Deflationism and the primary truth bearer

Synthese 173 (3):281 - 297 (2010)
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Abstract

The paper discusses what kind of truth bearer, or truth-ascription, a deflationist should take as primary. I first present number of arguments against a sententialist view. I then present a deflationary theory which takes propositions as primary, and try to show that it deals neatly with a wide range of linguistic data. Next, I consider both the view that there is no primary truth bearer, and the most common account of sentence truth given by deflationists who take propositions as primary, and argue that they both attribute an implausible type of ambiguity to “true”. This can be avoided, however, if truth-ascriptions to sentences are taken as a certain form of pragmatic ellipses. I end by showing how this hypothesis accommodates a number of intuitions involving truth-ascriptions to sentences.

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Arvid Båve
University of Lisbon

Citations of this work

The Argument from Accidental Truth against Deflationism.Masaharu Mizumoto - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
In Defence of Radical Restrictionism.David Liggins - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1):3-25.
Formulating deflationism.Arvid Båve - 2013 - Synthese 190 (15):3287-3305.
Truth-Deflationism and Truth-Theoretic Semantics: One Way to Make Them Clash.Arvid Båve - 2023 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (3):1067-1072.
Propositions, Meaning, and Names.Tristan Grøtvedt Haze - 2018 - Philosophical Forum 49 (3):335-362.

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References found in this work

Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Two Dogmas of Empiricism.W. Quine - 1951 - [Longmans, Green].
From a Logical Point of View.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1953 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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