Deflationary Truth and the Liar

New Waves in Truth

“…If the problem of necessity isn't bad enough to scare one away from deflationism, the semantic paradoxes pose a grave threat to its coherence (here I agree with Simmons 1999). As commonly expressed, the deflationary idea is that 'the' T-propositions for the sentences of some language L are part of the conception of truth for L. This sounds simple enough until it occurs to one that if the only sentence on the blackboard in room 101 is 'the only sentence on the blackboard in room 101 is not true in L', our T-propositions, plus the claim that the only sentence on the blackboard in room 101 is 'the only sentence on the blackboard in room 101 is not true in L', imply the logically false proposition that…”

Should Deflationists Be Dialetheists?

“…38 Of course, a dialetheist need not endorse the semantics of LP, but for present purposes we assume LP as the base semantics. 39 A glutty sentence is both true and false, and a gappy sentence is neither true nor false; the terminology is from Fine [15]. 40 We should note that dialetheism is beginning to be taken seriously by at least some (prominent) deflationists.…”

“…38 The mistaken assumption that the dialetheic deflationist rejects the claims that the Kripkean deflationist wants to assert but cannot may be encouraged by the standard way of distinguishing the Kripkean response to the paradoxes from the dialetheic response-by the claim that the former sees gaps where the latter sees gluts. As Hartry Field notes [14], this way of conceiving the difference between Kripkean deflationism and dialetheic deflationism can be misleading; after all, as is easy to verify, the dialetheic deflationist-relying on LP-can assert that L is (not) ''glutty'' and that it is (not) ''gappy'', 39 whereas the Kripkean deflationist can assert none of this. Regardless of the source of the mistaken assumption, however, the present point is that the assumption is mistaken: The dialetheic deflationist, relying on LP, accepts that L is both true and false and that it is neither true nor false.…”

Deflating the Correspondence Intuition

“…However, as Field 1992, 322n notes, Horwich may well take this problem too lightly, since the device used in what currently are the leading attempts to solve the semantical paradoxes, viz., truth value gaps, is not available to the deflationist. See on this issue also Simmons 1999. 3 This is rough, if only because there currently is no universally accepted formulation of deflationism. One particularly controversial issue in this connection concerns the nature of truth bearers.…”

“…However, as Field 1992, 322n notes, Horwich may well take this problem too lightly, since the device used in what currently are the leading attempts to solve the semantical paradoxes, viz., truth value gaps, is not available to the deflationist. See on this issue also Simmons 1999.…”