A few years before Strawson developed his representation of sentences containing the truth predicate as performative statements, Alfred Tarski had developed his so-called semantic theory of truth. Tarski`s fundamental purpose was to provide a strictly logical definition of the term “true sentence” in a particular formal language and to clarify the basic conditions of material relevance that should be fulfilled by any definition of the truth predicate. If all these conditions were met, it would be possible to avoid semantic paradoxes such as the liar`s paradox (i.e. “This sentence is false.”) Tarski`s material condition of adequacy, or T convention, is as follows: A definition of truth for an object language involves all instances of the sentential form The potential problem that this Mooreian view of truth poses to deflationism could be best expressed in the form of a question: What is the difference between Moore`s view and deflationism? One could answer that according to deflationary theories, the concept of truth plays an important logical role, that is, the expression of certain generalizations, while the concept of good does not. However, this does not really answer our question. For one, it`s not clear that Moore`s idea of truth doesn`t capture generalizations equally, as it will also drive all instances of (ES). On the other hand, the idea that the concept of truth plays an important logical role does not distinguish metaphysics from deflationary conceptions of metaphysics from Moore`s point of view, and it is the metaphysics of matter that really highlights the current objection. Alternatively, one might suggest that the distinction between truth in Moore`s view and deflationary notions of truth is the distinction between a simple unanalyzable nature and no underlying nature at all. But what is this difference? It is certainly not obvious that there is a difference between a nature of which nothing can be said and no nature at all.
The second possibility is to deny the last stage from C3 to C4 and admit that there is a sense in which truth is a causal-explanatory property, while saying that it is still not a material property (cf. Damnjanovic 2005). For example, some philosophers (e.g., Friedman 1974, van Fraassen 1980, Kitcher 1989, Jackson, and Pettit 1990) have proposed different understandings of scientific and causal explanation, according to which a causal and explanatory property could not contradict being non-essential (perhaps by being an abundant or unimaginative property). This could be enough to maintain a deflationary stance. According to the discussion of Grover et al. (1975) in Section 2, prosententialism is the form of deflationism that contrasts most with inflationism and even rejects its initial assumption that lethenic locutions act as predicates. Partly in response to the difficulties encountered by the prosential narrative of Grover et al., Robert Brandom (1988 and 1994) developed a variation of their point of view with a significant modification. Instead of assuming the underlying logic of “true” so that this expression occurs only as an inseparable component of the semantically atomic prosentential expressions “this is true” and “it is true,” Brandom treats “is true” as a separable proposition operator.
“It applies to a term that is a sentence name or that refers to or selects a sentence tokenization. The result is a sanction that has this tokenization as an anaphoric precursor” (Brandom 1994, 305). In this way, Brandom`s report avoids most of the paraphrase concerns faced by the prosunentialism of Grover et al., while maintaining the rejection of prosentencialism`s claim that alethic locutions work predictively. As a result of its operator approach, Brandom gives the quantifying uses of proposals a slightly different analysis. He (re)develops cases of truth discourse such as the following, expressivism and prose theory are close relatives of deflationism and could reasonably be described as deflationary in some uses of the term. However, they are also sufficiently different from the versions of deflationism that use the equivalence scheme to be used here. The important difference between expressivism and prosentential theory on the one hand and deflationism as we understand it on the other hand concerns the logical structure of sentences like “S is true”. For the deflationary, the structure of such sentences is very simple: “S is true” predicates the property expressed by “is true” of the thing designated “S”. We could express this by saying that after deflationism, “S is true” says about S that it is true, just as “apples are red” apples says they are red, or “John sleeps” says john that he sleeps. Expressivism and prose theory deny this, albeit for different reasons.
According to expressivism, “S is true” is interpreted correctly, not even by subject-predicate form; On the contrary, it has the structure “Hurrah to S”. Obviously, therefore, it does not say of S that it is true. According to prosententialism, on the other hand, “S is true” would have a subject-predicate structure, but it would always be wrong to interpret it as if it were S. Consider: According to prose theory, “S is true” is a phrase that represents the phrase designated S, just as “she” in (1) is a pronoun that represents the name “Mary.” But we are not saying that “she” in (1) is about the name “Mary”; Similarly, according to prose theory, we should not say that “S is true” is about S. To assume otherwise would be to misinterpret the nature of anaphora. Another objection to deflationism begins by drawing attention to a little-known doctrine of truth that G.E. Moore held in the early 20th century. Richard Cartwright (1987, 73) describes the view as follows: “A true statement is a statement that has some simple unanalyzable property, and a false statement is a statement that does not have ownership. This doctrine of truth must be understood as analogous to the doctrine Moore advocated about good, namely that good is a simple and unanalyzable quality.
To interpret the equivalence scheme as (ES-sent) instead of (ES-prop) or vice versa is to obtain another deflationary theory of truth. Therefore, sententialism and propositionalism are different versions of deflationism. (There are also a few other ways to interpret the equivalence scheme, but we`ll put them aside here.) Christopher Hill (2002) attempts to solve some of the problems facing Horwich`s point of view by presenting a view that he considers to be a more recent version of minimalism, replacing horwich`s equivalence scheme with a universally quantified formula, and using some sort of substitution quantification to obtain a finite definition of “true thought (statements)”. In Hill`s formulation (ibid., 22) of his report, citationists are able to explain the existence and usefulness of the truth predicate in contexts of generalization such as “John believes everything Mary says” by asserting with Quine that in these contexts we cannot do without the truth predicate, because the convenient expression of such a generalization is precisely the role of the truth predicate in language.