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Deflationist Truth is Substantial

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Abstract

Deflationism is usually thought to differ from the correspondence theory over whether truth is a substantial property. However, I argue that this notion of a ‘substantial property’ is tendentious. I further argue that the Equivalence Schema alone is sufficient to lead to idealism when combined with a pragmatist theory of truth. Deflationism thus has more powerful metaphysical implications than is generally thought and itself amounts to a kind of correspondence theory.

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Notes

  1. Something like this seems to be the strategy employed by Crispin Wright (1992: 12–32) to obtain a genuine though ‘metaphysically lightweight’ notion of truth that can be amplified in various ways if needed.

  2. He has since changed his mind on this. Hilary Putnam (1978, Lecture 1) also discusses this idea.

  3. Things become a little more complex if propositions are allowed to be identified indirectly, for example, by phrases such as ‘What the policeman said’, ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’, and so forth. But we surely cannot put much weight on this point alone. The paradoxical < This proposition is false > might also prove difficult, as Trenton Merricks (2007: 187n) points out.

  4. Lewis 2001: 275. Correspondentism, by contrast, will not conflict with the redundancy theory in an analogous way (a claim disputed by Marian David 2004), which is why, according to Lewis, it does not count as a genuine alternative theory of truth. Lewis uses the term ‘redundancy theory of truth’ in a fairly broad way that includes the sort of deflationism that I am defending.

  5. Both Christopher Hookway (2002: 44–107) and C.J. Misak (2004: 127–8), for example, emphasize this point. Misak is concerned with Tarski’s theory of truth rather than deflationism, but the same point applies.

  6. Alan Musgrave (1997) also argues for this. This type of inference is disputed by John F. Fox (2008) who suggests that all that is really implied is extreme epistemic optimism. However, it is hard to see how this amplified version could fail to generate idealism or, at the very least, some controversial form of mind-dependence.

  7. See Putnam 1981, for example.

  8. Where ‘It is true for A that p’ means something like ‘A would be ideally warranted in believing that p’, for example. A version of this view was defended by me in Unwin 1987 and further examined in Unwin 2007.

  9. We have a ‘because’ instead of an ‘iff’, but this could be understood merely to reflect the difference between analysandum and analysans.

  10. I have argued elsewhere that they are misconceived. See my ‘Truthmakers, Events and Supervenience’, unpublished paper at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/ppr/profiles/Nick-Unwin/

  11. A version of this paper was presented at the Work in Progress seminar at Lancaster University, and I am grateful for comments made. I am also grateful to a referee from Acta Analytica who made many helpful recommendations for improvement of an earlier draft.

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  1. Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YL, UK

    Nicholas Unwin

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  1. Nicholas Unwin
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Correspondence to Nicholas Unwin.

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Unwin, N. Deflationist Truth is Substantial. Acta Anal 28, 257–266 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0174-0

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