On Field’s truth and The absence of fact – comment

Abstract

In "Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content," one of the papers in his terrifically important and interesting Truth and the Absence of Fact, Hartry Field contrasts two traditions in philosophical accounts of truth, truth conditions and other semantic concepts and properties; reference, meaning and so forth. According to accounts belonging to the first tradition semantic concepts and properties/relations are descriptively and explanatorily "extremely" central in the philosophy of mind and language. Proponents of these accounts hold that truth is a substantive value and goal for belief and assertion, that understanding a language and grasping thoughts consists in knowledge of truth conditions (and other semantic properties and relations), that the difference between factual and nonfactual discourse is explicated in terms of semantic notions, and that semantic properties (and relations) of thoughts and other intentional mental events and states enter into rationalizing and causal explanations of actions. Some go even further and claim that semantic (and intentional) properties as "natural kinds" involved in scientific laws. According to accounts belonging to the second tradition the concept of truth is not explanatorily central, at least not in the ways just mentioned. On these accounts the primary role of the concept of truth (or the predicate "is true") is as a logical device for disquotation and for expressing certain thoughts that would otherwise require infinitely long expressions. Proponents of these accounts think that the explanatory work that the first tradition assigns to semantic concepts can either be accomplished by this logical role (together with other nonsemantic notions like causation, indication, computational