Abstract

The question of what truth is has traditionally been one of the major concerns in the Philosophy of Language and Logic. The contemporary debate has focused on the difficulties which the traditional conception of truth as correspondence with reality incurs, and the attempt of "weakening" such a conception in order to overcome the difficulties. The family of theories and conceptions of truth that emerge from this attempt goes under the general denomination of the Deflationary Conception of Truth, or Deflationism; the current debate is trying to determine whether Deflationism can be successful. In this thesis, I discuss a version of the Deflationary Conception of Truth for ordinary language. The version at issue, originally due to Quine, takes the predicate "true" of ordinary English as a logical device of metalinguistic generalization over sentences by means of disquotation. The definition of such a predicate does not require the assumption that speakers' practices, together with empirical facts, determine sentences' truth value. I distinguish two projects. The Limited Deflationary Project aims to show the legitimacy and usefulness of such a truth predicate independently of whether the specified assumption will be eventually needed to account for all linguistic phenomena. The Comprehensive Deflationary Project aims to show that the specified assumption is not required in any area of the Philosophy of Language. I offer formal definitions of "true" that express the Deflationary Conception for increasingly complex first order approximations of the language I speak. The most complex definition is given for a first order approximation of my language containing vague, purely indexical, and purely demonstrative expressions. Then, I show how the defined truth predicates can be applied to the sentences of other languages via a deflationary notion of translation. By so doing, I show that the Limited Project is successful, and that a number of objections usually leveled against the Comprehensive Project can be forestalled. Finally, I indicate in what directions future research should move in order to establish conclusively whether the Comprehensive Project can or not be successful