Bradley Armour-Garb

In this dissertation, I take a close look at the deflationary theory of truth, and deflationary semantics, generally. My thesis is that, as a theory about the nature and function of the property of truth, deflationism is well supported. However, deflationary semantics, which combines deflationism about truth with deflationism about meaning cannot be argued for by pointing to the expressive function of the truth predicate. ;Having shown that deflationism about meaning cannot be argued for in this way, I develop a challenge to deflationary semantics, the challenge of the contingency of sentential truth conditions. The challenge for the deflationist is to explain the fact that her view assigns the wrong modal properties to "true". As I show, the deflationist does not have the resources either to explain or to explain away this counter-intuitive feature of her view. Since, in addition, the arguments for deflationism do not support the adoption of a deflationary attitude towards meaning, I offer and support what I call propositional deflationism. Propositional deflationism deflates truth for propositions, thereby respecting the deflationist's contentions about the nature and function of truth, without deflating truth for sentences and beliefs. The result is a hybrid view that is deflationist about truth, though not about meaning

The aim of this chapter is to explain, motivate, and provide the central details of a specific version of what has come to be called alethic fictionalism—namely, a fictionalist account of truth (or, more accurately, of truth-talk, that fragment of discourse that involves the truth-predicate and other alethic-locutions). Our particular brand of alethic fictionalism is sometimes described as a “pretense theory of truth,” and a catchphrase for our view is “truth is a pretense.” But a more precise label for the view that we will present is “semantic pretense-involving fictionalism about truth-talk.” Our endorsement of this view (for short, our SPIF account) stems from our belief that deflationism is the right approach to take on the topic of truth. This already shifts the focus away from any property of truth, since deflationism “about truth” (or, as we will call this view, T-deflationism) is best understood as an approach to analyzing truth-talk. We arrive specifically at our SPIF account of truth-talk because we also think that versions of T-deflationism should be understood as a kind of fictionalism (which, again, puts the focus on discourse, rather than metaphysics) and because we maintain that a SPIF account is the best variety of fictionalism to apply specifically to truth-talk. We will explain some of our reasons for holding these beliefs below, laying out the basics of our SPIF account of truth-talk and highlighting the merits of endorsing our particular account of that talk.