Deflationism and the Autonomy of Truth

Abstract

In Thought and World, Chris Hill offers us the most sophisticated version of minimalism to date. Hill's starting point is Horwich's minimal theory of truth (MT), according to which propositions - or thoughts in Hill's preferred terminology - are the truth-bearers, and the axioms of the theory are the thoughts expressed by sentences like The thought that aardvarks amble is true if and only if aardvarks amble. But Hill's theory is superior to Horwich's in a number of crucial respects. For example, while Horwich gives up on a finite formulation of MT, taking it that an infinity of axioms is needed, Hill's basic theory (simple substitutionalism or SS) is composed of just one axiom. And unlike MT, SS can accommodate certain generalizations about truth (for example, the generalization that only thoughts are true, and general propositions about the truth-conditional properties of logical connectives.) Moreover, Hill provides a detailed deflationary theory not only of truth, but also of related semantic notions such as reference and concept-denotation, notions that have received relatively little attention in the literature on deflationism; he takes correspondence intuitions much more seriously than most deflationists, and is at pains to show how those intuitions may be accommodated within his framework; he provides the most developed deflationary account available of indexical concepts and indexical thoughts; and unlike many deflationists, he is not content to merely set aside problems concerning bi valence and the Liar paradox. Those of us interested in the proper treatment of our semantic concepts, whether we are deflationists or not, are in Hill's debt.