Deflationism

Philosophers before Tarski, including Gottlob Frege and Frank Ramsey, had suspected that the key to understanding truth lay in the odd fact that putting “It is true that…” in front of an assertion changes almost nothing. It is true that snow is white if and only if snow is white. At most there might be an added emphasis, but no change of topic. The theory that built on this insight is known as “deflationism” or “minimalism” (an older term is “the redundancy theory”).

Yet, if truth is essentially redundant, why should talk of truth be so common? What purpose does the truth predicate serve? The answer, according to most deflationists, is that true is a highly useful device for making generalizations over large numbers of sayings or assertions. For example, suppose that Winston Churchill said many things (S₁, S₂, S₃,…S_n). One could express total agreement with him by asserting, for each of these sayings in turn, “Churchill said S, and S,” and then asserting, “And that is all he said.” But even if one could do this—which would involve knowing and repeating every single saying Churchill made—it would be much more economical just to say, “Everything Churchill said was true.” Similarly, “Every indicative sentence is either true or false” is a way of insisting, for each such sentence (S), S or not S.

Despite their contention that the truth predicate is essentially redundant, deflationists can allow that truth is important and that it should be the aim of rational inquiry. Indeed, the paraphrases into which the deflationary view renders such claims help to explain why this is so. Thus, “It is important to believe that some individuals are ill only if it is true that they are” becomes “It is important to believe that some individuals are ill only if they are.” Other broad claims that appeal to the notion of truth can likewise be paraphrased in illuminating ways, according to deflationists. “Science is useful because what it says is is true” is a way of simultaneously asserting an indefinitely large number of sentences such as “Science is useful because it says that cholera is caused by a bacterium, and it is” and “Science is useful because it says that smoking causes cancer, and it does” and so on.

While deflationism has been an influential view since the 1970s, it has not escaped criticism. One objection is that it takes the meanings of sentences too much for granted. According to many theorists, including the American philosopher Donald Davidson, the meaning of a sentence is equivalent to its truth conditions (see semantics: truth-conditional semantics). If deflationism is correct, however, then this approach to sentence meaning might have to be abandoned (because no statement of the truth conditions of a sentence could be any more informative than the sentence itself). But this in turn is contestable, since deflationists can reply that the best model of what it is to “give the truth conditions” of a sentence is simply that of Tarski, and Tarski uses nothing beyond the deflationists’ own notion of truth. If this is right, then saying what a sentence means by giving its truth conditions comes to nothing more than saying what a sentence means.

As indicated above, the realm of truth bearers has been populated in different ways in different theories. In some it consists of sentences, in others sayings, assertions, beliefs, or propositions. Although assertions and related speech acts are featured in many theories, much work remains to be done on the nature of assertion in different areas of discourse. The danger, according to Wittgenstein and many others, is that the smooth notion of an assertion conceals many different functions of language underneath its bland surface. For example, some theorists hold that some assertions are not truth bearers but are rather put forward as useful fictions, as instruments, or as expressions of attitudes of approval or disapproval or of dispositions to act in certain ways. A familiar example of such a view is expressivism in ethics, which holds that ethical assertions (e.g., “Vanity is bad”) function as expressions of attitude (“Tsk tsk”) or as prescriptions (“Do not be vain!”) (see ethics: Irrealist views: projectivism and expressivism). Another example is the constructive empiricism of the Dutch-born philosopher Bas van Fraassen, according to which some scientific assertions are not expressions of belief so much as expressions of a lesser state of mind, “acceptance.” Accordingly, assertions such as “Quarks exist” are put forward not as true but merely as “empirically adequate.” If some such views are correct, however, then an adequate theory of truth will require some means of distinguishing the kinds of assertion to which it should apply—some account, in other words, of what “asserting as true” consists of and how it contrasts, if it does, with other kinds of commitment.

Even if there is this much diversity in the human linguistic repertoire, however, it does not necessarily follow that deflationism—according to which the truth predicate applies redundantly to all assertions—is wrong. The diversity might be identifiable without holding the truth predicate responsible. “Vanity is bad” or “Quarks exist” might contrast with “Snow is white” in important respects without the difference entailing that the first two sentences are without truth value (neither true nor false) or at best true in other senses.