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Author:
Båve, Arvid (Stockholm University, Department of Philosophy)
Title:
Deflationism: A Use-Theoretic Analysis of the Truth-Predicate
Department:
Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Philosophy
Publication type:
Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)
Language:
English
Place of publ.:
Stockholm
Publisher:
Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis
Pages:
207
Series:
Stockholm studies in philosophy, ISSN 0491-0877; 29
Year of publ.:
2006
URI:
urn:nbn:se:su:diva-999
Permanent link:
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-999
ISBN:
91-85445-33-9
Subject category:
Philosophy subjects
Keywords(en) :
truth, deflationism, disquotationalism, proposition, use-theory, semantics, nominalism, inferentialism, assertibility, that-clause, singular term, Tarski, Horwich, Field, meaning
Abstract(en) :

I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to be unambiguous. Ch. 2 is a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier.

Public defence:
2006-06-01, hörsal 8, hus D, Universitetsvägen 10, Stockholm, 13:00 (English)
Degree:
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Supervisor:
Pagin, Peter, Professor (Stockholm University, Department of Philosophy)
Opponent:
Raatikainen, Panu, Ph. D. (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)
Available from:
2006-05-11
Created:
2006-05-11
Last updated:
2009-06-05
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