Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Debate

Thesis Deflationism is right: “true” is a useful device, not the name of a property

Oskar Nyberg Fellow
· 6 replies · 242 views
TruthAnalyticChineseIslamicAlfred TarskiFrank RamseyIbn SinaW. V. O. Quine#correspondence#deflationism#redundancy-theory#t-schema
Follow

Where it stands

Here is the view I want to defend, as plainly as I can.

Take the schema: "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Every reasonable theory of truth accepts instances of this. Deflationists say these instances are basically all there is to the concept of truth. Saying a sentence is true adds nothing to asserting the sentence. Frank Ramsey made the point in the 1920s: "it is true that Caesar was murdered" says no more than "Caesar was murdered". He thought there was no separate problem of truth, only a linguistic muddle.

Why have the word at all? Because it lets us do things we otherwise couldn't, like endorse what we can't repeat ("everything she said in court was true") or generalise ("every sentence of the form p or not-p is true"). Quine called this semantic ascent: we talk about sentences in order to say something about the world in bulk.

What deflationism denies is that there is a deep property, correspondence, coherence or utility, that all true sentences share and that a theory must explain. On this view the old debates were looking for the nature of something that has no nature, like asking what all the things you can point at have in common.

I expect objections from correspondence theorists, pragmatists and anyone who thinks truth explains something, for instance the success of science. Go ahead.

LikeReply
Follow6 replies

Members reply here. Reading is always free.

Sign in to reply

6 replies

For the thesis 0

No replies on this side yet.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Tomasz Wójcik

    Against Fellow

    Against, though maybe not where you expect. You enlist Tarski, but Tarski himself did not think he was deflating anything. In "The Semantic Conception of Truth" he quotes Aristotle's formula, to say of what is that it is, is true, and presents his work as making that classical intuition precise. His definition goes through satisfaction, the relation between expressions and objects. Whether that amounts to correspondence is debated, but he would not have said truth has no nature.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Layla Haddad

    Against Fellow

    Against, from Arabic. In the philosophical Arabic I work with, the word for the true, al-ḥaqq, also means the real, what is firmly so, and it is a name of God. A truthful statement is ṣidq. Ibn Sina, as I read his Ilāhiyyāt, discusses the senses of ḥaqq and connects the truth of statements to the being of things, with the necessary existent as most deserving of the name. Deflationism makes truth a matter of how sentences are used. The Arabic tradition treats the truth of a statement as one face of a deeper notion of being real. You may say that is just a fact about a word, but it shaped a philosophical culture.

    1. Oskar Nyberg

      Fellow

      Layla, I accept the history and I find it beautiful. But I think it is evidence about the word, not about the concept the debate is about. The deflationist can grant that "ḥaqq" carries metaphysical weight and still say that the logical work of "is true" in "everything he said was true" is done without that weight. A word can be rich while one of its jobs is thin.

      Tomasz, fair point about Tarski. I'll say his formal work is available to deflationists, not that he was one.

      Helpful · 1
  3. Derek Hollis

    Against Fellow

    Against, as a pragmatist. Here is the standard worry. We explain why some methods succeed by saying they tend to produce true beliefs. If "true" has no substance, that explanation is empty. Deflationists reply that the explanation can be stated case by case: the bridge stood because the engineers believed the load was under the limit, and the load was under the limit. No truth property needed. I half accept the reply. But it makes the success of inquiry into a list rather than a pattern, and I think the pattern is real.

    Helpful · 3

Other replies

  1. Chen Yuting

    Fellow

    Neither side, a comparison. The Later Mohist canons say that in disputation, the winning claim is the one that fits, dang. Fitting what? The way things are, apparently. So even in a tradition that some scholars say lacked a semantic concept of truth, there was a notion of a claim matching its object. That looks to me like evidence that the correspondence intuition is not an accident of European grammar. Whether it is a property in Oskar's sense, I leave to you.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    Fair summary of where I've ended. Tomasz corrected my history; Layla and Yuting showed that the correspondence intuition is cross-cultural, which I think deflationists should grant and explain; Derek's success argument is the one I can't fully answer. Revised: deflationism is right about the logic of "true", and still owes an account of why the correspondence picture is so universal and so useful. That's a real debt.