Truth as a pretense: A deflationary account of truth -talk.

Abstract

Deflationism about truth is best understood as holding that the logico-linguistic functioning of truth-<italic>talk</italic> limits the roles the notion of truth plays to certain thin (e.g., logical or expressive) functions. Truth-predicates are just grammatical devices, not means of attributing a property requiring analysis. I argue that truth-talk's unusual features---its duality of triviality and non-triviality and its propensity for paradox---motivate deflationism. I then develop a new, superior formulation of deflationism that takes the notion of truth to be part of an established, rule-governed <italic> semantic pretense</italic>. The pretense approach explains utterances by taking them as moves in games of make-believe. Make-believe involves rules that establish systematic dependencies between what is to be pretended in the game and how the word is outside of the game. Employing a semantic pretense thus allows one to make a <italic>serious</italic> claim by <italic>pretending</italic> (shallowly) to say something else. I argue that truth-talk is best explained as a way of offering pretend attributions of a pretend property (truth) to pretend objects (propositions), in order to make serious, non-semantic claims indirectly. A truth-attribution expresses a serious commitment to the world outside of the game being how it must be in order for the pretenses displayed in the utterance to be prescribed by the rules of the game. The basic dependency the game stipulates is what is expressed in the instances of the equivalence schema: <italic>it is true that p iff p</italic>. The pretense-based account of truth-talk shares certain merits with other formulations of deflationism, but it also has several advantages over them. Most importantly, it provides a better account of truth-talk's central function of generalizing on sentence positions, as in the transition from If Bob says that crabapples are edible, then crabapples are edible to Everything Bob says is true. Combined with a pretense-based account of proposition-talk, this view also accommodates other aspects of truth-talk that are problematic for other deflationary views. The pretense-based account of truth-talk thus offers a way of securing the benefits of deflationism (e.g., not having to <italic>eliminate</italic> the semantic paradoxes) without accruing certain costs imposed by other deflationary accounts of truth.