Deflationist Theories of Truth, Meaning, and Content

Abstract

I When a philosopher proposes a semantic theory she commends for being deflationist, that theory is intended to replace an entrenched theory that is predicated in part on what is thought to be the need to answer certain questions, and the philosopher objects to that theory not because it gives the wrong answers to those questions, but because she feels those questions are the wrong ones to be asked by a theory seeking to explain what the entrenched theory might legitimately hope to explain. Her alternative theory, she contends, is both to be preferred to the entrenched theory and deflationist relative to it because it doesn’t bear the burden of needing to answer those questions. Every deflationist semantic theory has its inflationist correlate: this is the semantic theory the deflationist theory is designed to deflate. Consequently, distinct deflationist semantic theories may differ from one another either by having different inflationist correlates or by having the same inflationist correlate but differing in their views of how its deflating should go. Some deflationist semantic theories are considerably more deflationist than others. For example, a deflationist theory of truth as applied to propositions needn’t be at all deflationist about semantic notions in their application to sentences or utterances. The most interesting deflationist theories would be ones that are deflationist about all semantic notions in all their applications; but of such theories I am aware of only one. I’ll call this theory Radical Deflationism, and I’ll take its inflationist correlate to be a theory I’ll call Radical Inflationism, although it will be obvious that there are a number of inflationist alternatives to Radical Deflationism that are less inflationist than Radical Inflationism. I shall present Radical Inflationism and Radical Deflationism as stipulatively defined theories, without regard to who might subscribe to them, or to one or another of their parts, but, as will become clear as I proceed, Radical Deflationism is based on a view worked out over a number of