“Deflationary” is not the same sort of thing as the other two theories, either of which one might believe while being a deflationist. In fact, I don’t see a reason to think deflationism is false. What is actually meant by “just saying P” is not answered by deflationism, but by an actual theory of truth.
And I still think that after consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia on the subject.
The whole point of deflationism is that there is nothing further to be said about truth other than what I said in my description. They think of truth as a shallow notion that plays no significant explanatory role in our accounts of language and meaning. If you think that the deflationist claim needs to be backed up by a more substantive theory of truth then you are not a deflationist. So there you have it, a reason to think deflationism is false.
You can think of deflationism as an anti-theory of truth rather than a theory of truth. The central claim is that no theory of truth is needed. The linguistic function of truth claims can be understood in terms of the formal disquotational scheme I outlined, and there isn’t really any deeper metaphysical question about what Truth is.
If you ask a deflationist, “What do you mean by ‘just saying P’?”, he might respond with a theory of meaning—a theory that gives a systematic account of how sentences are assigned semantic content—but he will not respond with a theory of truth.
It seems to me that if a deflationist answers the question “when can you correctly say “snow is white”″ with the answer “when snow is, in fact, white”, then the deflationist is a correspondencist. If he says “when you have good enough evidence that snow is white”, he is an epistemicist. Deflationism on its own is surely just a shallow concern with the word “truth”. Of course asserting “it is true that P” is the same as asserting P, but that is not an interesting fact.
Is deflationism historically a response to some obsolete idea about “truth” as an immaterial substance that adheres to true propositions, by virtue of which they are true? Neither of the other two theories assert such an idea.
“Deflationary” is not the same sort of thing as the other two theories, either of which one might believe while being a deflationist. In fact, I don’t see a reason to think deflationism is false. What is actually meant by “just saying P” is not answered by deflationism, but by an actual theory of truth.
And I still think that after consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia on the subject.
The whole point of deflationism is that there is nothing further to be said about truth other than what I said in my description. They think of truth as a shallow notion that plays no significant explanatory role in our accounts of language and meaning. If you think that the deflationist claim needs to be backed up by a more substantive theory of truth then you are not a deflationist. So there you have it, a reason to think deflationism is false.
You can think of deflationism as an anti-theory of truth rather than a theory of truth. The central claim is that no theory of truth is needed. The linguistic function of truth claims can be understood in terms of the formal disquotational scheme I outlined, and there isn’t really any deeper metaphysical question about what Truth is.
If you ask a deflationist, “What do you mean by ‘just saying P’?”, he might respond with a theory of meaning—a theory that gives a systematic account of how sentences are assigned semantic content—but he will not respond with a theory of truth.
It seems to me that if a deflationist answers the question “when can you correctly say “snow is white”″ with the answer “when snow is, in fact, white”, then the deflationist is a correspondencist. If he says “when you have good enough evidence that snow is white”, he is an epistemicist. Deflationism on its own is surely just a shallow concern with the word “truth”. Of course asserting “it is true that P” is the same as asserting P, but that is not an interesting fact.
Is deflationism historically a response to some obsolete idea about “truth” as an immaterial substance that adheres to true propositions, by virtue of which they are true? Neither of the other two theories assert such an idea.
I totally agree.