Abstract

The concept of truth is thought to have a substantive explanatory role in various philosophical issues, e.g., realism, explanations of success. A proponent of this view typically holds that the explanatory role of truth requires that the concept be analyzed as a property of utterances or beliefs which ties these utterances or beliefs onto the world. Recently, this approach has been challenged by what I call the 'deflationary' view of truth. The deflationary view of truth is characterized by the claims that the concept of truth does not have an explanatory role and that the utility of the truth predicate for a language consists mainly in its being a device for expressing infinite conjunctions and disjunctions. This account of the utility of the truth predicate is made plausible by both the disquotational and prosentential theories of truth. The aim of this dissertation is to advance a substantive view of truth. This is done in the context of responding to the challenge posed by deflationism. ;I argue that there is reason to doubt the adequacy of the disquotational and prosentential accounts of the meaning of truth. In addition, deflationary approaches to explaining realism and success fail to provide an adequate account of the semantic facts relevant to these issues. Although these criticisms give us reason to reject the arguments for deflationism, they do not by themselves establish a substantive view of truth. We need to provide an account of the explanatory role of truth with regards to at least one issue. I think that the most plausible area for developing such an account is motivated by Putnam's claim that the concept of truth has a substantive role in explaining the contribution of our linguistic behavior to the success of our ordinary actions. Following Dretske, I propose an account for certain cases in which our utterances have the function of indicating certain states of affairs and influence our behavior in virtue of this indicating function. A true utterance explains our success in the sense that it guides us to the state of affairs needed for success