Bradley Armour-Garb

This volume aims to provide an indication of how the discussion of fictionalism has advanced over the past ten to fifteen years, in particular since the publication in 2005 of Mark Kalderon’s _Fictionalism in Metaphysics_. But the rise of fictionalism as a trend in metaontology raises a fundamental concern: Is fictionalism more than just a loose collection of ideas? How precisely should philosophers understand _fictionalism_? This introduction prepares readers for diving into the remainder of the volume by first confronting the question of how best to understand the idea of fictionalism and then providing brief summaries of the chapters.

This chapter shows that the method that Peter Unger (1979, 1980) has developed for dealing with the sorites paradox can, and perhaps should, be extended and applied to the semantic paradoxes—specifically, to Grelling’s paradox and to the liar paradox. After carefully explicating Unger’s earlier method for treating the sorites, the chapter expands on a very brief, compact argument in which he (1979) contends that, in light of certain putatively paradoxical semantic expressions, which are not obviously soritical, there are no expressions and, hence, no languages. The concluding section of the chapter identifies some important similarities between the liar paradox and the sorites.

According to dialetheists, the ‘liar paradox’ constitutes a sound argument to a true contradiction. But in the standard view, a paradox is an apparently unacceptable conclusion derived from apparently acceptable premises by apparently acceptable reasoning. So, in what sense can the dialetheist take the liar paradox to be just that: a paradox? This chapter raises and replies to a putative problem for dialetheism: the problem of diagnosing the liar paradox. It shows that dialetheism offers a way of rethinking the nature of paradox and, with it, a rethinking of the rules that govern it.

Deflationist accounts of truth are widely held in contemporary philosophy: they seek to show that truth is a dispensable concept with no metaphysical depth. However, logical paradoxes present problems for deflationists, which their work has struggled to overcome. In this volume of fourteen original essays, a distinguished team of contributors explore the extent to which, if at all, deflationism can accommodate paradox. The volume will be of interest to philosophers of logic, philosophers of language, and anyone working on truth. Contributors Bradley Armour-Garb, Jody Azzouni, JC Beall, Hartry Field, Christopher Gauker, Michael Glanzberg, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta, Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten, Paul Horwich, Graham Priest, Greg Restall, Alan Weir.

Within contemporary, analytic philosophy, “Fictionalism”—broadly understood as a view that uses a notion of fiction in order to resolve certain philosophical problems that do not necessarily have anything to do with fiction—has been on the scene for some time. A well-known collection, Fictionalism in Metaphysics, provided a good indication of the scope of the view (and its problems) as things stood in the early 2000s. But more than a decade has passed since the appearance of that volume and much has happened in philosophy, including in the area of fictionalism. In addition to the fact that fictionalism in philosophy appears to be more popular than ever, there are now competing views about how to tackle some of the issues that fictionalists aim to address. Moreover, fictionalism has branched out into many more areas, and there is a continuing debate about what fictionalism in philosophy actually amounts to and about how precisely it ought to be pursued. There is thus a pressing need for a volume such as Fictionalism in Philosophy. After a detailed discussion in the book’s introductory chapter of how, in the light of these ongoing debates, philosophers should think of fictionalism and its connection to metaontology more generally, the remaining chapters provide readers with some of the most current and up-to-date work on fictionalism, both for and against. As such, the volume will be of interest to professional philosophers as well as to graduate students in philosophy and to advanced undergraduates.

In recent years there have been a number of books—both anthologies and monographs—that have focused on the liar paradox and, more generally, on the semantic paradoxes, either offering proposed treatments to those paradoxes or critically evaluating ones that occupy logical space. At the same time, there are a number of people who do great work in philosophy, who have various semantic, logical, metaphysical, and/or epistemological commitments that suggest that they should say something about the liar paradox, yet who have said very little, if anything, about that paradox or about the extant projects involving it. The purpose of this volume is to afford those philosophers the opportunity to address what might be described as reflections on the Liar.

The Law of Non-Contradiction - that no contradiction can be true - has been a seemingly unassailable dogma since the work of Aristotle, in Book G of the Metaphysics. It is an assumption challenged from a variety of angles in this collection of original papers. Twenty-three of the world's leading experts investigate the 'law', considering arguments for and against it and discussing methodological issues that arise whenever we question the legitimacy of logical principles. The result is a balanced inquiry into a venerable principle of logic, one that raises questions at the very centre of logic itself. The aim of this volume is to present a comprehensive debate about the Law of Non-Contradiction, from discussions as to how the law is to be understood, to reasons for accepting or re-thinking the law, and to issues that raise challenges to the law, such as the Liar Paradox, and a 'dialetheic' resolution of that paradox. The editors contribute an introduction which surveys the issues and serves to frame the debate, and a useful bibliography offering a guide to further reading. This volume will be of interest to anyone working on philosophical logic, and to anyone who has ever wondered about the status of logical laws and about how one might proceed to mount arguments for or against them.

In this paper, we develop a particular approach within deflationary theorizing about truth-talk in natural language. Deflationists often maintain that truth-talk is indispensable and that the expressive roles that truth-talk plays exhaust the discourse’s purpose and operation. One way to present this latter thesis is by saying that the central function of truth-talk is to express what would otherwise require sentential variables and quantifiers. Sentential-variable deflationism (SVD) involves taking this logical machinery to explain (not merely to indicate, capture, or model) the truth predicate’s logical role and to capture what the interesting instances of truth-talk express. Since this approach makes explanatory use of quantifying into sentence position, it is especially crucial in this context to determine the best way of understanding these higher-order logical devices. After eliminating some interpretations of them that are inadequate for SVD’s purposes, we show how this deflationary approach can succeed. This involves explaining how truth-talk operates and what truth-ascriptions express in terms of an adverbial reading of quantification into sentence position originally proposed by Arthur Prior. We maintain that, with this understanding of the higher-order logical machinery in hand, truth-talk is revealed as dispensable, even for the important generalizing role that deflationists have emphasized.

This book presents a detailed, up-to-date, and historically informed survey and critical explication of the deflationary approach to the topic of truth. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 explains what deflationism about truth involves and develops a useful framework that clarifies how this approach differs from the traditional, "inflationary" approach. The framework illuminates certain general deflationary themes in terms of what we call broad four-dimensional deflationism, which comprises four different dimensions that any deflationary account must satisfy. We first examine the degree to which each of these dimensions is displayed in early, "proto-deflationary" accounts. We then, while explaining the details and historical development of the different contemporary species of deflationism, assess the degree to which each version of them adheres to the deflationary dimensions, in addition to clarifying how each species differs from inflationism and how they all differ from one another. Part 2 of the book examines challenges to deflationism, systematizing them by considering the deflationary dimension that each targets and grouping the challenges in terms of them. For each challenge, this part explains its historical development and investigates the extent to which the most prominent contemporary deflationary accounts answer, or fail to answer, it. Part 3 of the book is an appendix that presents new directions for deflationism by developing a version of the approach that answers the challenges examined in Part 2. The three parts of the book together provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the challenges to and merits of the deflationary approach to truth.

In "Nothing Is True," Will Gamester defends a form of alethic nihilism that still grants truth-talk a kind of legitimacy: an expressive role that is implemented via a pretense. He argues that this view has all of the strengths of deflationism, while also providing an elegant resolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. For the alethic nihilist, Liar and related sentences are not true, and that is the end of the story. No contradiction arises because it does not thereby follow that any of these sentences are also true, since nothing is. Gamester concludes that the simplicity of this response to the semantic paradoxes makes alethic nihilism an attractive approach. We disagree. In addition to providing insurmountable obstacles for his form of alethic nihilism, we contend that a certain form of non-nihilist deflationism is better placed to deal with the paradoxes and to account for truth-talk more generally.

We defend deflationism about truth against a pressing challenge, which is to explain how deflationists can understand the role that the _concept_ of truth appears to play in accounts of several other philosophically important concepts. We provide three strategies that deflationists can employ in response to the specific challenge regarding assertion that has been raised in several recent articles, viz., that the truth concept plays an ineliminable explanatory role in an account of assertion. We then show how to extend our strategies to accounts of other central philosophical concepts, by applying them to accounts of belief, knowledge, and logical validity. The result is a set of recipes for deflationists about truth to employ in developing responses to worries that might be raised about the explanatory role of the truth concept.

Using ideas proposed in Aboutness and developed in ‘If-thenism’, Stephen Yablo has tried to improve on classical if-thenism in mathematics, a view initially put forward by Bertrand Russell in his Principles of Mathematics. Yablo’s stated goal is to provide a reading of a sentence like ‘The number of planets is eight’ with a sort of content on which it fails to imply ‘Numbers exist’. After presenting Yablo’s framework, our paper raises a problem with his view that has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature. If we are right, then Yablo’s version of if-thenism cannot succeed.

Do inconsistent laws, which are in the form of inconsistent legal obligations, provide us with good reasons for accepting the possibility of legal gluts, which are true legal statements whose negations are also true? Given the contingencies of the law, it is unlikely that many will deny the possibility of inconsistent legal obligations, but it remains an ongoing debate whether these lead to any legal gluts. In a recent debate, Graham Priest [Priest, G. 2006. In ‘Contradiction’. In First printed by Martinus Nijhoff in 1987. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Priest, G. 2017. ‘Where Laws Conflict: An Application of the Method of Chunk and Permeate’. In Law and the New Logics, edited by H. Glenn, and L. Smith, 168–180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] has argued from inconsistent obligations to legal gluts and JC Beall [Beall, JC 2017. ‘On inconsistent laws and gluts’. In Law and the New Logics, edited by H. Glenn, and L. Smith, 199–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.], while he has acknowledged that there are inconsistent obligations, has argued against Priest’s arguments for legal gluts. In this paper, after reviewing the debate, I adjudicate it and provide reasons for resisting Beall’s arguments again Priest thereby providing a possibility for legal gluts.

Alethic pluralists often claim that accommodating certain alethic platitudes motivates rejecting deflationism in favour of a pluralist inflationism about truth. Deflationists claim that the logical role of the truth predicate, viz providing something equivalent to variables for sentence-in-use positions and quantifiers governing them, is sufficient to account for the appeal to truth in the alethic platitudes. Surprisingly, however, most deflationists face an insufficiently acknowledged problem with respect to explaining how this mode of generalizing works. The standard substitutional or higher-order interpretations of sentential quantifiers and variables do not meet two desiderata that we claim any adequate account of them must satisfy. To address this issue, we review and extend A. N. Prior's adverbial understanding of sentential quantification, explain how it satisfies the desiderata, and respond to some objections. This shows that deflationists can accommodate and account for the alethic platitudes by applying this non-nominal understanding of generalizing on sentence positions.

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.

Deflationism about truth, what is often simply called “deflationism”, is really not so much a theory of truth in the traditional sense, as it is a different, newer sort of approach to the topic. Traditional theories of truth are part of a philosophical debate about the nature of a supposed property of truth. Philosophers offering such theories often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; truth consists in coherence with a set of beliefs or propositions; truth is what is acceptable in the ideal limit of inquiry. According to deflationists, such suggestions are mistaken, and, moreover, they all share a common mistake. The common mistake is to assume that truth has a nature of the kind that philosophers might find out about and develop theories of. The main idea of the deflationary approach is (a) that all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ or of the concept of truth in our talk and thought, and (b) that, by contrast with what traditional views assume, this role is neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory. For example, according to deflationary accounts, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is in some sense strongly equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary approach, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’. Philosophers looking for some underlying nature of some truth property that is attributed with the use of the expression ‘true’ are bound to be frustrated, the deflationist says, because they are looking for something that isn’t there. Deflationism comprises a variety of different versions, each of which have gone by different names, including at least the following: disquotationalism, minimalism, prosententialism, the redundancy theory, the disappearance theory, the no-truth theory. There has not always been terminological consensus in the literature about how to use these labels: sometimes they have been used interchangeably; sometimes they have been used to mark distinctions between different developments of the same general approach. The actual variety of deflationary views has not always been clear in discussions of this approach, especially in the earlier literature, where important differences are occasionally missed. To help clear this up, we will use ‘deflationism’ to denote the general approach we want to discuss and reserve other names for specific versions of that approach.