Disquotationalism and the Compositional Principles

What Bar-On and Simmons call 'Conceptual Deflationism' is the thesis that truth is a 'thin' concept in the sense that it is not suited to play any explanatory role in our scientific theorizing. One obvious place it might play such a role is in semantics, so disquotationalists have been widely concerned to argued that 'compositional principles', such as (C) A conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true are ultimately quite trivial and, more generally, that semantic theorists have misconceived the relation between truth, meaning, and logic. This paper argues, to the contrary, that even such simple compositional principles as (C) have substantial content that cannot be captured by deflationist 'proofs' of them. The key thought is that (C) is supposed, among other things, to affirm the truth-functionality of conjunction and that disquotationalists cannot, ultimately, make sense of truth-functionality. This paper is something of a companion to "The Logical Strength of Compositional Principles"

The Strength of Truth-Theories

This paper attempts to address the question what logical strength theories of truth have by considering such questions as: If you take a theory T and add a theory of truth to it, how strong is the resulting theory, as compared to T? It turns out that, in a wide range of cases, we can get some nice answers to this question, but only if we work in a framework that is somewhat different from those usually employed in discussions of axiomatic theories of truth. These results are then used to address a range of philosophical questions connected with truth, such as what Tarski meant by "essential richness" and the so-called conservativeness argument against deflationism. This draft dates from about 2009, with some significant updates having been made around 2011. Around then, however, I decided that the paper was becoming unmanageable and that I was trying to do too many things in it. I have therefore exploded the paper into several pieces, which will be published separately. These include "Disquotationalism and the Compositional Principles", "The Logical Strength of Compositional Principles", "Consistency and the Theory of Truth", and "What Is Essential Richness?" You should probably read those instead, since this draft remains a bit of a mess. Terminology and notation are inconsistent, and some of the proofs aren't quite right. So, caveat lector. I make it public only because it has been cited in a few places now

Consistency and the theory of truth

AbstractWhat is the logical strength of theories of truth? That is: If you take a theory${\cal T}$and add a theory of truth to it, how strong is the resulting theory, as compared to${\cal T}$? Once the question has been properly formulated, the answer turns out to be about as elegant as one could want: At least when${\cal T}$is finitely axiomatized theory, theories of truth act more or less as a kind of abstract consistency statement. To prove this result, however, we have to formulate truth-theories somewhat differently from how they have been and instead follow Tarski in ‘disentangling’ syntactic theories from object theories.</jats:p

Modes of Truth

The aim of this volume is to open up new perspectives and to raise new research questions about a unified approach to truth, modalities, and propositional attitudes. The volume’s essays are grouped thematically around different research questions. The first theme concerns the tension between the theoretical role of the truth predicate in semantics and its expressive function in language. The second theme of the volume concerns the interaction of truth with modal and doxastic notions. The third theme covers higher-order solutions to the semantic and modal paradoxes, providing an alternative to first-order solutions embraced in the first two themes. This book will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and semantics

Modes of Truth

The aim of this volume is to open up new perspectives and to raise new research questions about a unified approach to truth, modalities, and propositional attitudes. The volume’s essays are grouped thematically around different research questions. The first theme concerns the tension between the theoretical role of the truth predicate in semantics and its expressive function in language. The second theme of the volume concerns the interaction of truth with modal and doxastic notions. The third theme covers higher-order solutions to the semantic and modal paradoxes, providing an alternative to first-order solutions embraced in the first two themes. This book will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and semantics