Alexis Burgess

Recent philosophy of language has been profoundly impacted by the idea that mainstream, model-theoretic semantics is somehow incompatible with deflationary accounts of truth and reference. The present article systematizes the case for incompatibilism, debunks circularity and “modal confusion” arguments familiar in the literature, and reconstructs the popular thought that truth-conditional semantics somehow “presupposes” a correspondence theory of truth as an inference to the best explanation. The case for compatibilism is closed by showing that this IBE argument fails to rule out two kinds of deflationism: the position Field famously accused Tarski of having; and a less familiar version of the view that defines reference in terms of a deflated notion of truth. Finally, the distinction between unifying and constitutive explanation is used to forestall the response that correspondence theory is literally part of mainstream semantics.

There are three general ways to approach reconciliation: from the side of nonfactualism, from the side of deflationism, or from both sides at once. To approach reconciliation from a given side, as I will use the expression, just means to attend in the first instance to the details of that side’s position. (It will be important to keep in mind that the success of an approach from one side may ultimately require concessions from the other side.) The only attempts at reconciliation in the literature of which I am aware fall in to the first of these three categories. Such writers argue that the tension between our –isms can be resolved by paying sufficiently close attention to the nature of nonfactualism. While I have nothing against this approach in principle, I do have reservations about the particular proposals that have been made in its pursuit. The first section of the present paper briefly develops a line of objection against one such proposal, in order to motivate the approach to reconciliation from the side of deflationism. In section two, I argue that the deflationist can and should reject the inference from (2) to (3) above. Section three addresses a special problem of reconciliation for the nonfactu- alist who continues to use the discourse she takes to be factually defective. By paying close attention to the details of deflationism about reference, I show how a deflationist about truth might avoid this problem. I conclude that deflationism can be developed in a way that renders it compatible with nonfactualism

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology