The Explanatory Value of Truth Theories Embodying the Semantic Conception

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is, firstly, to propose a reply to a popular argument against disquotational theories of truth; and, secondarily, to contribute in so doing to clarifying the nature of such theories, in a specific way of interpreting them. There are different, even contraposed ways of interpreting disquotationalism (see O’Leary-Hawthorne and Oppy, 1997, for an examination of different dimensions along which a truth-theory can be deflationary); as a paradigm of the sort of disquotational theories I will be considering, I have in mind (what I take to be) Tarski’s semantic conception, as presented (with a carefully developed example of what a disquotational theory would look like) in his classic 1936 paper. The semantic conception takes as truth-bearers linguistic items (sentences, or uttered instances thereof) which are already interpreted. Far from aiming to explicate what it is for truth-bearers to have meaning, or propositional content (a proper part of the meaning of truth-bearers), this variety of disquotationalism takes for granted that their having the propositional content they possess is to be explicated (if illuminatingly explicated at all) without resort to an independently analyzed truth-concept. (Interesting Tarskian accounts are necessarily given for ‘formalized’ languages. However, they are ‘formalized’ only in the sense that the truth-definitions are given for languages whose logical syntax has been made theoretically perspicuous; not in the sense that they are uninterpreted formal languages, so that the truth-definition is at the same time a stipulation of the language’s semantics.) The fundamental idea which informs the semantic conception (the one which makes it a disquotational theory) is that, for any potential candidate truth-bearer already endowed with meaning, the condition ultimately asserted to obtain when truth is predicated of it is just that asserted in asserting that candidate truth-bearer. Hence, there is a sort of redundancy in truth-predications; although, strictly speaking, the semantic conception does not take truth to be redundant, in that it takes the main function of the truth-predicate to lie in allowing for the expression of general claims in which its use is not redundant.