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Response to the Comments on Deflationary Truth and the Problem of Aboutness Author(s): Paul Horwich Source: Philosophical Issues, Vol. 8, Truth (1997), pp. 139-140 Published by: Ridgeview Publishing Company Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1523000 Accessed: 05/12/2008 06:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rpc. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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PHILOSOPHICALISSUES, 8
9
Truth, 1997
to the Response Deflationary Truth
Problem
of
comments the and Aboutness
on
Paul Horwich
1. The deflationist thesis that the truth-predicate is merely a device of generalization (and that this function hinges on nothing more than the material equivalence of "p" and "'p' is true") implies neither that "the purpose of truth-claims... is merely to express truth-free claim" (Kovach), nor that we only "apply the predicate to things which are disquotable" (Kovach), nor that "p" and "'p' is true" are intersubstitutible salva veritate in all contexts, nor that every 'difficult' generalization is obtained by means of this device. In order to generalize Voltolini's example If one believes that dogs bark, then one should accept "dogs bark" we instead need the schema That p = what is expressed by "p"
yielding
140
PAULHORWICH If one believes what is expressed by "dogs bark", then one should accept "dogs bark"
which generalizes in the normal way to Any sentence expressing what one believes should be accepted 2. My interpretation of Kripke -in particular my suggestion that his sceptical argument betrays an implicit commitment to inflationism about truth- derives from the fact that such a commitment rationalizes his otherwise arbitrary presupposition that one must be able to 'read off', from any meaning-constituting dispositional property, what the meaning would be of any predicate possessing that property (n.b. Voltolini). Specifically, it explains the example he provides: namely that from "One would be disposed (in conditions I) to apply x to something just in case it is F" one might 'read off' that "x means F". 3. A 'deflationary account of meaning', as I am using the expression, does not imply that meaning-properties, such as 'x means dog', are insubstantial (n.b. Price). On the contrary, I argue that each such property consists in a certain basic regularity of use. What is 'deflationary' in this proposal is its dispensing with the requirement that "x means F" reduce to some relation between x and Fs. 4. It is vital to distinguish between a theory of X (e.g. water, magnetism, truth) and a theory about the word "X". In claiming that our inclination to accept instances of the disquotation schema is the basic explanation for our overall use of the truth predicate, I am not suggesting that all facts about truth itself are consequences of the disquotational facts (n.b. Kovach). In particular, in showing how our acceptance of conditionals like x means dog -
x is true of dogs
emerges from our commitment to the disquotation schema and a use conception of meaning, I do not purport to have explained the fact that this conditional holds. On the contrary (as I say in footnote 9) this fact may explanatorily fundamental. In light of its existence and of our commitment to it, my aim was to show how inflationism (since it endorses analyses of truth and reference) implies overwhelmingly difficult, relational constraints on the analysis of meaning-properties -constraints with which a deflationist about truth and reference need not be concerned.
