirement on our best theories of truth. (shrink)

The paper proposes a strategy for understanding metaphysical grounding in deflationary terms and, more generally, proposes a form of methodological deflationism with respect to the notions of ground. The idea is to define a deflationary is grounded in-predicate by appeal to the two-place non-causal connective ‘because’ and a deflationary truth predicate. To this end, we discuss the explanatory role of the truth-predicate in non-causal explanations and develop a theory of truth for the language of the ‘because’-connective. We argue that (...) at least from a logical perspective our deflationary notion of ground is up to the task. (shrink)

Methodological deflationism is a policy about how we should conduct ourselves when it comes to theories of truth: in particular, a deflationary theory of truth should be taken as one’s starting point, and the notion of truth should be inflated only as necessary. This policy is motivated, in part, by the need to balance the theoretical virtue of parsimony with that of explanatory sufficiency. In this article, the case is made that the methodological deflationist is in no position to (...) properly balance those virtues—a point made evident by tracing the relationship between semantic theories and the explanatory needs of theories of truth. Furthermore, methodological deflationism threatens to unduly influence semantic theorizing and, in doing so, displays an inappropriate bias towards deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

With metaphysical philosophy gaining prominence in the aftermath of the Quine-Carnap debate, not only has it become assumed that the Quinean critique leaves ontological pluralism behind as an untenable approach, but also that the same is true of deflationism more generally. Building on Quine’s criticisms against the analytic-synthetic distinction and the notion of quantifier variance, contemporary metaphysicians like van Inwagen and Sider continue to argue for the untenability of deflationary approaches to metaontology. In this paper I will argue that (...) Quine’s criticisms do not provide sufficient grounds for revitalizing metaphysics, as the aforementioned metaphysicians conceive them as doing, and that they also don’t eliminate all hope for Carnapian pluralism. Furthermore, Carnap’s initial position may even yield the most promising route for the pluralistically inclined. Moreover, pluralism is often conceived as being equivalent with the narrower notion of quantifier variance, often associated with Hirsch and Putnam. As this notion often is attributed not only to Carnap and other pluralists, but also is taken to be an essential feature of deflationism, explicating how their merits in fact don’t necessarily coincide with those of quantifier variance will clarify matters. I will conclude by noting how neither pluralism nor deflationism is committed to quantifier variance, and thus how arguments against the latter don’t entail a refutation of the former. (shrink)

Anaphoric deflationism is a prosententialist account of the use of “true.” Prosentences are, for sentences, the equivalent of what pronouns are for nouns: as pronouns refer to previously introduced nouns, so prosentences like “that’s true” inherit their content from previously introduced sentences. This kind of deflationism concerning the use of “true” (especially in Brandom’s version) is an explanation in terms of anaphora; the prosentence depends anaphorically on the sentence providing its content. A relevant implication of this theory is (...) that “true” is not understood as a predicate and that truth is not a property. Primitivism, defended by Frege, Moore, and Davidson, is associated with two ideas: (1) that truth is a primitive and central trait of our conceptual system and (2) that truth, as such, cannot be defined. This second claim can be called “negative primitivism,” and it especially points out the facts about the “indefinability” of truth generally advocated by primitivists. In what follows, a connection is established between the deflationist’s rejection of the predicate and of the property and facts (and primitivist ideas) about the indefinability of truth. This connection establishes a common framework to lend further explanatory power to both options. According to the resulting view, this indefinability can explain the appeal and soundness of a deflationist dismissal of predicates and properties dealing with truth. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially explained in terms of the speech act of rejection. We implement the deflationist insight in a bilateral theory by taking (...) the meaning of the truth predicate to be explained by its inferential relation to assertion. We combine this account of the meaning of the truth predicate with a new diagnosis of the Liar Paradox: its derivation requires the truth rules to preserve evidence, but these rules only preserve commitment. The result is a novel inferential deflationist theory of truth, which solves the Liar Paradox in a principled manner. We end by showing that our theory and simple extensions thereof have the resources to axiomatize the internal logic of several supervaluational hierarchies, including Cantini’s. This solves open problems of Halbach (2011) and Horsten (2011). (shrink)

Stephen Stich (1990) has argued that our commitment to truth is parochial, arbitrary, and idiosyncratic. Truth, according to Stich, can be analyzed in terms of reference and predicate satisfaction. If our intuitions about reference can change, this means that our concept of truth can change. If there can be many distinct concepts of truth, our seemingly unreflective commitment to the one we have inherited seems unmotivated. I argue that deflationism about truth possesses sufficient resources to turn back Stich’s skeptical (...) challenge. If, as deflationism claims, no analysis of truth can be given, Stich’s argument cannot succeed. I argue that deflationism is correct by showing that differences in reference do not lead to distinct concepts of truth. I also show that deflationism can clarify what it is we care about when we care about whether our beliefs are true. To care whether p is true is simply to care whether p. (shrink)

This chapter subjects deflationism to an indirect test by considering whether it can give an adequate account of the kindred notion of accuracy. The concept of accuracy seems to work very much like truth but applies to a broader range of representational phenomena. Very roughly, truth appears to be something like a species of accuracy. The important point for this chapter is that the notions of truth and accuracy are sufficiently alike that we should not expect them to be (...) fundamentally different in nature, such that deflationism might hold for one but not the other. This would make it a condition of theoretical adequacy that deflationism be able to provide an adequate account of accuracy. This chapter argues that it cannot. (shrink)

I will argue that the standard formulation of non-factualism in terms of a denial of truth-aptness is consistent with a version of deflationsim. My line of argument assumes the use conception of meaning. This brings out an interesting consequence since mostly the philosophers who endorse the use conception of meaning, e.g. Paul Horwich, hold that deflationism is inconsistent with the strategy of implementing non-factualism in terms of a denial of truth-aptness and thereby urge a reformulation of non-factualism.

The aim of this chapter is to explain, motivate, and provide the central details of a specific version of what has come to be called alethic fictionalism—namely, a fictionalist account of truth (or, more accurately, of truth-talk, that fragment of discourse that involves the truth-predicate and other alethic-locutions). Our particular brand of alethic fictionalism is sometimes described as a “pretense theory of truth,” and a catchphrase for our view is “truth is a pretense.” But a more precise label for the (...) view that we will present is “semantic pretense-involving fictionalism about truth-talk.” Our endorsement of this view (for short, our SPIF account) stems from our belief that deflationism is the right approach to take on the topic of truth. This already shifts the focus away from any property of truth, since deflationism “about truth” (or, as we will call this view, T-deflationism) is best understood as an approach to analyzing truth-talk. We arrive specifically at our SPIF account of truth-talk because we also think that versions of T-deflationism should be understood as a kind of fictionalism (which, again, puts the focus on discourse, rather than metaphysics) and because we maintain that a SPIF account is the best variety of fictionalism to apply specifically to truth-talk. We will explain some of our reasons for holding these beliefs below, laying out the basics of our SPIF account of truth-talk and highlighting the merits of endorsing our particular account of that talk. (shrink)

A common objection against deflationism is that it cannot account for the fact that truth depends on reality. Consider the question ‘On what does the truth of the proposition that snow is white depend?’ An obvious answer is that it depends on whether snow is white. Now, consider what answer, if any, a deflationist can offer. The problem is as follows. A typical deflationary analysis of truth consists of biconditionals of the form ‘The proposition that p is true iff (...) p’. Such biconditionals tell us nothing about what the truth of the proposition that p might depend on. Therefore, it seems that a typical deflationist cannot give an answer. Since we know that an answer is available, this throws doubt over the adequacy of deflationism as an account of truth. Articulated here is a defence of deflationism against this objection. It is argued that although biconditionals of the sort mentioned do not explicitly state a dependency between truth and reality, they nevertheless convey one. The reason is that, given the context in which a deflationist invokes the biconditionals, such a dependency is implicated. A potential problem with this defence is that it leaves the deflationist still unable to give an account of what it is for truth to depend on reality. One might think that a deflationist can offer such an account by appealing to truthmaker theory but, it is argued below, truthmaker theory is unavailable to a deflationist. Instead, the deflationist should question the assumption that an account is available. (shrink)

What requirements must deflationary formal theories of truth satisfy? This chapter argues against the widely accepted view that compositional and Tarskian theories of truth are substantial or otherwise unacceptable to deflationists. First, two purposes that a formal truth theory can serve are distinguished: one descriptive, the other logical (i.e., to characterise the correctness of inferences involving ‘true’). The chapter argues that the most compelling arguments for the incompatibility of compositional and Tarskian theories concern descriptive theories only. -/- Second, two requirements (...) that any deflationist truth theory intended to serve a logical purpose must satisfy are put forward. These requirements, it is argued, suggest that (i) many well-known compositional and Tarskian theories are acceptable from a deflationist standpoint (including CT); (ii) certain other popular theories of truth (including KF and FS) are not similarly acceptable; (iii) there are no conclusive reasons to impose a conservativeness requirement on deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

Deflationism is the view that certain metaphysical debates are defective, leaving it open whether the defect is best explained in semantic, conceptual, or epistemic terms. Local semantic deflationism is the thesis that familiar metaphysical debates, which appear to be about the existence and identity of material objects, are merely verbal. It’s a form of local deflationism because it restricts itself to one particular area of metaphysics. It’s a form of semantic deflationism because the defect it purports (...) to identify in these debates is explained in terms of the broadly semantic notion of a merely verbal disputation. Three questions about this thesis are asked and answered here. Does a commitment to the principle of interpretive charity support it? No. Does it avoid the problems that plagued Carnap? No. Does it support a linguistic turn with respect to questions about the nature of material things? No. The central take-home message is that local semantic deflationism is unstable: advocates of the view must admit that debates about material coincidence and identity are substantive. (shrink)

A line of argument, presented by David Lewis, to show that the correspondence theory of truth is not a real alternative to deflationism is developed. It is shown that truthmakers, construed as concrete events or states of affairs, are unsatisfactory entities, since we do not know how to individuate them or how to identify their essential qualities. Furthermore, the real work is usually done by supervenience relations, which have little to do with truth. It is argued that the Equivalence (...) Schema is quite sufficient to yield a unitary property of being true, and that this generates a weak, but non-trivial, version of the correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that a deflationist theory of truth must conservatively extend any base theory to which it is added. But when applied to arithmetic, it's argued, the imposition of a conservativeness requirement leads to a serious objection to deflationism: for the Gödel sentence for Peano Arithmetic is not a theorem of PA, but becomes one when PA is extended by adding plausible principles governing truth. This paper argues that no such objection succeeds. The issue turns on how we (...) understand the notion of logical consequence implicit in any conservativeness requirement, and whether we possess a categorical conception of the natural numbers. I offer a disjunctive response: if we possess a categorical conception of arithmetic, then deflationists have principled reason to accept a rich notion of logical consequence according to which the Gödel sentence follows from PA. But if we do not, then the reasons for requiring the derivation of the Gödel sentence lapse, and deflationists are free to accept a conservativeness requirement stated proof-theoretically. Either way, deflationism is in the clear. (shrink)

Deflationists believe that the question “What is truth?” should be answered not by means of a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of truth, but by figuring out what use we make of the concept of truth, and the word ‘true’, in practice. This article accepts this methodology, and it thereby rejects pluralism about truth that is driven by ontological considerations. However, it shows that there are practical considerations for a pluralism about truth, formulated at the level of use. The theory (...) expounded by this article states that truth is a dual-purpose tool; it can be used as a device for transferring justificatory burdens and, for select areas of discourse, it can also be used as a standard, a norm. This contrast in how truth is used introduces a bifurcation in our discourse that is reminiscent of metaphysical divides traced by more traditional versions of alethic pluralism. However, my pluralism “at the level of use” states that truth is plural solely at the level of use. It is unified at both the conceptual as well as the metaphysical level. At those levels, the theory takes its cue from deflationism. As such, this theory is offered as a midway point and as a potential way forward in the debate between deflationism and pluralism. (shrink)

This essay argues that deflationism is incompatible with the phenomenon of referential indeterminacy. This puts the deflationist in the difficult position of having to deny the possibility of what otherwise seems like a manifest and theoretically important phenomenon. Section 1 provides background on deflationism. Section 2 considers an intuitive argument by Stephen Leeds to the effect that deflationism precludes RI; the essay argues that this argument does not succeed. The rest of the essay presents its own, distinct (...) argument for the incompatibility of deflationism and RI. Section 3 argues that direct RI—RI that is not simply a derivative of some other, nonreferential instance of indeterminacy—is strictly incompatible with deflationism. Section 4 considers a couple of different ways the deflationist might try to achieve indirect RI—via indeterminate identity and indeterminate synonymy—and argues that each is unsatisfactory. (shrink)

This paper discusses the meta-ethical implications of Wittgenstein’s later moral philosophy. According to Lovibond and Brandhorst, Wittgenstein provided a novel conception of moral facts, properties and objects by adopting deflationism. Lovibond argues that Wittgenstein’s seamless conception of language together with his non-foundational epistemology and non-transcendent understanding of rationality involves a change of perspective towards a plausible and non-mystificatory moral realism. Meanwhile, Brandhorst argues that Wittgenstein’s provides a deflationist conception of moral truths from which we obtain a deflationist conception of (...) moral facts. This paper argues, on the contrary, that the attribution of deflationism does not do justice to Wittgenstein’s later work. It is concluded, therefore, that the appeal to deflationism does not afford or substantiate the exegetical claims made by Lovibond and Brandhorst. (shrink)

Deflationism about truth is often said to be incompatible with truth-theoretic semantics. However, both of these labels are ambiguous, making the truth of the incompatibility claim dependent on interpretation. I provide one pair of natural interpretations, on which both views relate essentially to grounding and on which they are indeed incompatible. This result has some intrinsic interest as well as paving the way for further needed clarifications in the debate about the relationship between the views.

In this paper, I consider the question of whether or not the deflationist about truth can respond to the Liar and allied paradoxes by taking sentences such as the following: (1) (1) is false (2) (2) is not true (3) (3) is true to be meaningless. Let's call this strategy for dealing with the Liar and Liar-like phenomena the Meaningless Strategy. This strategy is intuitively satisfying: it captures many people's initial response to the paradoxes; and it is theoretically important: if (...) successful, it might allow the deflationist to avoid the revenge problem that plagues so many putative solutions to the Liar. Moreover, owing to the austerity of their theory, deflationists have very few resources to deploy in attempting to accommodate the Liar, which means that if the deflationist is in a good position to employ the Meaningless Strategy, so much the better for deflationism. (shrink)

The radically enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) holds that cognition is not always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations. Arguments for REC have assumed that its opponents defend a substantive notion of representation—a notion that entails the existence of content-carrying mental states. This paper considers the prospects of representationalism of a different stripe—one that prefers deflated notions representation. For example, deflationists hold that talk of mental representations might just be a kind of convenient labeling that does (...) not commit theorists to any substantive claims about the explanatory work done by psychosemantic properties. Taking the deflationary option thus undercuts the crucial motivation for positing mental representations in the first place. This chapter argues that, should the deflationist arguments prove warranted, they provide reason to hold that some forms of cognition are contentless, à la REC. (shrink)

I defend the deflationary theory of truth and reference I have proposed from the objections raised in Vann McGee’s “Thought, Thoughts, and Deflationism,” trying where possible to use arguments that other deflationists might find useful.

In this article, I provide a general account of deflationism. After doing so, I turn to truth-defla- tionism, where, after first describing some of the species, I highlight some challenges for those who wish to adopt it.

The debate between scientific realists and antirealists has been going on for a long time, and neither side seems to prevail. To resist the objections raised by antirealists, a long series of versions of realism have been proposed, but none seems to work across the board. Therefore, various critics suggested that supporters and adversaries of realism speak past each other, and the debate is at a stalemate. In this paper, written in honour of Fabio Minazzi, I examine and criticize some (...) recent proposals to deflate or radically change the dispute: deflationism, radical naturalism and particularism: none of them, I argue, is satisfactory, nor actually required. I suggest, instead, that the debate is in better shape than it might seem, having already made significant progresses and converged on certain conclusions. (shrink)

Many people feel compelled to interpret, describe, and respond to Large Language Models (LLMs) as if they possess inner mental lives sim- ilar to our own. Responses to this phenomenon have varied. Inflation- ists hold that at least some folk psychological ascriptions to LLMs are warranted. Deflationists argue that all such attributions of mentality to LLMs are misplaced, often cautioning against the risk that anthropomor- phic projection may lead to misplaced trust or potentially even confusion about the moral status of (...) LLMs. We advance this debate by assessing two common deflationary arguments against LLM mentality. What we term the robustness strategy aims to undercut one justification for believing that LLMs are minded entities by showing that putatively cognitive and humanlike behaviours are not robust, failing to generalise appropriately. What we term the etiological strategy undercuts attributions of mental- ity by challenging naive causal explanations of LLM behaviours, offering alternative causal accounts that weaken the case for mental state attribu- tions. While both strategies offer powerful challenges to full-blown infla- tionism, we find that neither strategy provides a knock-down case against ascriptions of mentality to LLMs simpliciter. With this in mind, we ex- plore a modest form of inflationism that permits ascriptions of mentality to LLMs under certain conditions. Specifically, we argue that folk prac- tice provides a defeasible basis for attributing mental states and capacities to LLMs provided those mental states and capacities can be understood in metaphysically undemanding terms (e.g. knowledge, beliefs and de- sires), while greater caution is required when attributing metaphysically demanding mental phenomena such as phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiry about metaphysically loaded expressions like “law of nature,” “essence,” and “ground” faces a choice point: Do we need the word, and the concept that goes with it, in order to facilitate thought and communication about some distinctive, explanatorily important _metaphysical structure_? Or does their value for us consist in the way they play some crucial _epistemic role_, a role that can itself be characterized without reference to any such metaphysical structure? Here I explore the latter option, in the (...) form of “respectful deflationism”: roughly, the position that we can in good conscience take some putatively metaphysical expression to be of central philosophical importance, but for entirely non-metaphysical reasons. I use recent debates between Humeans and anti-Humeans about laws of nature as a case study. (shrink)

Anaphoric deflationism is a kind of prosententialist account of the use of “true.” It holds that “true” is an expressive operator and not a predicate. In particular, “is true” is explained as a “prosentence.” Prosentences are, for sentences, the equivalent of what pronouns are for nouns: As pronouns refer to previously introduced nouns, so prosentences like “that’s true” inherit their semantic content from previously introduced sentences. So, if Jim says, “The candidate is going to win the election,” and Bill (...) replies “that’s true,” the real meaning of Bill’s statement is “It is true that the candidate is going to win the election.” This kind of prosententialist deflationism around the use of “true,” especially in Robert Brandom’s version, is an explanation given in terms of anaphora. The prosentence is an anaphoric dependent of the sentence providing its content. Båve (Philosophical Studies, 145, 297-310. 2009) argued that the anaphoric account is not as general as prosententialists claim, and that the analogy between prosentences and pronouns is explanatorily idle because it does not do any real explanatory work. The two criticisms are connected: The lack of unity within the anaphoric theory can be used to show its poor explanatory value. The plurality of uses of “is true” exceeds the anaphoric account indeed. Therefore, prosententialism is just a superficial re-description and the real work is done by means of more general semantic terms, namely “semantic equivalence and consequence” between “p” and ““p” is true.” I analyze Båve’s arguments and highlight that he fails to acknowledge the importance of a pragmatic and expressive dimension explained by the anaphoric account, a dimension that semantic “equivalence” and “consequence” are not capable of explaining. I then show that the anaphoric account can actually explain semantic equivalence and consequence, and this is crucial because equivalence and consequence do not explain anaphoric dependence. This reverses the allegation of generality: The anaphoric account is more general. Again, the cases typically used to defend prosententialism, if correctly described, show a unitary structure: They are all versions of lazy anaphoric dependence. Therefore, the unifying principle performing the explanation here is lazy anaphora. (shrink)

Two influential objections to deflationism about truth question its ability to explain the role of true beliefs in successful actions; and to account for general compositional principles linking truth to complex sentences governed by truth-functional connectives. In this paper, I address recent formulations of these objections by Will Gamester and Richard Heck. My responses draw on recent work on explanation, grounding, and the logic of “because”. However, each response leaves a residual concern for deflationists that these strategies alone cannot (...) fully resolve. In the final section, I propose a view I call "Aristotelian Deflationism," which incorporates specific “because” principles relating to truth as an alternative to standard instances of the T-schema. While not deflationist in the strictest sense, I argue that this approach offers compelling ways to address both the primary objections and the residual concerns effectively. (shrink)

Controversy has arisen of late over the claim that deflationism about truth requires that we explain meaning in terms of something other than truth-conditions. This controversy, it is argued, is due to unclarity as to whether the basic deflationary claim that a sentence and a sentence that attributes truth to it are equivalent in meaning is intended to involve the truth- predicate of the object language for which we develop an account of meaning, or is intended to involve the (...) truth- predicate of the metalanguage in which we develop an account of meaning. The former view is compatible with the truth-conditional theory of meaning for the object language, the latter is incompatible with it. However, the former view is also trivially true; hence we should endorse the claim that any form of deflationism worth being interested in is incompatible with understanding meaning truth-conditionally. (shrink)

The paper first discusses a general argument against Horwich's Minimal Theory of Truth, relating to its infinitary character, and then discusses his argument against using propositional quantifiers to generalize over the truth schema instances. On the most charitable interpretation, the argument holds that there is a contradiction between the use of such quantifiers and a typical deflationist idea about the function of the truth predicate. It turns out, however, that although for the cast majority of cases in which propositional quantifiers (...) could be used in a theory, his argument works, but not for the special case of truth theories. I then consider some other common worries about using propositional quantifiers to formulate a truth theory and find them all wanting. An upshot of this investigation, however, is that it seems to be indeterminate, among several formulations of a deflationist truth theory, which one is “the right one”. I conclude that this conclusion is not necessarily unacceptable, and may even be one that should endorsed by deflationists, as it coheres with the “fundamental deflationist intuition”, that all there is to say about truth is that the proposition that snow is white is true if snow is white, and so on. (shrink)

Deflationists argue that ‘true’ is merely a logico-linguistic device for expressing blind ascriptions and infinite generalisations. For this reason, some authors have argued that deflationary truth must be conservative, i.e. that a deflationary theory of truth for a theory S must not entail sentences in S’s language that are not already entailed by S. However, it has been forcefully argued that any adequate theory of truth for S must be non-conservative and that, for this reason, truth cannot be deflationary :493–521, (...) 1998; Ketland in Mind 108:69–94, 1999). We consider two defences of conservative deflationism, respectively proposed by Waxman :429–463, 2017) and Tennant :551–582, 2002), and argue that they are both unsuccessful. In Waxman’s hands, deflationists are committed either to a non-purely expressive notion of truth, or to a conception of mathematics that does not allow them to justifiably exclude non-conservative theories of truth. Tennant’s conservative deflationism fares no better: if deflationist truth must be conservative over arithmetic, it can be shown to collapse into a non-conservative variety of deflationism. (shrink)

This chapter discusses deflationist and anti-metaphysicalist views of the temporal-ontology question—i.e., the question of whether past and future objects exist (i.e., roughly, the question of whether presentism or eternalism is true). In addition to surveying the possible deflationist and anti-metaphysicalist views that one might hold, this chapter provides an argument against the most popular versions of deflationism—versions that can be thought of as Carnapian—and it develops some non-Carnapian versions of deflationism and anti-metaphysicalism.

In this paper, we develop a particular approach within deflationary theorizing about truth-talk in natural language. Deflationists often maintain that truth-talk is indispensable and that the expressive roles that truth-talk plays exhaust the discourse’s purpose and operation. One way to present this latter thesis is by saying that the central function of truth-talk is to express what would otherwise require sentential variables and quantifiers. Sentential-variable deflationism (SVD) involves taking this logical machinery to explain (not merely to indicate, capture, or (...) model) the truth predicate’s logical role and to capture what the interesting instances of truth-talk express. Since this approach makes explanatory use of quantifying into sentence position, it is especially crucial in this context to determine the best way of understanding these higher-order logical devices. After eliminating some interpretations of them that are inadequate for SVD’s purposes, we show how this deflationary approach can succeed. This involves explaining how truth-talk operates and what truth-ascriptions express in terms of an adverbial reading of quantification into sentence position originally proposed by Arthur Prior. We maintain that, with this understanding of the higher-order logical machinery in hand, truth-talk is revealed as dispensable, even for the important generalizing role that deflationists have emphasized. (shrink)

This paper argues, in response to Huw Price, that deflationism has the resources to account for the normativity of truth. The discussion centers on a principle of hyper-objective assertibility, that one is incorrect to assert that p if not-p. If this principle doesn't state a fact about truth, it neednt be explained by deflationists. If it does,, it can be explained.

This paper compares two ways of holding that logic is special among the sciences in that it has no restricted class of entities as its subject matter, but instead concerns all entities alike. One way is Williamson’s explanation of how inquiry into logical consequence and logical truth only superficially concerns the linguistic or conceptual entities that bear these properties. Williamson draws on ideas familiar from deflationism about truth, and his account has been called “deflationary.” I argue that the analogy (...) is misleading. While there’s a broad sense in which Williamson offers a deflationary account of logical inquiry, his view differs from deflationism about truth in being best understood as a form of instrumentalism. By contrast, I elaborate a deflationism about logical properties modeled on deflationism about truth. I defend this expressive device deflationism as an explanation of our use of logical predicates. (shrink)

Alethic pluralists often claim that accommodating certain alethic platitudes motivates rejecting deflationism in favour of a pluralist inflationism about truth. Deflationists claim that the logical role of the truth predicate, viz providing something equivalent to variables for sentence-in-use positions and quantifiers governing them, is sufficient to account for the appeal to truth in the alethic platitudes. Surprisingly, however, most deflationists face an insufficiently acknowledged problem with respect to explaining how this mode of generalizing works. The standard substitutional or higher-order (...) interpretations of sentential quantifiers and variables do not meet two desiderata that we claim any adequate account of them must satisfy. To address this issue, we review and extend A. N. Prior's adverbial understanding of sentential quantification, explain how it satisfies the desiderata, and respond to some objections. This shows that deflationists can accommodate and account for the alethic platitudes by applying this non-nominal understanding of generalizing on sentence positions. (shrink)

We discuss two desirable properties of deflationary truth theories: conservativeness and maximality. Joining them together, we obtain a notion of a maximal conservative truth theory - a theory which is conservative over its base, but can't be enlarged any further without losing its conservative character. There are indeed such theories; we show however that none of them is axiomatizable, and moreover, that there will be in fact continuum many theories of this sort. It turns out in effect that the deflationist (...) still needs some additional principles, which would permit him to construct his preferred theory of truth. (shrink)