Abstract
Anaphoric deflationism is a prosententialist account of the use of “true.” Prosentences are, for sentences, the equivalent of what pronouns are for nouns: as pronouns refer to previously introduced nouns, so prosentences like “that’s true” inherit their content from previously introduced sentences. This kind of deflationism concerning the use of “true” (especially in Brandom’s version) is an explanation in terms of anaphora; the prosentence depends anaphorically on the sentence providing its content. A relevant implication of this theory is that “true” is not understood as a predicate and that truth is not a property. Primitivism, defended by Frege, Moore, and Davidson, is associated with two ideas: (1) that truth is a primitive and central trait of our conceptual system and (2) that truth, as such, cannot be defined. This second claim can be called “negative primitivism,” and it especially points out the facts about the “indefinability” of truth generally advocated by primitivists. In what follows, a connection is established between the deflationist’s rejection of the predicate and of the property and facts (and primitivist ideas) about the indefinability of truth. This connection establishes a common framework to lend further explanatory power to both options. According to the resulting view, this indefinability can explain the appeal and soundness of a deflationist dismissal of predicates and properties dealing with truth.
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Notes
Horwich’s minimalism is a theory developed on the basis of this idea (see Horwich 1998). That these schemas exhaust truth is an explicit feature of Horwich’s deflationism (minimalism). This is not, however, true of the prosentential account. As we will see, there are pragmatic features of “true” that go beyond these schemas. The general agreement between minimalism and anaphoric deflationism concerns only the expressive role of “true” and the insubstantiality of “truth.”
For a global reconstruction of these options, see Wyatt (2016).
Jeremy Wyatt distinguishes between “pure” and “moderate” deflationary views. In general, pure views are those willing to deny both “truth” as a property and “true” as a predicate. Moderate views are those admitting the truth property as something light or non-substantive, and the truth predicate as sui generis, expressive, or logical. Therefore, according to Wyatt’s terminology, I will say (1) that both moderate and pure deflationist theorists are not actual defenders of the truth property view and (2) that only defenders of substantive accounts can be considered to adhere to the truth property view (see Wyatt 2016).
See Baldwin (1997) for a discussion comparing the varieties of primitivism defended by Frege, Moore, and Davidson.
This is in a general agreement with standard deflationism. See Horwich (1998). The Brandomian account of truth expressivism is the following: “[…] the presence of ‘true’ and its cognates in a language adds at the sentential level all of the crucial expressive power added by anaphorically dependent expressions at the subsentential level,” and it especially adds the capacity to make quantified claims, the capacity to pick up deictic and other otherwise unrepeatable expressions and use them in further conceptual uses, that is, “as premises in inference,” the capacity to grant interpersonal communication “across substantial differences in belief and information among the interlocutors,” and the capacity to make explicit who is committed to what when characterizing another’s beliefs. See Brandom (2002, p. 114).
See below for the quantified cases addressed by anaphoric deflationism.
Redundancy is therefore limited to semantic equivalence and cannot account for the whole job of “true.”
Redundancy and disquotationalism are typical eliminativist accounts. Redundancy, as defended by Ramsey, is the idea that since “p” and ““p” is true” are semantically equivalent, one can delete “is true” without any loss whatsoever. Disquotationalism, as defended by Quine and Rorty, is the idea that truth is disquotation; “p” is true if and only if p. Therefore, “is true” can be eliminated losslessly, together with the quotation marks. See Ramsey (1927), Quine (1986), and Rorty (1991).
This formula uses the so-called conditional assertion developed by Nuel Belnap. The account provided by Belnap is especially useful in avoiding a number of well-known technical problems for such quantifications with propositional variables and ways of limiting the scope of the universal (substitutional) quantifier (Belnap 1973; Beebe 2006, Section 2). The general definition of conditional assertion (CA) is as follows:
(CA): If A is true, then what (A/B) asserts is what B asserts. If A is false, then (A/B) is nonassertive (Belnap 1973, p. 50).
According to such an anaphoric conception, multiple tokenings may depend upon the same antecedent. The antecedent may be uttered by someone other than the one uttering the expressions anaphorically dependent on it; this is important because interlocutors may attach sentences and prosentences to the same antecedents. Furthermore, an antecedent may depend on prior antecedents. Anaphoric chains can also be formed by anaphoric antecedents that, playing the role of anaphoric initiators, do not depend on other antecedents (see Brandom 1994, p. 458).
An argument for this claim, as presented for the first time in Dummett (1959), can be found in Brandom (2009). Basically, truth-conditional semantics would be possible “only if we could make sense of […] truth prior to and independently of making sense of the notion of propositional content” (Brandom 2009, p. 162). Tarski’s biconditionals (like “snow is white is true in L if and only if snow is white”) define truth in terms of identity of content/meaning; this prohibits using truth (defined in terms of content/meaning) to define content/meaning. This problem with truth-conditional accounts directly favors inferentialist views like that defended by Brandom (see Brandom 1994).
Lance (2005, pp. 291–292).
Lance is interested in defending a general compatibility between prosententialism and causal accounts of truth, and he thinks that if “true” is not a predicate, and if this is a substantive point, then, after all, there must be some incompatibility. Lance has an interest in concluding that “true” is a predicate. I try to do something different by trying to spell out the reasons why “true” should not be understood as a predicate, which are quite independent of the compatibility defended by Lance. (However, I do not want to claim that the possibility of such compatibility is uninteresting or misleading.)
With the exception of “nominalized sentences” like “Einstein’s relativity is true,” “the first sentence of this paper is true,” and so forth.
Lance later (fn 10) recognizes that, as a matter of fact, “true” “does not function as a predicate.” He glosses this over with the statement “I hope it is now clear how little substance hangs on this.” See Lance (2005, p. 294).
If one finds compelling the remarks presented in Lance (2005).
See for example Künne (2003, pp. 53–84) that encompasses all these views in what he sees as “Truth nihilism.”
See Davidson (1996).
The entire point holds, as well, for those accounts that even if accepting that “true” is a predicate, as well deny that it plays an explanatory role or a standard predicative function.
Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Löwenstein (2012).
Radical interpretation is the attempt to understand a native speaker of another language from scratch, without knowing anything about their language or beliefs. Davidson claimed that in order to do so, from a methodological perspective, an interpreter should maximize the rationality attributed to the speaker’s utterances.
See also Horisk (2007).
It can be also the basis to understand exactly why Davidson’s view on meaning has been associated either to truth-conditional accounts or to anti-representational accounts (e.g., by Richard Rorty). The fact that truth here does not play the explanatory role typical of substantivist accounts provides a solid rationale for Rorty’s reading.
Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. For all the other issues dealing with this compatibility, I generally agree with Löwenstein (2012).
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Salis, P. Anaphoric Deflationism, Primitivism, and the Truth Property. Acta Anal 34, 117–134 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0363-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0363-6