Minimalism and Truth

John O'Leary-Hawthorne, Graham Oppy
1997 Noûs  
Minimalism about truth has received considerable attention of late. We think that much of the discussion suffers from a pair of deficiencies. First, there has been a failure to discriminate different varieties and dimensions of minimalism about truth. Second, some serious and fundamental problems for the most popular varieties of minimalism about truth have not yet received sufficient attention. This paper aims to remedy those deficiencies. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first
more » ... section, we distinguish six main varieties of minimalism about truth. In the second section, we identify four dimensions along which views about truth can be more or less minimal, thus clarifying the range of relevant notions of "minimality". In the third section, we critically discuss four minimalist theses. I. Varieties Of Minimalism About Truth Many philosophers have been quick to endorse "a correspondence conception of truth" without being quite sure what they mean by it. 1 A similar problem besets another currently fashionable conception of truth which has its roots in Ramsey's seminal "Facts and Propositions", the so-called "minimalist conception" or "deflationary theory" of truth. 2 In claiming that there is a problem here, we do not mean to suggest that there is no unity to the views in question. All minimalists think that to claim that it is true that snow is white is not to say something that is interestingly different from the claim that snow is white. And all minimalists think that truth is philosophically a good deal more boring than some philosophers have thought. But beyond that, the ideas that attract the title "minimalism" are which reveals underlying grammatical or logical form. Such redundancy --elimination, disappearance --theories of truth can take various forms but share a common thread. The root idea is that when we assert something of the form "It is true that P", we are not predicating something of a proposition or statement, but merely asserting that P. It is somewhat harder to make "true" disappear in other uses, particularly generalizations using "true", e.g. "Everything the Pope says is true". Even here, though, there are paraphrastic resources for the disappearance act provided by the literature: "is true" might be made to disappear by: (i) using substitutional or prosentential quantification quantification to paraphrase "Everything the Pope says is true" as "For all P, if the Pope says P then P", etc. 7 ; or (ii) taking claims involving "is true" to be equivalent to various infinite disjunctions and/or conjunctions, so that "Everything the Pope says is true" is paraphrased as "If the Pope says grass is green, grass is green; and if the Pope says snow is white, snow is white; and if the Pope says there are bachelors with three hands, there are bachelors with three hands; and . . . ", etc. 8 Yet another way --though very different in kind --of giving expression to the idea that "is true" is not a significant predicate might be thought to lie in the suggestion that truth is immanent to a language, i.e. that truth predicates have the form "true-in-L", for particular languages L. It might be maintained --and Tarski did maintain 9 --that "is true" simpliciter is not a significant predicate because it makes no sense; it is of course another question whether "is true in English" is a significant predicate. Indeed, it seems that Tarski held that "is true" can only be given content if it is read as elliptical for some predicate of the form "is true-in-L", but that he also held that the predicate "is true-in-L" is by no means minimal, and, in particular, that it does act as a significant predicate. 10 2. "is true" expresses a sub-standard property:
doi:10.1111/0029-4624.00041 fatcat:wei5okaakzgnlf3d52jrx2ktgq