Quine’s conflicts with truth deflationism

Abstract

Compared to the extensive amount of literature on various themes of W.V.O. Quine’s philosophy, his immanent concept of truth remains a relatively unexplored topic. This relative lack of research contributes to a persistent confusion on the deflationary and inflationary details of Quine’s truth. According to a popular reading, Quine’s disquotational definition of the truth predicate exhausts the topic of truth, thus amounting to a deflationary view. Others promote opposing interpretations. I argue that by relying on Tarski’s semantic conception of truth, Quine’s disquotational account inherits a commitment to classical correspondence intuitions. Based on this, Quine posits a firm constitution for truth as an intermediary between language and the world. From this constitution claim follows that the disquotational account proves incompatible with both the general deflationary thesis and, more specifically, the minimalist account, which deny any constitution for truth past what is given by the preferred deflationary schema. This reading is significant for refuting the widespread misrepresentations of Quine as a prominent deflationist.

1 Introduction

W.V.O. Quine’s philosophy has been subject to extensive research especially in recent decades.¹ Despite this, there are even major themes under Quine’s corpus that have received relatively minor attention from scholars when compared to other thoroughly examined aspects of his philosophy.² One relatively unexplored topic is Quine’s immanent conception of truth that he frequently discussed in the latter part of his career (1975, 327–328; 1981, 38–39 & 21–23; 1986, 10–12 & 35–46; 1987, 212–216; 1992, 77–101; 1995a 59–67; 1995b, 261; 1995c, 353; 1995d, 224).³

The relative lack of research on Quine’s truth contributes to a persistent confusion on the deflationary and inflationary details of this notion.⁴ Quine is widely interpreted as a prominent deflationist in both the literature on his philosophy and contemporary truth theoretic debates more broadly conceived. For example, Verhaegh notes in his book-length study of Quine’s naturalism that “Quine, as is well known, defends a deflationary theory of truth.” (2018, 64; see Horwich, 1998, 5 & 2009, 31–33; Hylton, 2007, 274–279; Ebbs, 2009, 1–3; Price, 2009, 325; Horsten & Leigh, 2017, 200; Kemp, 2012, 52–53; Misak, 2018, 299). Eklund makes a similar claim that further emphasizes Quine’s significance in influencing contemporary deflationists: “Quine was a prominent deflationist, and many more recent deflationists are clearly inspired by Quine.” (2021, 635). Others promote non-deflationary readings: “Those who have taken the emphasis on the disquotational aspect of the truth predicate as a sign that Quine is a deflationist must, I conclude, be wrong.” (Davidson, 2005, 85; see Bergström, 1994, 421 & 2000, 63; Raatikainen, 2006, 184; Schwartz, 2014, 9–11 & 2016, 1; Janssen-Lauret, 2015, 153; Gregory, 2019, 152–154, Chen 2020, 110–113).⁵ More recently, Parsons argues that:

But he [Quine] does not make the negative statements characteristic of deflationists, that the concept of truth does not have the importance traditionally attributed to it or that it is an uncontentious concept. And he does not say that the meaning of ‘true’ is given by some version or other of the schema expressing the equivalence of a statement with the attribution of truth of the statement itself. (2020, 222)

What is one to make of Quine’s truth when it seems to allow for both deflationary and inflationary readings? I clarify matters by focusing on what Quine’s (1992, 79–82) disquotational account commits to regarding the nature of truth in relation to the inflationism/deflationism distinction. My core argument is that Quine’s account encompasses extra-schematic and non-deflationary commitments. For the deflationists, the preferred deflationary schema exhausts the content of truth: “The notion of truth, and everything we do with it, is captured entirely by attending to the truth schema.” (Asay, 2021, 111; see Armour-Garb et al., 2022, 1.1; Eklund, 2021, 632). However, nowhere does Quine state that the disquotation schema encompasses all there is to truth. Rather, just as Tarski before him, Quine holds that the instances of the disquotation schema (or the T-schema) are what any materially adequate definition of truth must imply and that a satisfactory account of truth can involve more. In relation to this, Quine (1995c, 353) explicitly states that disquotation is only one of the three constitutive commitments of his immanent conception of truth, others being sententiality and naturalism. Furthermore, when describing disquotation as one of these commitments, Quine states, “I base the immanence of truth on disquotation: To call a sentence true is just to include it in our own theory of the world.” (1995c, 353). However, claiming that truth in the disquotational sense has a role in the selection of contents to our theories exceeds what is evident in the plain disquotation schema, thus indicating extra-schematic commitments. The threat with such commitments from the deflationary perspective is that they risk tying one’s account of truth to other concepts with varying degrees of metaphysical weight, subsequently risking metaphysical inflation. Overall, my contention is that by focusing on the extra-schematic and non-deflationary aspects of Quine’s disquotational account, clarity is achieved regarding his understanding of truth and, more specifically, on the aforementioned confusion between its deflationary and inflationary readings.

In the second section, I set the stage by discussing Quine’s views on the nature of truth and note some initial conflicts between it and deflationary views. In the third section, I clarify core differences between deflationary and inflationary theories to allow for a more detailed comparison between Quine’s views and these -isms. In the fourth section, I demonstrate conflicts between Quine’s views and the deflationary claims of truth being exhausted by the preferred deflationary schema and truth lacking extra-logical explanatory utility. In the fifth section, I argue that Quine commits to an extra-schematic constitution claim where sentential truth consists in a substantive connection that they have with the relevant aspect of the world, namely objects, as perceived from the deployed theoretical perspective. Because of this constitution claim, Quine’s truth proves incompatible with both the general deflationary thesis and, more specifically, the minimalist account, which deny any constitution for truth past what is given by the preferred deflationary schema.

2 Quine’s immanent conception of truth

Quine’s mission with truth is to achieve a naturalistically legitimate account of this concept: “The concept of truth belongs to the conceptual apparatus of science” (1999, 165). One reason for this is that Quine sees truth as having a role in explaining scientifically relevant phenomena and it is through this role that the nature of truth ought to be studied. Initially, Quine holds that truth predications are always made from the perspective of some background theory. Because of this, truth in the Quinean sense is always immanent to the theory through which it is claimed: “Truth is immanent, and there is no higher. We must speak from within a theory, albeit any of various.” (1981, 22).⁶ The core thesis of truths immanence is that just like all concepts, truth is embedded in our conceptual frameworks (theories) and that there is no framework-transcendent (extra-theoretic) perspective through which truth could be claimed, studied, or evaluated. It is worth emphasizing that, for Quine, the claim of immanence concerns both the concept of truth and its instances i.e., true sentences. Our understanding of what it means to be true or the concept of truth and the contents that we hold as true, the class of true sentences, are both embedded in our theoretical understanding of the world: “Where it makes sense to apply ‘true’ is to a sentence couched in the terms of a given theory and seen from within the theory, complete with its posited reality.” (1960, 24). I find both claims, that truth ought to be studied through its role for our theorizing and that it is embedded in our theories in the aforementioned sense, very reasonable.

One motivation behind the immanent conception is Quine’s naturalistic anti-transcendentalism. As there is no way to step beyond the limits of our understanding to evaluate the “full” objectivity of our claims, questions about the theory-independent or transcendent aspects of truth become not only of secondary interest, but meaningless.⁷ All aspects of truth, even the ones that predicate objectivity or seeming transcendence to it, are concluded on from some theoretical perspective—better or worse. As Quine notes in a late interview by Bergström and Føllesdal: “I think of the basic tenet [of naturalism] as a negative one, namely that we can’t hope for any evidence, any avenue to truth higher than or more fundamental than ordinary scientific method itself.” (1994, 196). Another motivation for upholding the immanent conception is Quine’s naturalistic fallibilism, where science embodies “an inquiry into reality, fallible and corrigible but not answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal” (1981, 72). Science, broadly conceived, manifests the highest form of inquiry and pursuer of truth, and if scientific progress proves that the claims we now uphold as true potentially turn out false in the long run, then this is a conclusion that must be accepted based on there being no extra-theoretic perspective through which concluding remarks can be drawn. Since anti-transcendentalism and fallibilism are fundamental components of Quine’s naturalistic thought, and as he approaches truth from a strictly naturalistic perspective, then accordingly both theses carry over to his immanent conception. There is no higher truth than the truth that is immanent to our theories, however fallible and correctible it turns out to be.

The constitutive commitments of the immanent conception could be clearer, and in his late Responses, Quine argued them to be sententiality, disquotation, and naturalism:

I base [the immanent conception of truth] on three counts: sententiality, disquotation and naturalism. By sententiality, what are true are sentences rather than propositions […] A string of marks is true only as a sentence of some specific language L; true in L. […] Further, I base the immanence of truth on disquotation: To call a sentence true is just to include it in our own theory of the world. […] Finally, I base the immanence of truth on naturalism, in disavowing any higher tribunal [of truth] than our best scientific theory of the time. (1995c, 353)⁸

Regarding sententiality, Quine (1966, 11) initially played with treating utterances as truth-bearers, but ultimately settled for eternal sentence tokens: “Declarative sentences thus refined – eternal sentences – are what I shall regard as truth vehicles” (1992, 78–79).⁹ One reason being Quine’s well-known skepticism towards propositions (1986, 2–3). Another reason is Quine’s respect towards the Tarskian apparatus that relies on a sentential truth schema. Based on this, for Quine, what is true are eternal sentence tokens that are formed in a disambiguated language L and are justified by a well-regimented theory T that that gives rise to them and includes them as its contents: “Theory consists of [immanently true] sentences, or is couched in them; and logic connects sentences to sentences.” (1992, 2–3). However, because of the already mentioned fallibility of our science, the truth of any sentence and, subsequently, the overall truth of our theories are subject to near endless re-evaluation. Is this in conflict with the basic truism that truth is objective and independent of what our theories say about it? No, for with the appropriate restrictions regarding truth-aptness at hand, Quine’s disquotational account defines truth in a manner that leads to each truth-apt sentence being necessarily true or false (bivalence) independent of our knowledge about it (warrant independence). To illustrate this further, take Quine’s preferred disquotation schema:

D-schema: “s” is true iff s

or

D-schema instance: “snow is white” is true iff snow is white

There are two key implications of this schema: the first one concerns its ability to define the the logico-expressive utility of the truth predicate and the second one concerns its ability to provide a scaling criterion for sentential truth. Regarding the former point, the disquotation schema demonstrates that when “is true” is added to a sentence (s) of a language L, and the sentence at hand is quoted (“s” is true), we semantically ascend to speech on meta-L.¹⁰ When the predicate is removed and the sentence is disquoted, we semantically descend to speech on object-L (Quine, 1987, 213; 1992, 80). On the left-hand side of the biconditional, we are speaking about linguistic entities (sentences) on the meta-language level and, on the right-hand side, we are speaking about the world on an object-language level. In other words, quoted sentences are names (suppositio formalis) that designate object-language sentences, and unquoted sentences refer to worldly affairs (suppositio materialis) that the sentences are about:

Quotation marks make all the difference between talking about words and talking about [real] snow. The quotation is a name of a sentence that contains a name, namely of “snow”, of snow. By calling the sentence true, we call snow white. The truth predicate is a device of disquotation. (Quine, 1986, 10–11)

In the spirit of Ockham, Quine concludes that, for all interpreted sentences, we do better by simply speaking on the object-language level: “The attribution of truth to a [given] statement is equated to the statement itself.” (1987, 214). Attributions of truth to given sentences bears no descriptive utility, so the predicate “is true” is rendered as a largely redundant linguistic instrument. Why not dispense with it altogether? There are well-known technical advantages that semantic ascent via truth predication enables for generalizing over sets of sentences.

In short, the indispensable logico-expressive utility that semantic ascent via truth predication provides is two-fold, both sides relating to generalizing over sets of sentences. First, regarding open sentences with finite values on their variables, the truth predicate enables the construction of generalizations like “everything that Einstein said in relation to the theory of general relativity is true” without the need to utter each of Einstein’s claims (s1, …, sn) individually. Second, regarding open sentences with infinite values on their variables, the truth predicate enables the construction of generalizations like “every sentence of the form ‘p or not p’ is true,” thus ending up with a formula for tautology. This is what Gary Ebbs calls the indispensability argument, according to which, “to generalize on all sentences of a given form, a truth predicate is indispensable.” (2009, 47). It is also here that Quine and at least some deflationists agree on the utility of the truth predicate. Without said predicate, it would be impossible to construct such generalizations: “the truth predicate exists solely for the sake of a certain logical need” (Horwich, 1998, 2). As will be argued throughout the remaining sections, a central difference between Quine and the deflationists is that for the former truth has other explanatory uses as well.

In addition to providing a logico-expressive definition of the truth predicate, Quine treats the disquotation schema as a scaling definition for the criteria of truth on sentential level. What this schema demonstrates is that each truth-apt sentence gives its own conditions for being true, and that the truth of each sentence is decided on the object-language level. On the left-hand side of the biconditional, we have a linguistic predication (“snow is white” is true) that is defined via reference to a worldly predication (snow is white). The linguistic predication is true if and only if the worldly predication is true. From the scalability of this criterial definition follows that the linguistic predication can be almost completely eliminated when applied to sentences with clear or interpreted meanings, but keeping in mind the paradoxes and infinite semantic ascent, the schematic definition cannot eliminate “is true” from every instance (1992, 84).¹¹ It would be a mistake to read this as taking away from the virtue of the disquotational account in offering a satisfactory definition of truth-criteria:

Yet there is surely no impugning the disquotation account; no disputing that ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. Moreover, it is a full account: it explicates clearly [what is required from] the truth or falsity of every clear sentence. (1992, 93).

However, for one to have a definition of truth and not only of the criteria of truth, a satisfactory account ought to include more than is given by the brute schema. One reason being that the schema-based definition of truth-criteria is, by itself, silent on why any of its instances are true and others false, or in what is the truth of sentences grounded in. One cannot explain such grounding via reference to true instances of the disquotation schema, for this would amount to a circular definition. Additional premises like an extra-schematic constitution claim are required to offer a satisfactory definition of sentential truth, unless one makes the negative claim that no such grounding exists. Deflationists prefer the latter path, for, according to them, there is nothing more to truth than the triviality of each truth-apt sentence specifying its own conditions for being true, which is enough to justify the logico-expressive utility of the truth predicate in enabling the construction of the aforementioned types of generalizations. Quine, however, is clear on his views regarding the grounding of truth: “As already hinted by the correspondence theory, the truth predicate is an intermediary between words and the world. What is true is the sentence, but its truth consists in the world’s being as the sentence says” and “truth should hinge on reality, and it does. No sentence is true but reality makes it so.” (1992, 81 & 1986, 10). This, in turn, sounds much like a classical correspondence theory, where it is left for reality to decide which sentence is true by them connecting with its relevant aspects in a materially adequate and extensionally correct manner. For the sentence “snow is white” to be true is for worldly snow to be white (as we best understand it), so that no sentence is true without reality being as the sentence says as perceived from the given theoretical standpoint. Deflationists, on the other hand, explicitly oppose such an explanatory route:

Philosophers […] often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; […] 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. (Armour-Garb et al., 2022, 1)

But it is Quine’s constitution claim that justifies the argument that the disquotational account provides an instrument for introducing contents, immanently true sentences, to our theories: “To call a sentence true is just to include it in our own theory of the world.” (1995c, 353). One goal of theories is to increase our understanding of the world, and, insofar as true sentences are the “intermediary between words and the world,” we are accordingly interested in constructing theories that consist of true sentences (1992, 81). An important discovery is that no such explanation is derivable from the brute disquotation schema, which, by itself, is completely silent on what the grounds of truth are or why the true instances of the schema are true, subsequently taking no stand on whether they provide an intermediary between language and the world or why one would be interested in introducing them to their theory. This is evident when realizing that both coherence and correspondence theories can utilize the schematic apparatuses by supplementing them with their chosen explanations for the grounds of truth; I see no reason for why this could not be the case for the brute disquotation schema. One is free to argue that “S” is true iff S because S corresponds with the relevant aspects of the world or because S is consistent with a body of true sentences. Quine, himself, indicates the prospect of accommodating both correspondence and coherence criteria under his truth:

Coherence and correspondence, properly considered, are not rival theories of truth, but complementary aspects. The coherence aspect has to do with how to arrive at truth, by the best of our lights. The correspondence aspect has to do with the relation of truths to what they are about. (1987, 213–214)¹²

In addition to grounding the explanation for why true sentences are the preferred contents of our theories, the extra-schematic constitution claim shields Quine’s truth from reducing to theory-bound relativism. The worry is that if truth is immanent to a theory in a manner described in the first paragraph of this section, then this would render it relative, inter-theoretically. However, because sentential truth depends on worldly affairs, it is these affairs that pick from the gallery of any theory’s truth-apt sentences those that are true by their connecting with the world. Based on this, the truth of any sentence is a matter of discovery rather than intra-theoretical invention. While theories can only estimate the truth and are, as such, fallible and correctible, truth in sentential form remains objective to the highest degree possible within the constraints of Quine’s throughout immanentism. Such explanation is sustained by enriching the schema-based criterial definition with the realist argument for the grounds of truth, where each truth-apt sentence provides its own conditions for being true, ultimately leaving it for reality to decide whether these conditions are met. This, in turn, renders each truth-apt sentence necessarily true or false independent of knowledge or justification: “The truth values [of particular sentences] need not be known, but they must be stable.” (Quine, 1992, 78). This perfectly aligns with Quine’s commitments to bivalence (1992, 91–93) and warrant independence (1992, 78–79). Based on such commitments, the domain of true eternal sentence tokens achieves a robust extension, subsequently achieving clear identity for the class of true sentences and permitting the inclusion of truth to the class of naturalistically legitimate notions.

It is worth emphasizing that the key discovery from the perspective of this study is that the aforementioned constitution claim is not derivable from the brute disquotation schema. This proves to be a major issue for the deflationary interpreters. As noted, deflationists commit to exhaustion, where the preferred deflationary schema exhausts the content of truth, so that no extra-schematic constitution claim is called for:

[W]e can formulate the central theme of deflationism under consideration as the view, roughly, that the instances of (some version of) this schema do capture everything significant that can be said about applications of the notion of truth; in a slogan, the instances of the schema exhaust the notion of truth. (Armour-Garb et al., 2022, 1.1; see Wyatt, 2021a, 459; Eklund, 2021, 632)

Above, we find indication about Quine’s commitment to an extra-schematic constitution claim. The details of this claim are put under close scrutiny in the fifth and final section. Before this, clarification on what the deflationary and inflationary positions amount to helps compare Quine’s views to these opposing -isms.

3 Deflationism and inflationism

Rather than being a definition per se, deflationism describes an attitude or orientation towards truth and its definition:

Deflationism is the somewhat vague idea that truth is not a “substantive” property, that no reductive theory of it should be anticipated, and that our grasp of the truth predicate comes from our appreciation of the trivial way that each statement specifies its own condition for being true. (Horwich, 2001, 161; see Wright, 1998, 38–39).

Deflationary theories show significant variety and, because of this, there is ambiguity involved with labeling someone as a proponent of the -ism. For example, Kemp notes in relation to the deflationary interpretations of Quine that “Quine is often held up as a deflationist with respect to truth (or a minimalist, or a disquotationalist)” (2012, 52). Price, for one, reads Quine as a minimalist (2009, 325). However, while minimalism and at least the Fieldian pure disquotational theories count as deflationary views, they also vary on multiple accounts, such as on what they take as preferred truth-bearers, which schema they deploy in their definitions, and what they interpret the schema as explaining.

Because of the variety between deflationary views and the general overuse of the term, offering a precise definition for this -ism that would satisfy all deflationists is difficult. When comparing Quine’s views to this thesis, I commit to a general definition, many of which can be found in the literature (Raatikainen, 2006, 175–176; Wyatt, 2016, 362–364; Sher, 2016, 819–820; Wyatt & Lynch, 2016, 324; Edwards, 2018, 22 & 41; Eklund, 2021, 632–634). The general deflationary thesis is that truth is a far simpler and less significant notion than traditionally assumed. For the deflationists, truths nature is exhausted by some simplifying schema that is typically derived from either the Tarskian (1936, 154–162; 1944, 342–345; 1969, 63–66) (sentential) T-schema or Ramsey’s (1927, 158) (propositional) equivalence thesis. What these schemas explain is that each sentence gives its own conditions for being true and, for the deflationists, this is all that can be significantly said about the nature of truth. Simply put, asserting “snow is white” is true is equivalent to saying that snow is white, full stop. No further reference to correspondence, facts, worldly objects, or, arguably, even reference or satisfaction is required. Furthermore, no reductive analysis regarding the grounds of truth is required, for the existence of an extra-schematic constitution is explicitly denied: “[According to the deflationist,] there can be no account of what truth consists in: there is no prospect of discovering a property F shared by all and only the truths, such that the truths are true because they are F” (Dodd, 2008, 133–134). Two negative theses can be derived: First, the metaphysical study of truth is brought under suspicion, for there is nothing substantive to uncover past the preferred schema. Second, and partially because of this, truth is denied its traditional explanatory role where it helps illuminate the nature of other substantive concepts like knowledge, meaning, and validity (Lynch, 2009, 4–5; Wyatt, 2016, 365; Edwards, 2018, 22–25; Eklund, 2021, 632–634).¹³ In short, for the deflationists, truth has no constitution past the schemas and, at least partly because of this, it lacks substantiality that could be relied upon in defining other items of philosophical interest (Wyatt, 2021b, 319).

Perhaps the most developed deflationary framework is the so-called minimalist position promoted most notably by Paul Horwich. Coincidentally, Horwich (1998, 5 & 2009, 31–33) is one of the scholars who persists on reading Quine as a deflationist. Focusing on Horwich’s account helps restrict the exposition and avoid ambiguity regarding different variants of deflationism. The minimalist position subsists of two components, the first one being a minimal definition of truth that consists of the non-paradoxical instances of the equivalence schema:

Equivalence schema: “p” is true iff p

or

Equivalence schema: the proposition that p is true iff p

The second component is a minimal conception of truth, according to which the minimal definition exhaustively explains truth. There is nothing more to truth than one’s acceptance of each schema instance so that these instances are rendered explanatorily fundamental in relation to one’s understanding of truth. In the words of Horwich, these instances are “conceptually basic” and “explanatorily fundamental” (1998, 50 & 37). Note that, for the minimalists, the infinite conjunction of the schema instances is constitutive of one’s conception of truth. As there is full cognitive equivalence between the left- and right-hand sides of the biconditionals, there is nothing more to truth than what the predicate “is true” implies. Since each instance specifies its own conditions for being true, triviality follows:

[E]very statement trivially specifies its own condition for being true – ‘There’s life on other planets’ is true if, and only if there's life on other planets; ‘Torture is wrong’ is true if, and only if, torture is wrong; and so on. But whereas traditional theorists, whilst acknowledging these obvious equivalences, have always insisted on some further, deeper account of what truth is […] the new approach has it that no such further account is needed or should be expected. (Horwich, 2009, 3–4; see 1998, 9).

Evidently, Horwich’s treatment is in line with the aforementioned general description of the deflationary thesis, according to which the content of truth is exhausted by the preferred deflationary schema that leads to an insubstantiality claim regarding the nature of this concept, further compromising its usage as an extra-logical explanatory instrument. Past the negative claims, the positive deflationary claim is nonetheless that the truth predicate bears logico-expressive utility for generalizing over sets of sentences in a similar fashion to what was discussed in the previous section: “the singular point of having a truth predicate is merely that it enables us to state generalizations whose articulation would otherwise be difficult, perhaps impossible.” (Horwich, 2009, 4). In this sense, the generalization-enabling functions of the truth predicate are what Quine and Horwich agree on. But as noted, Quine does not make the aforementioned negative claims that nothing else is involved with truth than what is given by the disquotation schema or that it is a merely deflationary concept, thus allowing for his account to be enriched with extra-schematic and potentially non-deflationary commitments.

What about inflationary theories? As with deflationism, these theories show notorious variety (Field, 1994, 256). The unifying feature of inflationary theories is that, in them, truth encompasses more than is explained by a schematic or logico-expressive definition of the truth predicate, and that this extra-linguistic feature, in one way or another, inflates the metaphysical nature or explanatory potential of truth. For example, inflationary theories allow for the concept of truth to be used as an explanatory instrument in defining other items of philosophical interest; knowledge is defined as justified true belief, meaning is identified with statements’ conditions for being true, and validity is defined as the preservation of truth over inference. This is possible because truth has a substantive enough nature to ground its explanatory utility.¹⁴ Prime examples of inflationary accounts are the neo-classical correspondence theories, where truth consists in either a strict or a loose correspondence relation between the preferred truth-bearer and the relevant aspects of the world, such as facts, states of affairs, or objects. For such theories, sentences are true because they correspond with the relevant aspects of the world, and where the respective correspondence relation is reductively defined by reference to concepts like beliefs, reference, satisfaction, facts, and worldly objects. Such reductive analyses have two consequences that depart from the deflationary approach. First, they extend beyond what is evident in the preferred deflationary schemas, thus conflicting with the deflationary thesis of exhaustion. Second, such analyses risk tying one’s account of truth to other concepts with varying degrees of metaphysical weight, subsequently risking metaphysical inflation.

Note that inflationists can acknowledge and utilize the schema-based logico-expressive definitions of the truth predicate that are crucial components of deflationary theories. The key point of disagreement lies in the additional premise that there is something more to uncover. For the inflationist, any deflationary schema or their instances are either not primitive or fundamental in explaining the nature of truth or they do not exhaust all there is to this notion. Based on this, a core explanatory difference can be diagnosed between deflationary and inflationary views. Even if a deflationary theory would result in at least a partial compatibility with correspondence intuitions, this would not render them substantive correspondence theories. The reason is that, that for such theories, the chosen correspondence relation grounds the truth of each true sentence and is hence explanatorily fundamental in relation to the deployment of the schemas. For example, substantive correspondence theorists can argue that the preferred truth-definitional schema is put to place because it guarantees the satisfaction of the criterion of material adequacy that is crucial for capturing one’s correspondence intuitions. In other words, to claim that a sentence is true if, and only if, it corresponds with the world, is to accept that such a principle is explanatorily fundamental in relation to our use of the truth predicate and the deployment of the preferred schema in defining this concept. This requires the substantive correspondence theorist to say something non-list-like about why some instances of the preferred truth theoretic schema are true and others are false, which leads to the project of explicating how the alleged correspondence plays out between preferred truth-bearers and their worldly correspondents. Deflationists like Horwich disconnect from such project, for they persist in the idea that no substantive answer is forthcoming to the question of in what is the truth of some sentences grounded, or why some instances of the preferred schema are true and others false. Simply put, under deflationary accounts, sentences are not true because they correspond with worldly affairs and their truth is not reductively explained by making reference correspondence-like relations between the preferred truth-bearers and worldly affairs:

[A]ccording 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’. (Armour-Garb et al., 2022, 1).

What the deflationists can, at most, argue is that their schematic definitions are compatible with correspondence intuitions, but that introducing them to one’s account brings with it only the trouble of explicating how the alleged correspondence relation plays out. Subsequently threatening the tying of one’s account of truth to other concepts with varying degrees of metaphysical weight and the subsequent prospect of metaphysical inflation. Quine, on the other hand, is clear on his commitment to correspondence intuitions when claiming that “no sentence is true but reality makes it so” and that the truth of sentences “consists in the world's being as the sentence says” (1986, 10 & 1992, 81). Before clarifying these intuitions and explicating their manifestation under Quine’s account, I proceed to dissect specific instances where Quine’s views conflict with the aforementioned deflationary claims of truth being exhausted by the preferred deflationary schema and that it lacks extra-logical explanatory utility.

4 Non-deflationary aspects of Quine’s truth

How does Quine’s immanent conception of truth and perhaps its most central aspect of disquotation account fare when compared to the deflationary and inflationary claims? As noted, Quine’s statements are sometimes compatible with both -isms. In one instance, Quine expounds on the redundancy of truth-predications: “So long as we are speaking only of the truth of singly given sentences, the perfect theory of truth is what Wilfrid Sellars called the disappearance theory of truth” (1986, 11). Elsewhere, Quine professes the value of true sentences for our scientific enterprise:

True sentences, observational and theoretical, are the alpha and the omega of the scientific enterprise. They are related by structure, and objects figure as mere nodes of the structure. What particular objects there may be is indifferent to the truth of observation sentences, indifferent to the support they lend to theoretical sentences, indifferent to the success of the theory in its predictions. (1992, 31)

This, in turn, suggests that there is more to Quine’s truth than the deflationists allow, for no such significance or explanatory utility is predicated on truth in their frameworks. Furthermore, as Quine does not profess commitment to deflationism and as he does not make the negative claims associated with it, there are initial reasons for being suspicious about his alleged commitment to this thesis. Of course, Quine and the deflationists agree on the logico-expressive functions of the truth predicate, but, as was noted in the previous section, this much is allowed even by inflationary theories. Yet, there are more or less tempting reasons that push towards the deflationary readings.

One potential reason for the widespread deflationary readings of Quine’s truth follows from his ontological naturalism. Quine rejects properties as a legitimate ontological category and thus he also rejects truth-properties that are standardly committed to in contemporary truth theoretic literature: “‘Property’ makes no sense to me except as ‘class’, and anything you can ascribe to anything, even truth to a sentence, ascribes a class” (1994, 498).¹⁵ However, there is no reason to presume that Quine’s rejection of properties has anything to do with truth, per se. Regarding ontological commitments, Quine’s primary motive is in cleaning up scientific discourse and excluding suspicious entities from it based on their having insufficient identity criteria or their being reducible to more fundamental entities. Since properties overall are banned in virtue of increasing the ontological simplicity of our science, truth-properties fall out accordingly.¹⁶ However, this is not to be confused with a claim about the insignificance or redundancy of truth on sentential level. Quine’s point is strictly that instead of speaking about sentences that have the property of being true, for ontological reasons, we ought to speak about true sentences and their domain, and this, by itself, does not push towards either -ism.

Another reason for the deflationary readings of Quine’s truth is the hasty conclusion that the brute disquotation schema exhausts the content of truth. Such commitment would align with the general deflationary thesis of exhaustion. Quine, himself, is partially to blame for pushing towards this direction, for, as his well-known statement reads: “Truth is disquotation” (1992, 80).¹⁷ However, it is not difficult to find conflicting statements:

There is a remarkable feature of our use of the truth predicate that lends truth a dignity beyond disquotation. When a scientific tenet is dislodged by further research, we do not say that it had been true but became false. We say that it was false, unbeknownst, all along. Such is the idiom of realism, integral to the semantics of ‘true’. Such is scientific method: interrogation of nature in a cosmic true-false test. Man proposes, nature disposes. (Quine, 1994, 500; see 1992, 87–88)

While, on one occasion, Quine suggests in a deflationary manner that the nature of truth is exhausted by the disquotational function of the truth predicate, in the quote above, Quine indicates that truth is what we aim at in our inquiries and that truth governs correctness of belief and assertion in scientifically legitimate discourse. Elsewhere, Quine puts the latter point differently, further emphasizing the naturalistic legitimacy of truth as a goal and a standard of scientific discovery:

We naturalists say that science is the highest path to truth, but still we do not say that everything on which scientists agree is true. Nor do we say that something that was true became false when scientists changed their minds. What we say is that they and we thought it was true, but it wasn’t. We have scientists pursuing truth, not decreeing it. (1995b, 261)

As was demonstrated in the second section, when truth-aptness is restricted to eternal sentence tokens, Quine’s schema-based criterial definition, in combination with the extra-schematic constitution claim, posits each truth-apt sentence a stable truth value, known or unknown, allowing for true sentences to be legitimate targets for our scientists to discover: “Science is seen as pursuing and discovering truth rather than as decreeing it.” (1995a, 67). This renders a robust extension and clear identity for the class of true sentences, allowing for truth to be admitted naturalistic legitimacy as a goal of inquiry and a standard for correctness of belief and assertion, assuming that such a role provides utility for advancing our scientific enterprise.

For Quine, truth has evident explanatory utility in relation to scientific practices. One goal of theories is to increase our understanding about the world: “Not that prediction is the main purpose of science. One major purpose is understanding. Another is control and modification of the environment” (1990, 128). It is because true sentences connect with the world and, thus, provide an intermediary between our language and reality that we aim to discover them in our inquiries, for such sentences are instrumental for increasing our understanding about the world. Additionally, without true sentences, theories would lack the type of content that guarantees the success of our science in certain core practices, like truth-preserving inferences and the subsequent enabling of prediction making and the ability to control our environments. But to emphasize, the brute disquotation schema is completely silent on whether truth provides such an intermediary because it fails to articulate an extra-schematic constitution claim. No substantive connections between true sentences and the world are required in the deflationary frameworks—“S” is true if and only if S and no further explanation for the truth of S is required. Because of this, with the plain disquotation schema at hand, one cannot argue for the aforementioned utilities of true sentences for advancing scientifically relevant practices. Further, Quine is clear that truth is something we aim to assert and, indeed, aspire for in the midst of our theorizing: “there is no higher truth than the truth we are claiming or aspiring to as we continue to tinker with our system of the world from within” and “[w]e choose to pursue truths conducive to our well-being and that of other deserving people, and truths that gratify our curiosity about the world” (1975, 327 & 1994, 498).¹⁸ As originally noted by Dummett (1958), there is an inherent conflict between deflationary theories and the idea that truth is something we want to believe and assert. In other words, deflationary theories are unable to account for the motivational pull and normativity that truth displays. It is customary to think that, when forming beliefs, we aim at truth and avoid falsity, and when making assertions, we sometimes evaluate their correctness via reference to truth. It is, thus, no surprise that Quine, who never professed commitment to deflationism, also indicates this in his works.

Based on this, it is difficult to give the benefit of the doubt to deflationary interpreters, for whom Quine only commits to the thesis that “snow is white” is true if, and only if, snow is white, and where no further reference to extra-schematic commitments like an underlying constitution or substantive connection with the world is required. Were Quine to commit to such a deflationary claim, then the aforementioned explanatory uses of truth would be left unaccounted for. However, it is important to note that, for Quine, many of these explanatory uses follow from the claim that truth does provide an interface between language and the world. Thus, the explanatory uses are at least partly grounded in Quine’s claim of how sentential truth consists in the substantive connections that sentences have with extra-theoretic worldly affairs. Because of this, it is important to closely scrutinize how this connection plays out under the Quinean scheme.

In the final section, we turn to clarify Quine’s views on the aforementioned constitution claim regarding the grounds of sentential truth. In short, the core argument is that, by closely adhering the Tarskian truth-theoretic apparatus, the gate is open for Quine to introduce extra-schematic commitments into his account. Based on this, Quine subscribes to a substantive constitution claim where the truth of sentences consists in a correspondence-like relation that a sentence has with the relevant aspects of the world, namely, objects. Evidently, such a claim is incompatible with both the general deflationary thesis and, more specifically, the minimalist account.

5 Language to world connections

What about the nature of those object-language sentences that fall under the truth predicate? After all, Quine holds truth to be a naturalistically legitimate notion and argues for various utilities that true sentences provide for advancing our epistemic pursuits. As argued in the previous sections, the brute disquotation schema falls short in sustaining such explanatory uses. What the schema demonstrates is that each truth-apt sentence gives its own conditions for being true and that the truth predicate can be dispensed with when applied to interpreted sentences. However, whether or not the truth predicate can be trivially removed from situations where it is attributed to sentences with clear and unambiguous meanings is a wholly different matter from what it means to be a true object-language sentence. The sentence “show is white” is true and “snow is black” is false, predicated with truth or falsity or not. A less trivial example is: “there is an even number of planets in the universe” and “there is an uneven number of planets in the universe”—one of these sentences is necessarily true, even if we can never know which one it is.¹⁹ But the question that any satisfactory account of truth must answer is why is one of these sentences true, or in what does the truth of some object-language sentences consist?²⁰ Dissecting Quine’s answer to this question occupies the remaining discussion.

Quine (1992, 79–82) is transparent about how his disquotational account is founded on Alfred Tarski’s semantic conception of truth (1936, 154–162; 1944, 342–345; 1969, 63–66).²¹ Tarski’s original goal was to construct a materially adequate and formally correct truth predicate for a formalized language L on the level of a meta-L relying on the T-biconditional schema:

T-schema: X is true iff p²²

or.

T-schema instance: “snow is white” is true iff snow is white²³

As with the disquotation schema, one has to be careful not to confuse a definition of truth with the criteria of such a definition. The T-schema provides general and scaling criteria that each materially adequate definition of truth for a language L must satisfy. When applied to natural discourse such as English, the schema demonstrates that each truth-apt sentence provides its own conditions for being true and that whether or not a sentence actually is true is evaluated on the object-language level. More specifically, the schema explains the correctness of linguistic truth predications (“S” is true) on meta-language-level via worldly predications, where the truth of a sentence “S” (X) depends on whether S (p) connects with worldly affairs: “[a] true sentence is one which says that the state of affairs is so and so, and the state of affairs indeed is so and so” (Tarski, 1936, 155).²⁴ Satisfying the criterion of material adequacy is important for capturing the classical correspondence intuitions that originate in Aristotle’s definition of truth in Metaphysics (1908, IV 7, 1011b27). In Aristotle’s account, to speak truly is to do so in accordance with how things stand; his account can be treated as an inexplicit and minimal correspondence view: “the [Aristotelian] definition offers a muted, relatively minimal version of a correspondence theory.” (David, 2022, 1). It is partly because of the Aristotelian foundation that some interpret Tarski’s account as an explicate of the classical correspondence theory: “[Tarski’s] original definition of truth, together with its later elaboration in model theory, is an explicate of the classical correspondence theory of truth” (Niiniluoto, 1999, 91; see Sher, 1999, 154–156).²⁵ Indeed, even though the Tarskian apparatus has greatly influenced the work of contemporary deflationists, the semantic conception is widely interpreted as a non-deflationary view: “It is widely believed that […] Tarskian theories convey substantial concepts of truth or are otherwise unacceptable for the deflationist.” (Picollo & Schindler, 2021, 41). One reason for this is the deflationary claim of exhaustion, where the preferred schema captures everything significant about truth. Tarski, on the other hand, holds that the T-schema provides a criterion that any materially adequate definition of truth must satisfy, thus allowing for an account to cover more. In other words, Tarski holds that the T-sentences express the concept of truth, hence counting as only partial analyses of this concept. Furthermore, for the deflationists, the preferred schema is fundamental and basic for defining the concept of truth. Tarski, on the other hand, defines object-language truth via the concepts of reference and satisfaction. Because of this, the concept of truth and the schema that captures at least a part of its nature are reductively defined with other concepts, thus conflicting with the fundamental and basic status of the preferred schema. In addition to this, for Tarski, the instances of T-schema are contingent, allowing for some of them to be false, whereas for deflationists like Horwich (1998, 21), they are necessary. In line with this, and adding further suspicion towards deflationary readings, no deflationary schema deploys the Tarskian material equivalence relation between the operands, but they, rather, either analytic or necessary equivalence relations (Armour-Garb et al., 2022, 1.1). Finally, according to Patterson, perhaps the best argument for reading Tarski as a correspondence-theorists is that “he accepts the semantical definition and holds that the semantical definition defines a correspondence notion.” (2012, 141).²⁶

However, whether or what type of correspondence theory Tarski’s account ultimately amounts to is an extensive topic that ought to be addressed elsewhere in full detail. Evidently, Tarski’s views allow for multiple interpretations, and not everyone agrees that they result in a non-deflationary account: “Interpreters are split on whether Tarski was a correspondence theorist or a deflationist.” (Patterson, 2012, 140–143; see Woleński, 2021, 275 & 281). For the purposes of this study, it is important to recognize that the Tarskian criterial definition allows for truth to encompass more than is given by the collection of T-instances and that at least in some of the sense in which Tarski speaks about truth, there is aligning with classical correspondence intuitions: “We should like our definition [of truth] to do justice to the intuitions which adhere to the classical Aristotelian conception of truth” (1944, 342). Abiding by the explanatory direction of correspondence theories explicated in the end of the third section, according to such theories, it is because of our correspondence intuitions that we require material adequacy from our account and it is because of material adequacy that the T-schema is deployed to guarantee its fulfillment. In short, the criterion of material adequacy requires from one’s account of truth that it does justice to the intuition that no sentence is true without the world being as the sentence says:

It seems clear that if we base ourselves on the classical [Aristotelian] conception of truth, we shall say that the sentence is true if snow is white, and that it is false if snow is not white. Thus, if the definition of truth is to conform to our conception, it must imply the following equivalence: The sentence “snow is white” is true if, and only if, snow is white. (Tarski, 1944, 334).

Here, the explanatory direction is clear, for the T-schema is put in place to guarantee the satisfaction of the criterion of material adequacy, which itself is in place to guarantee the satisfaction of the classical correspondence intuitions. Clearly, the Tarskian claim is not that we require from our account of truth that it is compatible with the T-instances because they tell us every relevant fact about truth. Rather, the roots of the Tarskian apparatus are on the Aristotelian account, where truth consist in the ability of sentences to describe the world as it is, even if some of Tarski’s other elaborations disconnect from this thesis.

It is worth emphasizing that even if Tarski’s semantic conception is motivated by the capturing of classical correspondence intuitions, this alone does not necessitate its ability to count as a correspondence view. Even deflatonists can argue that their interest is in forming a definition of truth that is compatible with such intuitions, yet where distance is drawn between the initially troublesome project of explicating how the alleged correspondence plays out: “The common-sense notion that truth is a kind of ‘correspondence with the facts’ has never been worked out to anyone's satisfaction.” (Horwich, 1998, 1). However, at least for natural discourses such as English, Tarski not only motivates the semantic conception of truth with the capturing of said intuitions, but also explains object-language truth in a manner that is fully compatible with object-based correspondence views where the truth of sentences relies on there being substantive connections between linguistic elements and worldly objects. For both, Tarski and Quine, correspondence intuitions are initially captured by the claim that no object-language sentence is true without the world being as the sentence says:

But he is right that truth should hinge on reality, and it does. No sentence is true but reality makes it so. The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true, as Tarski taught us, if and only if real snow really is white. The same can be said of the sentence ‘Der Schnee ist weiss’; language is not the point. (Quine, 1986, 10–11)

Interestingly enough, the Aristotelian, Tarskian, and Quinean definitions do not make direct reference to a correspondence relation.²⁷ However, this is not required for an account to count as a correspondence view. The reason for this is that a view counts as a variant of a correspondence theory if it explains the nature of truth via reference to a correspondence-like relation between truth-bearers and extra-linguistic or factual affairs, that is, that the truth of sentences consists in their correspondence with the relevant aspect of the world, as summarized by Field: “the central feature of a correspondence theory is that it explains truth in terms of some correspondence relations between words and the extralinguistic world” (1974, 200). More specifically, an object-based correspondence theory states that a subject-predicate structured sentence such as an atomic sentence of the form “a is F” (“snow is white”) is true if, and only if, its predicate (“is F”) corresponds with the object referred to by the subject term (“a”). Indeed, Tarski requires that an object-language sentence is true if, and only if, it connects with worldly objects in a satisfactory manner. Here, the deployment of the notions of reference and satisfaction is fundamental. For Tarski, an open object-language sentence (“x is white”) is made true by the values of its variables, where the variable stands for a subject term that refers to a range of objects: “Tarski’s satisfaction relation has to do with the objective reference, relating open sentences as it does to sequences of objects that are values of the variables” (Quine, 1976, 318). For example, an atomic object-language sentence with a free variable in the place of the subject term “x is white” is satisfied by the term “snow” that refers to a range of worldly snow-objects. It is in this sense that Quine’s views align with Tarski’s, for also under Quine’s account, truth on the object-language level consists in a correspondence-like relation between predicates and objects, that is, that there is a substantive connection between sub sentential elements and worldly objects that is similar to Tarski’s satisfaction relation. The difference is that, whereas for Tarski, open sentences are made true by the values of their variables, for Quine, predicates are true of objects: “Where I treat of denotation of sequences by predicates, Tarski treated of satisfaction of open sentences by sequences of values of their free variables. But it comes to the same thing.” (1995a, 63). For Quine, denotation is reference by name terms or predicates, the latter of which denote each particular object of which they are true. In other words, predicates denote n-tuples of objects, and predicative sentences are true if, and only if, the predicate (general term) is true of the range of objects for which the subject term (singular term) stands:

Predication joins a general term (“F”) and a singular term (“a”) to form a sentence (“a is F”) that is true or false according as the general term is true or false of the object, if any, to which the singular term refers. (1960, 96)

Simply put, for an object-language sentence to count as true, there must be correspondence between what is said about objects with predicates and the actual objects themselves. Insofar as this “saying of” happens in the form of predication, the appropriate correspondence relation lies between linguistic predicates and extra-linguistic objects. The key discovery, for the purposes of this study, is that, based on this, actual language to world connections are required for object-language sentences to count as true, and this was already indicated by Quine’s statement of how no sentence (linguistic element) is true without reality (extra-linguistic element) making it true by being the way that the sentence claims (1986, 10).²⁸ Based on this, it is no surprise, that in Pursuit of Truth, Quine makes an explicit constitution claim about truths nature as what can essentially be labeled a broad correspondence view: “What is true is the sentence, but its truth consists in the world’s being as the sentence says.” (1992, 81; see 1953, 34; 1987, 213–214). This aligns with Quine’s earlier statements on this topic:

For truth ordinarily attaches to statements by virtue of the nature of the world. It is commonplace, inaccurate but not unfounded, that a statement is true when it corresponds to reality, when it mirrors the world. A fundamental way of deciding whether a statement is true is by comparing it, in some sense or other, with the world—or, which is the nearest we can come, by comparing it with our experience of the world. (1966, 11)

It is worth clarifying some details of Quine’s account. For Quine, all objects are theoretical, so the argued for correspondence relation is not directly between language and worldly objects in a theory-independent or transcendent sense. Rather, whatever objects there are depends on what our most sophisticated scientific theory is committed to existing. Thus, the correspondence relation lies between predicates and objects in a theory-laden sense. Nevertheless, while theoretical, our conception of these objects is required to be compatible with extra-theoretic reality through observation about it. In this sense, observations or, more specifically, observation sentences, are the most direct interface between our language and theories, and the extra-theoretic reality that they are oftentimes about. True observation sentences are the most direct link between our theories and the world. However, to emphasize, it is because of Quine’s throughout anti-transcendentalism and his firm commitment to the theoretical nature of objects that our observations do not determine the truth of our sentences. Rather, it is only required from sentential truth that it is compatible with reality as given by our experiences about it:

He [Bergström] rightly quotes me as saying that if a theory conforms to every possible observation, ‘then the world cannot be said to deviate from what the theory claims’, but this only requires truth to be compatible with observation, not determined by it. (Quine, 1994, 497)

It is also in this sense that Quine’s views align with Tarski’s, for whom the T-instances are contingent. This is evident in Quine, for whom the whole notion of necessity is indirectly dependent on our experiences about the world and ultimately contingent.²⁹ However, a key point for the purposes of this study is that it is this requirement of compatibility between our theories and the world (as given by our perceptions about it) for sentences to count as true that renders deflationary interpretations of Quine problematic. As argued throughout this paper, a major motivation of deflationary theories is to disconnect one’s account of truth from other concepts that introduce metaphysical weight, like the claim that truth consists in a substantive connection that a sentence has with the world. Quine, on the other hand, willingly commits to his immanent realism, where we can know about reality only through some theoretical framework, yet where theories consist of immanently true sentences that either directly (observation sentences) or indirectly (theoretical sentences) connect with the world that is independent of our theories about it: “I am a realist about truth in whatever sense I am a realist about light rays or straightness.” (1994, 497). As is widely recognized, correspondence theories stand as the prime example of realist theories, and, as such, they starkly contrast with deflationary views based on the formers’ commitment to there being substantive connections between true sentences and the worldly affairs.

We have thus arrived at conflicts between Quine’s views and the general deflationary thesis of exhaustion. When Quine states that truth consists in the world being as a sentence says, and when he argues that the truth of object-language sentences depends on substantive connections that linguistic elements (predicates) have with worldly entities (objects), he positions in evident conflict with the deflationary thesis of truth’s nature being exhausted by the preferred deflationary schema. The reason for this is that these schemas are silent on one’s commitment to realism or there being such connections between language and reality. Furthermore, it is Quine’s substantive constitution claim that grounds the various explanatory uses of truth in relation to scientific practices that were articulated in the previous section, such as why we prefer true sentences as the contents of our theories or why truth is a standard for correctness of belief and assertion when orienting towards the world and answering questions about its nature. Such explanatory uses demand a substantive constitution for truth to justify such role, subsequently tying truth to other concepts with varying degrees of metaphysical weight and introducing metaphysical inflation.

Finally, regarding Quine’s relation to the minimalist account, in addition to the already noted incompatibilities with Quine’s truth and the general deflationary theses, conflict emerges on five central points. First, Quine does not believe in the existence of properties. For the minimalist, truth is a property, albeit a non-orthodox one. Second, the equivalence schema utilizes propositions and Quine rejects them, rather treating disambiguated eternal sentence tokens as truth-bearers. Fourth, for the minimalist, the equivalence schema instances exhaust the content of truth and are explanatorily fundamental in defining said notion. Quine, on the other hand, holds that the generalized disquotation schema poses a condition that each materially adequate definition of truth must conform to—a satisfactory definition of truth involves more. Finally, and importantly for the purposes of this study, Quine’s disquotational account includes a substantive constitution claim where the truth of object-language sentences is argued to consist in their connecting with the relevant aspects of the world, namely objects, as given by our immanent perspective. Based on this, Quine is justified to utilize truth in an explanatory manner in naturalistically legitimate discourse. No such substantivity or extra-logical explanatory utility is predicated on truth in the minimalist framework. Thus, I conclude that Quine is not a deflationist, and he should not be misrepresented as one, even though his work has significantly inspired the work of contemporary deflationists.³⁰