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)

In ‘Withdrawal and contextualism’, Jonathan Adler (2006) provides an argument which, if successful, undermines what contextualists take to be prime support for their view. Given the popularity of contextualist (and related) positions in epistemology, together with the fact that, thus far, no one has challenged Adler's argument, a critical assessment therefore presses. In this article, after briefly reviewing Adler's argument, I show that it fails. My reason for taking his argument to fail will then provide novel support for contextualism, one (...) that does not rely on raising the pragmatic stakes. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, Mark Balaguer develops and defends a new version of mathematical fictionalism, what he calls ‘Hermeneutic non-assertivism’, and responds to some recent objections to mathematical fictionalism that were launched by John Burgess and others. In this paper I provide some fairly compelling reasons for rejecting Hermeneutic non-assertivism — ones that highlight an important feature of what understanding mathematics involves (or, as we shall see, does not involve).

In ‘A Consistent Way with Paradox’, Laurence Goldstein (2009) clarifies his solution to the liar, which he touts as revenge immune . In addition, he (Ibid.) responds to one of the objections that Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2006) raise against certain solutions to the open pair and argues that his proffered solution to the liar family of paradoxes undermines what they (Ibid.) call the dialetheic conjecture . In this paper, after critically evaluating Goldstein’s response to A-G&W, I turn to (...) his proposed solution to the liar paradox, where I show that it is difficult to see how it manages to avoid that conjecture. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Mark Balaguer has responded to the argument that I launched against Hermeneutic Non-Assertivism, claiming that, as a matter of empirical fact, ‘when typical mathematicians utter mathematical sentences, they are doing something that differs from asserting in a pretty subtle way, so that the difference between [asserting] and this other kind of speech act is not obvious’. In this paper, I show the implausibility of this empirical hypothesis.

Minimalists, following Horwich, claim that all that can be said about truth is comprised by all and only the nonparadoxical instances of (E) p is true iff p. It is, accordingly, standard in the literature on truth and paradox to ask how the minimalist will restrict (E) so as to rule out paradox-inducing sentences (alternatively: propositions). In this paper, we consider a prior question: On what grounds does the minimalist restrict (E) so as to rule out paradox-inducing sentences and, thereby, (...) avoid contradictions? We argue that there is no good reason for thinking that the minimalist can furnish such grounds. Accordingly, while we are tempted to conclude from this that the minimalist should acknowledge the contradictoriness of truth, instead, we end with a challenge: Provide grounds, compatible with minimalism, for banning the paradoxical instances of (E), or embrace dialetheism. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

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)

There are things we routinely say that may strike us as literally false but that we are nonetheless reluctant to give up. This might be something mundane, like the way we talk about the sun setting in the west, or it could be something much deeper, like engaging in talk that is ostensibly about numbers despite believing that numbers do not literally exist. Rather than regard such behaviour as self-defeating, a "fictionalist" is someone who thinks that this kind of discourse (...) is entirely appropriate, even helpful, so long as we treat what is said as a useful fiction, rather than as the sober truth. "Fictionalism" can be broadly understood as a view that uses a notion of pretense or fiction in order to resolve certain puzzles or problems that otherwise do not necessarily have anything to do with literature or fictional creations. Within contemporary analytic philosophy, fictionalism has been on the scene for well over a decade and has matured during that time, growing in popularity. There are now myriad competing views about fictionalism and consequently the discussion has branched out into many more subdisciplines of philosophy. Yet there is widespread disagreement on what philosophical fictionalism actually amounts to and about how precisely it ought to be pursued. This volume aims to guide these discussions, collecting some of the most up-to-date work on fictionalism and tracing the view's development over the past decade. After a detailed discussion in the book's introductory chapter of how philosophers should think of fictionalism and its connection to metaontology more generally, the remaining chapters provide readers with arguments for and against this view from leading scholars in the fields of epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and others. (shrink)

The Law of Non-Contradiction - that no contradiction can be true - has been a seemingly unassailable dogma since the work of Aristotle, in Book G of the Metaphysics. It is an assumption challenged from a variety of angles in this collection of original papers. Twenty-three of the world's leading experts investigate the 'law', considering arguments for and against it and discussing methodological issues that arise whenever we question the legitimacy of logical principles. The result is a balanced inquiry into (...) a venerable principle of logic, one that raises questions at the very centre of logic itself. The aim of this volume is to present a comprehensive debate about the Law of Non-Contradiction, from discussions as to how the law is to be understood, to reasons for accepting or re-thinking the law, and to issues that raise challenges to the law, such as the Liar Paradox, and a 'dialetheic' resolution of that paradox. The editors contribute an introduction which surveys the issues and serves to frame the debate, and a useful bibliography offering a guide to further reading. This volume will be of interest to anyone working on philosophical logic, and to anyone who has ever wondered about the status of logical laws and about how one might proceed to mount arguments for or against them. (shrink)

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

Deflationist accounts of truth are widely held in contemporary philosophy: they seek to show that truth is a dispensable concept with no metaphysical depth. However, logical paradoxes present problems for deflationists that their work has struggled to overcome. In this volume of fourteen original essays, a distinguished team of contributors explore the extent to which, if at all, deflationism can accommodate paradox. The volume will be of interest to philosophers of logic, philosophers of language, and anyone working on truth. Contributors (...) include Bradley Armour-Garb, Jody Azzouni, JC Beall, Hartry Field, Christopher Gauker, Michael Glanzberg, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta, Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten, Paul Horwich, Graham Priest, Greg Restall, and Alan Weir. (shrink)

In this book, Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge distinguish various species of fictionalism, locating and defending their own version of philosophical fictionalism. Addressing semantic and philosophical puzzles that arise from ordinary language, they consider such issues as the problem of non-being, plural identity claims, mental-attitude ascriptions, meaning attributions, and truth-talk. They consider 'deflationism about truth', explaining why deflationists should be fictionalists, and show how their philosophical fictionalist account of truth-talk underwrites a dissolution of the Liar Paradox and (...) its kin. They further explore the semantic notions of reference and predicate-satisfaction, showing how philosophical fictionalism can also resolve puzzles that these notions appear to present. Their critical examination of fictionalist approaches in philosophy, together with the development and application of their own brand of philosophical fictionalism, will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and linguistics. (shrink)

This book is a collection of important writings on deflationism, with a detailed introduction and an exhaustive annotated bibliography. Among philosophers concerned with the theory of truth, deflationist positions have quickly gained ground and have become the most popular. Yet heretofore there has been no single book to which the readers can go for a detailed, overall view of the entire phenomenon of deflationism. This is the only available map of the whole terrain of deflationism. -/- Deflationism is a comparatively (...) new approach, though it has its roots in the thinking of some philosophers in the early twentieth century. Deflationism rejects all the traditional theories of truth: the correspondence theory (truth corresponds with facts), the coherence theory (truth is membership of a coherent set of beliefs), the pragmatist theory is provability or verifiability). This book gives complete coverage to all the different varieties of deflationism, and to earlier philosophers who anticipated deflationism. The articles and exerpts include classic works by Frege, Ayer, Ramsey, Tarsk, and Quine, and recent works by the leading deflationist authors of today: Paul Horwich, Hartry Field, Stephen Schiffer, Robert Brandom, and Stephen Leeds. (shrink)

In Vagueness and Contradiction (2001), Roy Sorensen defends and extends his epistemic account of vagueness. In the process, he appeals to connections between vagueness and semantic paradox. These appeals come mainly in Chapter 11, where Sorensen offers a solution to what he calls the no-no paradox—a “neglected cousin” of the more famous liar—and attempts to use this solution as a precedent for an epistemic account of the sorites paradox. This strategy is problematic for Sorensen’s project, however, since, as we establish, (...) he fails to resolve the semantic pathology of the no-no paradox. (shrink)

Stephen Read has presented an argument for the inconsistency of the concept of validity. We extend Read’s results and show that this inconsistency is but one half of a larger problem. Like the concept of truth, validity is infected with what we call semantic pathology, a condition that actually gives rise to two symptoms: inconsistency and indeterminacy. After sketching the basic ideas behind semantic pathology and explaining how it manifests both symptoms in the concept of truth, we present cases that (...) establish the indeterminacy of validity and that link this indeterminacy with the concept’s inconsistency. Our conclusion is that an adequate treatment of the semantic pathology thus revealed must deal with both of its symptoms. Further, it must extend to the occurrences of this condition elsewhere: in the concept of truth, in the other central semantic notions, and even in certain philosophical concepts outside semantics. (shrink)

It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that marshal parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists. At the same time, the utility of “proposition-talk”—indeed, the apparent linguistic commitment evident in our use of 'that'-clauses (in offering explanations and making (...) predictions)—is also in need of explanation. We account for this with a fictionalist analysis of our use of 'that'-clauses. Our account avoids certain problems that arise for the usual error-theoretic versions of fictionalism because we apply the notion of semantic pretense to develop an alternative, pretense-involving, non-error-theoretic, fictionalist account of proposition-talk. (shrink)

In this paper, we do two things. First, we provide some support for adopting a version of the meaningless strategy with respect to the liar paradox, and, second, we extend that strategy, by providing, albeit tentatively, a solution to that paradox—one that is semantic, rather than logical.

In this volume of fourteen original essays, a distinguished team of contributors explore the extent to which, if at all, deflationism can accommodate paradox.

We argue that if Stephen Yablo (2005) is right that philosophers of mathematics ought to endorse a fictionalist view of number-talk, then there is a compelling reason for deflationists about truth to endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk. More specifically, our claim will be that, for deflationists about truth, Yablo’s argument for mathematical fictionalism can be employed and mounted as an argument for truth-theoretic fictionalism.

Over the past 25 years, Graham Priest has ably presented and defended dialetheism, the view that certain sentences are properly characterized as true with true negations. Our goal here is neither to quibble with the tenability of true, assertable contradictions nor, really, with the arguments for dialetheism. Rather, we wish to address the dialetheist's treatment of cases of semantic pathology and to pose a worry for dialetheism that has not been adequately considered. The problem that we present seems to have (...) broader bite, afflicting both consistent and inconsistent proposals for resolving semantic pathology. Thus, while our primary goal is to uncover some important connections between dialetheism, semantic pathology, and other, more general issues, the problem that we pose might be a worry for anyone who aims to resolve semantic pathology - consistently or not. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out what we see as a novel, and very promising, approach to resolving a number of the familiar linguistic puzzles that provide philosophy of language with much of its subject matter. The approach we promote postulates semantic pretense at work where these puzzles arise. We begin by briefly cataloging the relevant dilemmas. Then, after introducing the pretense approach, we indicate how it promises to handle these putatively intractable problems. We then consider a number of objections (...) to pretense views, taking this as an opportunity to provide more detailed explanation of what a pretense account amounts to, what the pretense approach commits us to, and why it is a promising approach in philosophy of language. (shrink)

In this paper, we do two things. First, we clarify the notion of deflationism, with special attention to deflationary accounts of truth. Second, we argue that one who endorses a deflationary account of truth (or of semantic notions, generally) should be, or perhaps already is, a pretense theorist regarding truth-talk. In §1 we discuss mathematical fictionalism, where we focus on Yablo’s pretense account of mathematical discourse. §2 briefly introduces the key elements of deflationism and explains deflationism about truth in particular. (...) §3 discusses why deflationary accounts of truth should be construed as pretense accounts and gives a preliminary sketch of a particular pretense account of truth-talk. §4 addresses a main objection to a pretense account, and §5 concludes. (shrink)

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.

Note: This is a "pre-review" version, not the final version that will be published. -/- In “Nothing is True,” Will Gamester defends a form of alethic nihilism that still grants truth-talk a kind of legitimacy: an expressive role that is implemented via a pretense. He argues that this view has all of the strengths of deflationism, while also providing an elegant resolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. For the alethic nihilist, Liar and related sentences are not true, and (...) that is the end of the story. No contradiction arises because it does not thereby follow that any of these sentences are also true, since nothing is. Gamester concludes that the simplicity of this response to the semantic paradoxes makes alethic nihilism an attractive approach. We disagree. In addition to providing insurmountable obstacles for his form of alethic nihilism, we contend that a certain form of non-nihilist deflationism is better placed to deal with the paradoxes and to account for truth-talk more generally. (shrink)

Philosophical work on truth covers two streams of inquiry, one concerning the nature (if any) of truth, the other concerning truth-related paradox, especially the Liar. For the most part these streams have proceeded fairly independently of each other. In his "Deflationary Truth and the Liar" (JPL 28:455-488, 1999) Keith Simmons argues that the two streams bear on one another in an important way; specifically, the Liar poses a greater problem for deflationary conceptions of truth than it does for inflationist conceptions. (...) We agree with Simmons on this point; however, we disagree with his main conclusion. In a nutshell, Simmons' main conclusion is that deflationists can solve the Liar only by compromising deflationism. If Simmons is right, then deflationists cannot solve the Liar paradox. In this paper we argue that, pace Simmons, there is an approach to the Liar that is available to deflationists, namely dialetheism. (shrink)

In defense of the minimalist conception of truth, Paul Horwich(2001) has recently argued that our acceptance of the instances of the schema,`the proposition that p is true if and only if p', suffices to explain our acceptanceof truth generalizations, that is, of general claims formulated using the truth predicate.In this paper, I consider the strategy Horwich develops for explaining our acceptance of truth generalizations. As I show, while perhaps workable on its own, the strategy is in conflictwith his response to (...) the liar paradox. Something must give. I consider and reject variousalternatives and emendations to the strategy. In order to resolve the conflict,I propose an alternative approach to the liar, one that supports Horwich's strategywhile leaving minimalism maximally uncompromised. (shrink)

Do inconsistent laws, which are in the form of inconsistent legal obligations, provide us with good reasons for accepting the possibility of legal gluts, which are true legal statements whose negations are also true? Given the contingencies of the law, it is unlikely that many will deny the possibility of inconsistent legal obligations, but it remains an ongoing debate whether these lead to any legal gluts. In a recent debate, Graham Priest [Priest, G. 2006. In ‘Contradiction’. In First printed by (...) Martinus Nijhoff in 1987. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Priest, G. 2017. ‘Where Laws Conflict: An Application of the Method of Chunk and Permeate’. In Law and the New Logics, edited by H. Glenn, and L. Smith, 168–180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] has argued from inconsistent obligations to legal gluts and JC Beall [Beall, JC 2017. ‘On inconsistent laws and gluts’. In Law and the New Logics, edited by H. Glenn, and L. Smith, 199–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.], while he has acknowledged that there are inconsistent obligations, has argued against Priest’s arguments for legal gluts. In this paper, after reviewing the debate, I adjudicate it and provide reasons for resisting Beall’s arguments again Priest thereby providing a possibility for legal gluts. (shrink)

In a series of articles, Dan Lopez De Sa and Elia Zardini argue that several theorists have recently employed instances of paradoxical reasoning, while failing to see its problematic nature because it does not immediately (or obviously) yield inconsistency. In contrast, Lopez De Sa and Zardini claim that resultant inconsistency is not a necessary condition for paradoxicality. It is our contention that, even given their broader understanding of paradox, their arguments fail to undermine the instances of reasoning they attack, either (...) because they fail to see everything that is at work in that reasoning, or because they misunderstand what it is that the reasoning aims to show. (shrink)

In this paper, I address some of the chief challenges, or problems, for Deflationary Theories of Truth, viz., the Generalization Problem, the Conservativeness Argument, and the Success Argument.

In this paper, after clarifying certain features of Gideon Rosen’s Modal Fictionalism, I raise two problems for that view and argue that these problems strongly suggest that advocates of a “Deflationist Strategy” ought not to endorse, or adopt Rosen-style Modal Fictionalism.

Semantic pathology is most widely recognized in the liar paradox, where an apparent inconsistency arises in ‘‘liar sentences’’ and their ilk. But the phenomenon of semantic pathology also manifests a sibling symptom—an apparent indeterminacy—which, while not largely discussed (save for the occasional nod to ‘‘truthteller sentences’’), is just as pervasive as, and exactly parallels, the symptom of inconsistency. Moreover, certain ‘‘dual symptom’’ cases, which we call naysayers, exhibit both inconsistency and indeterminacy and also manifest a higher-order indeterminacy between them. In (...) this paper, we explore and lay out the full, broader extent of semantic pathology. We then turn to the best-known attempts to diagnose and treat the phenomenon: consistentist approaches, proposed by Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke, and an inconsistentist approach, originally presented by Graham Priest and dubbed ‘‘dialetheism’’. We explain the basic elements of each view and argue that each fails to provide an adequate way of dealing with the full extent of semantic pathology. We conclude that a new kind of approach is required and briefly sketch the pretense-based view that we favor. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 4, Page 427-438, December 2021.

This article reveals a tension between a fairly standard response to "liar sentences," of which -/- (L) Sentence (L) -/- is not true is an instance, and some features of our natural language determiners (e.g., 'every,' 'some,' 'no,' etc.) that have been established by formal linguists. The fairly standard response to liar sentences, which has been voiced by a number of philosophers who work directly on the Liar paradox (e.g., Parsons [1974], Kripke [1975], Burge [1979], Goldstein [1985, 2009], Gaifman [1992, (...) 2000]), Glanzberg [2004], Azzouni [2006], and others), but can also be heard from philosophers who do not work directly on that paradox, is that liar sentences do not express propositions. Call this the "No Proposition View" (hereafter NPV). Evidently, the belief that liar sentences do not express propositions is a deeply held intuition. As the previously mentioned tension will reveal, there is reason to worry about whether this deeply held intuition can be sustained. (shrink)

Using ideas proposed in Aboutness and developed in ‘If-thenism’, Stephen Yablo has tried to improve on classical if-thenism in mathematics, a view initially put forward by Bertrand Russell in his Principles of Mathematics. Yablo’s stated goal is to provide a reading of a sentence like ‘The number of planets is eight’ with a sort of content on which it fails to imply ‘Numbers exist’. After presenting Yablo’s framework, our paper raises a problem with his view that has gone virtually unnoticed (...) in the literature. If we are right, then Yablo’s version of if-thenism cannot succeed. (shrink)

In this paper I critically evaluate a number of current "consistent inconsistency theories" and then briefly motivate a rival position. The rival position challenges a consistent inconsistency theory, by sharing many of its basic commitments without suffering the problems that such a theory appears to face.

There are a number of people who do great work in philosophy who have said very little about the Liar paradox. The purpose of this volume is to afford those philosophers the opportunity to address what might be described as reflections on the Liar.