Field - Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content

Truth and the Absence of Fact
Hartry Field
https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242895.001.0001
Published: 2001 Online ISBN: 9780191597381 Print ISBN: 9780199242894
CHAPTER
4 De ationist Views of Meaning and Content 

Hartry Field
https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242895.003.0004 Pages 104–156

Published: March 2001
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Abstract
Attempts to motivate and clarify a radically ‘de ationist’ view of the relations of ‘meaning that’ and
‘having the content that’, and to defend it against many of the arguments that are widely viewed as
decisive against any such view. One of its claims is that standard work in the theory of reference (for
instance, that of Kripke and Putnam) can be reconceived so as not to be primarily about reference at all.
Includes a long postscript that, among other things, includes an account of how the degree to which
behaviour is successful can be explained within a ‘de ationist’ framework.
Keywords: belief, conceptual role, deflationism, interpersonal synonymy, Kripke, logical connectives,
meaning, psychological explanation, Putnam, reference, representation, truth, truth‐conditions
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
1. Two Views of Meaning and Content
I see the philosophy of language, and the part of philosophy of mind concerned with intentional states like
believing and desiring and intending and the like, as pretty much bifurcated into two traditions. The
traditions di er over the role that the notion of truth conditions plays in the theory of meaning and in the
theory of the content of intentional states.
One of the traditions, whose early advocates include Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and Ramsey, has
it that truth conditions play an extremely central role in semantics and the theory of mind; a theory of
meaning or content is, at least in large part, a theory of truth conditions. A strong prima‐facie reason for the
attractiveness of this position is that the way we standardly ascribe meanings and contents is via ‘that’
clauses, and the ascription of ‘that’ clauses is in e ect the ascription of truth conditions: to describe an
utterance as meaning that snow is white, or a belief state as a state of believing that snow is white, is in
e ect to say that the utterance or belief state has the truth conditions that snow is white. Since ‘that’ clauses
and hence truth conditions play such a central role in our ascriptions of meaning and content, it would seem
as if they ought to play a central role in the theory of meaning and content. However, it isn't easy to say
precisely what this central role is that truth conditions allegedly play; that I think is a main motivation for
the alternative tradition.
As a crude paradigm of the other tradition, consider the veri ability theory of meaning. Here the main
concept is not truth conditions but veri cation conditions. The veri cation conditions of a type of utterance
might be given by the class of sensory stimulations that would or should lead to the acceptance of an
utterance in that class. Notice that if the veri cation conditions of a type of utterance are given in this way,
then they are given without a ‘that’ clause; and indeed, there is no immediately clear way in which to obtain
a ‘that’ clause from them. It is because of this that an advocate of the Frege–Russell–Ramsey–Tractatus
tradition is likely to regard a veri cation theory of meaning as leaving out what is central to semantics: a
p. 105 theory of meaning according to which you can fully describe the ‘meaning’ of an utterance without
saying that it means that snow is white (or that something else) has left out the central element of meaning.
That central element is truth conditions.
Some advocates of the Frege–Russell tradition might prefer to describe what has been left out not as truth
conditions but as propositional content. There is a way of understanding this that makes it unobjectionable,
but it could be misleading. For a veri cationist is likely to simply deny the charge that he has left out
propositional content (or even, the charge that he has demoted it from a central place in his theory). A
proposition, he can say, is simply a class of veri cation conditions; for an utterance or belief state to express
the proposition is for it to have veri cation conditions in that class. So propositions in the veri cationist's
sense needn't be described by ‘that’ clauses: the most direct way to specify a proposition in the
veri cationist's sense is directly in terms of veri cation conditions. No one can deny that propositions so
understood play a central role in the veri cationist's theory. An advocate of the Frege–Russell tradition is
likely to say that these ‘propositions’ aren't what she means by propositions, and that is doubtless so; that is
because propositions as she conceives them must encapsulate truth conditions. (They may encapsulate more

than truth conditions, but they encapsulate at least this much.) So it seems to me that to describe the
di erence between the two traditions in terms of truth conditions rather than in terms of propositional
content brings to the forefront what is really central.
I do not mean to suggest that a veri cationist is precluded from speaking of truth or truth conditions; he
can do so in either of two ways. One way, which seems to me a very bad idea, is to introduce some epistemic
notion of truth conditions: that is, to de ne truth in terms of veri cation (e.g. ‘would be veri ed in the long
run’), so that truth conditions are derivatively de ned in terms of veri cation conditions. I won't discuss
this line here. The other way is to make use of what has been called a de ationary conception of truth. I take
this to have several variants, but the variant I will primarily focus on is called pure disquotational truth. As a
rough heuristic, we could say that for a person to call an utterance true in this pure disquotational sense is to
say that it is true‐as‐he‐understands‐it. (This is not intended to provide a de nition of pure disquotational
truth in terms of some other notion of truth plus a notion of understanding; it is intended only as a
heuristic, to motivate the features of pure disquotational truth I now proceed to enumerate.) As the heuristic
suggests, a person can meaningfully apply ‘true’ in the pure disquotational sense only to utterances that he
has some understanding of; and for such an utterance u, the claim that u is true (true‐as‐he‐understands‐it)
1
is cognitively equivalent (for the person) to u itself (as he understands it). A quali cation is needed, since
the claim that u is true involves an existential commitment to the utterance u, whereas u itself doesn't; this
keeps the two from being fully cognitively equivalent. The quali ed version is that the claim that u is true is
p. 106 cognitively equivalent to u relative to the existence of the utterance u; just as ‘Thatcher is such that she is
self‐identical and snow is white’ is cognitively equivalent to ‘Snow is white’ relative to the existence of
Thatcher. (To say that A is cognitively equivalent to B relative to C means that the conjunction of A and C is
cognitively equivalent to the conjunction of B and C; so that as long as C is presupposed we can treat A and B
as equivalent.) Having made this quali cation, I will generally leave it tacit, and simply say that in the
purely disquotational sense of ‘true’, the claim that u is true (where u is an utterance I understand) is
2
cognitively equivalent for me to u itself (as I understand it).
There are both oddities and attractive features to this as a reading of ‘true’; I will discuss these later on,
starting in section 5. But odd or not, the cognitive equivalence of the claim that u is disquotationally true to
u itself provides a way to understand disquotational truth independent of any nondisquotational concept of
truth or truth conditions (and independent of any concept of proposition). That is: if I understand ‘Snow is
white’, and if I also understand a notion of disquotational truth as explained above, then I will understand
‘ “Snow is white” is true’, since it will be equivalent to ‘Snow is white’. This will hold on any view of
understanding, even a crude veri cationist view according to which understanding a sentence is simply a
matter of having veri cation conditions for it: for the veri cation conditions of ‘ “Snow is white” is true’
will be precisely those of ‘Snow is white’. Certainly there is no need to presuppose that understanding an
utterance involves correlating a proposition or truth condition with it, as propositions and truth conditions
are understood in the Frege–Russell tradition. Because of this, there can be little doubt that the notion of
pure disquotational truth is a notion which a veri cationist is entitled to— and which other opponents of
the Frege–Russell tradition who have a more sophisticated alternative than veri cationism are entitled to
as well. (Adherents of the Frege–Russell tradition are entitled to it too, though not all want it.)
And using this notion of truth, even a crude veri cationist can grant the legitimacy of talk of truth conditions
of his own utterances. For the cognitive equivalence of ‘ “Snow is white” is true’ and ‘Snow is white’ will
lead to the (more or less indefeasible) acceptance of the biconditional ‘ “Snow is white” is true i snow is
white’; and a natural way to put this (more or less indefeasible) acceptance is to say ‘ “Snow is white” has
p. 107 the truth conditions that snow is white’. A pure disquotational notion of truth gives rise to a purely
disquotational way of talking about truth conditions.
An opponent of the Frege–Russell tradition can try to use this purely disquotational way of talking about
truth conditions, or some variant or extension of it, to allow the legitimacy of talk of the truth conditions of
utterances and mental states without giving truth conditions the central role that they play in the Frege–
Russell tradition. For instance, if one of our mental states can be described as an attitude of believing or
accepting the sentence ‘Snow is white’, then it can be described both as a state of believing that snow is
white and as a state with the truth conditions that snow is white. The connection of ‘that’ clauses to truth
conditions noted in the second paragraph thus remains, but the initial impression that it leads inevitably to
the Frege–Russell view is at least lessened. It may not be obvious that all legitimate talk of the truth
conditions of mental states can be handled in this way or by an extension of it, but that is what the opponent
of the Frege–Russell tradition contends. (This may involve disallowing as illegitimate certain uses of truth

3
conditional talk that an advocate of the Frege–Russell view would allow.) Such a view might naturally be
called a de ationist view of meaning and content; or more accurately, a de ationist view of meaning that and
having the content that, or a de ationist view about the role of truth conditions in meaning and content. The
rst of the three labels (which I have used in the title for brevity) could be misleading, since some versions
of the view are in a sense quite unde ationist about meanings: for instance, the crude veri cationism I
described is not in the least de ationist about veri cation conditions; and it identi es them with meanings.
What it is de ationist about is truth conditions; or, the locutions ‘means that’ and ‘has the content that’.
From now on I'll simply use the label ‘de ationist’. So that my labels not be thought as prejudging the
merits of the views, I'll call the Frege–Russell tradition ‘in ationist’.
The division between the in ationist and de ationist positions is in some ways the most fundamental
division within the theory of content and meaning (though as with many fundamental divisions in
philosophy, the line between the two views is not absolutely sharp). I myself strongly feel the attractions of
each position, though I have come to favor de ationism. In this paper I will formulate a fairly radical
4
version of de ationism, say a few things to try to motivate it, and try to defend it against some obvious
objections. I will also mention some deeper lines of objection that I cannot deal with here; these seem to me
the places where the battle between de ationism and in ationism must ultimately be fought.
p. 108
2. More on the Deflationist/Inflationist Distinction
The version of de ationism I outlined in my opening remarks was built around a crude veri cationism. It
hardly needs arguing that such a version of de ationism isn't satisfactory. But the main idea behind
de ationism doesn't require veri cationism, it requires only that what plays a central role in meaning and
content not include truth conditions (or relations to propositions, where propositions are conceived as
encapsulating truth conditions).
I must admit at the start that the question of whether truth conditions (or propositions encapsulating truth
conditions) play a central role in meaning and content is not a very clear one, for three reasons. First, the
notions of meaning and content aren't clear as they stand. Some ways of clarifying them involve legislating
truth conditions into or out of meaning and content, which would make the issue of de ationism totally
uninteresting. My way of resolving this unclarity will be to interpret ‘meaning’ and ‘content’ as broadly as
possible short of explicitly legislating truth conditions into meaning or content. Second, the idea of a central
role isn't initially clear either. My goal is to clarify this as I go along, by making explicit the limited role that
I think the de ationist can give to truth conditions, and identifying kinds of role that de ationism cannot
allow truth conditions to have. Unfortunately I cannot complete the job in this paper: to keep the paper to a
manageable size I have had to leave to another occasion discussion of the crucial subject of the role of truth
conditions in psychological explanation. [But see section 7 of the postscript.]
There is also a third source of unclarity to the question, one which I think makes a complete sharpening
impossible. If de ationism is to be at all interesting, it must claim not merely that what plays a central role
in meaning and content not include truth conditions under that description, but that it not include anything
that could plausibly constitute a reduction of truth conditions to other more physicalistic terms. And it is well
known that there is no sharp line between reduction and elimination, so this crucial tenet of de ationism is
not an altogether precise one. In other words, a theory of content and meaning might end up not employing
the notion of truth conditions directly (in a central role), but employing (in that role) certain physicalistic
relations that could be regarded as reducing the relation ‘S has the truth conditions p’, but could only be so
regarded on a rather loose conception of reduction. Such a theory of content and meaning would occupy the
borderline between a de ationist and in ationist theory: it would be rather a matter of taste which way we
describe it. I'll have a bit more to say about this possibility later.
I remarked earlier that a de ationist need not be a veri cationist. What elements instead of, or in addition
to, veri cation conditions does he have available for inclusion in meaning or content? One element that can
certainly be included in content is conceptual or computational role: role in a (perhaps idealized)
computational psychology that describes how the agent's beliefs, desires, etc. evolve over time (partly in
5
p. 109 response to sensory stimulations). The conceptual role of a belief state includes its veri cation
6
conditions, but includes much more besides. (It includes a wider variety of evidential relations; it includes
the conceptual consequences of having the belief; etc.) But conceptual role isn't enough: it is both
‘internalist’ and ‘individualist’, and a plausible de ationism is going to have to give to content both

‘externalist’ and ‘social’ aspects.
In describing these further aspects of content, it will help if I make what I hope is a harmless assumption.
The assumption is that we can speak of a language‐user as believing and desiring sentences of his or her
own language— or at least, as believing and desiring internal analogs of them in which some or all of the
ambiguities may have been removed— and that this relation can be made sense of without a prior notion of
content for the belief or desire states or of meaning for the sentences. In other words, this relation is one
that a de ationist can perfectly well appeal to. There is a good bit that needs to be said about just what this
assumption comes to, but let me simply say that I think that when it is unpacked it is pretty
7
unobjectionable.
Now let's get back to the aspects of content that go beyond conceptual role. The most obvious ‘externalist’
element that a de ationist can put into content is indication relations. It is a fact about me that I am a pretty
good barometer of whether there is rain falling on my head at that moment: when there is rain falling on my
head, I tend to believe ‘There is rain falling on my head’; conversely, when I do believe this sentence, usually
there is rain falling on my head. This is simply a correlation, there to be observed; and a de ationist is as
free to take note of it as is anyone else, and as free as anyone else to deem it an ingredient of what he calls
content. The correlation of people's belief states to the world outside presumably extends past the directly
observed; the beliefs of astronomers in sentences of form ‘The location of Halley's comet at time t will be x’
generally correlate pretty well with the location of Halley's comet at time t, and in certain circumstances the
beliefs of physicists in sentences of form ‘A particle has recently tunnelled through the potential barrier’
will correlate with whether a particle has indeed done so.
p. 110 These observations might make one think that a de ationist is bound to recognize (a non‐disquotational
version of) the relation ‘S has truth conditions p’, in fact if not in name, since these indication relations
constitute the truth‐conditions relation. But this overlooks the fact that the project of giving anything close
to a believable reduction of talk of truth conditions to talk of indication relations is at best a gleam in the eye
of some theorists. A way to see the point is to notice that there are plenty of examples where the indication
relations don't re ect what we would intuitively regard as truth conditions. Consider the ancient Greek
whose judgements (that we would translate as) ‘Zeus is throwing thunderbolts’ are reliably correlated with
the presence of lightning in the vicinity. That reliable correlation is a key fact about the use of the sentence,
and is part of its ‘content’ in the de ationist's sense, but it is not a matter of the truth conditions of his
utterance as normally understood. (It would be possible to maintain that the Greek's judgements had as
their truth conditions that lightning is present; I wouldn't want to say that that is exactly wrong, since I
doubt that there is a clear matter of right and wrong here, but it certainly ts ill with the fact that there were
systematic inferential connections between this sentence and others containing ‘Zeus’, such as ‘Let's build
an idol so Zeus will stop throwing thunderbolts’.) In many other cases, the facts about indication relations
are clear but a decision about truth conditions seems rather arbitrary. The judgement ‘The sun is rising’
today may have as its truth conditions that the angle from the horizon to the sun is small, positive and
increasing, but was this so at earlier times when people believed that its motion relative to the earth was
absolute motion? I have no idea how to decide, but from a de ationist point of view it doesn't matter: the
indication relations are there anyway, and they are what is important.
I have given examples from earlier theories since we obviously can't recognize any such serious errors that
may infect our own observational claims, but it is not beyond imagination that even some of our own
observational reports reliably indicate something at variance with their own truth conditions. When we
move beyond observation reports to more theoretical sentences, this is still more likely.
There are of course less systematic indication relations than the ones I have considered. Maybe I
systematically exaggerate, so that my believing a sentence of the form ‘It is n feet high’ is strongly
correlated with the object before me being f(n) feet high, where f(x) starts dropping o rapidly from x after
about 6 feet or so. Or worse, maybe my beliefs of the form ‘In Bosnia, p’ don't stand in any interesting
correlations with the actual facts about what's happening in Bosnia, but just re ect what appears in the
newspapers I read. The de ationist can recognize these facts about indication too, and attribute explanatory
importance to them. The de ationist can also use the disquotation schema to formulate the distinction
between these cases and cases like my reliability about whether rain is falling on my head: in the latter case
p. 111 my belief state reliably indicates its own truth conditions (as given by the disquotation schema), in the
8
former it indicates something else. What he can't do, it seems to me, is say that this distinction is of much
explanatory importance: for that would give truth conditions (rather than just indication relations in

general) a central role in the theory of mind; and the claim that truth conditions have a central role in the
9
theory of mind is the de ning characteristic of in ationism. But that isn't to say that he can't di erentiate
the exaggeration and Bosnia cases from the rain falling on my head case on other grounds, e.g. of how
systematic the indication relations are and how well they survive under the addition of evidence. And here it
is worth noting that on these scores the Zeus example and the rising sun example (and analogous examples
of as‐yet‐undetected errors in our own observation reports) come out more like the rain falling on my head
example than like the exaggeration or Bosnia examples: they are rather systematic indication relations not
dislodged by any small amount of additional evidence. It is these factors, rather than the factor of whether
what is indicated is truth conditions, that are explanatorily important.
Anyway, the de ationist can include indication relations in content; this is enough to make content
externalist, but not enough to make it social. However, since we are regarding many of our most important
beliefs as in e ect attitudes toward sentences in our language, the means to make content social is at hand.
That is, it seems reasonable to decree that the content of these belief states is to be in uenced by the
meaning these sentences have for us; that meaning is of course partly in uenced by the content of our
intentional states, but since language is social it will be in uenced by the contents of the states of other
members of our community as well. In particular— and removing the appearance of circularity— we can
understand ‘content’ in such a way that the conceptual roles and indication relations of other people's states of
10
believing a certain sentence are counted as relevant to the content of my state of believing that sentence; such a
way of understanding ‘content’ is not only possible, it is natural when one thinks of the ways that which
sentences I believe in uence and are in uenced by which sentences others believe. Again, construing content as
p. 112 social in this way is quite compatible with de ationism, that is, with keeping truth conditions (and hence
‘that’ clauses) out of the fundamental characterization of content.
3. The Semantics of Logical Operators
‘De ationism’ and ‘in ationism’ are broad labels, each encompassing many di erent views. I think it
would help to make the contrast between the de ationist and in ationist traditions clearer if I focussed on
several problems in the theory of content, and showed how they looked from each of the two broad
perspectives.
The rst problem I will discuss is the problem of saying what determines the ‘referent’ of a logical operator
like ‘or’ or ‘not’ or ‘all’; or to put it less Fregeanly, the problem of saying what determines the contributions
that such a logical operator makes to the truth conditions of sentences that contain it.
I think it is clear in broad outline what an in ationist's best strategy is for answering this question. The
answer will have two stages. The rst stage involves spelling out the ‘conceptual role’ that ‘or’ has (for a
given person, or for the linguistic community generally): in this case, it would largely be a matter of its role
in deductive inference and perhaps inductive and practical inference as well. For instance, among the
relevant facts about my use of the word ‘or’ is that I tend to accept inferences to a disjunction ‘A or B’ from
either disjunct, and to the negation of the disjunction from the negations of both disjuncts, but not to the
disjuncts from the disjunction; and when I do occasionally slip and infer according to the latter rule, I can be
brought to correct myself. Also relevant perhaps is that I tend to assign to a disjunction a degree of belief
higher than the degrees of belief of each disjunct but no higher than the sum of the degrees of belief of the
disjuncts. (Indeed my degree of belief in a disjunction ‘A or B’ tends to be about equal to the sum of my
degrees of belief in the disjuncts minus my degree of belief in A times my conditional degree of belief in B
given A.) And so on.
But what does the word's having this conceptual role have to do with its standing for the usual truth
function (that is, with its contributing to truth conditions according to the usual truth table)? Perhaps the
conceptual role of ‘or’ determines that it stands for that truth function in this sense: any word in any
linguistic community that had that conceptual role would stand for that truth function. But that doesn't
seem very helpful, for it doesn't tell you why that conceptual role should be associated with that truth
function.
There is, though, a rather natural story to try to tell. The idea is that if we assign truth conditions to our
sentences (and hence our belief states) according to this rule of truth for ‘or’ (and the standard rules of
truth for ‘not’), it will make our deductive inferences involving ‘or’ truth‐preserving, and presumably will

11
p. 113 make our inductive inferences involving ‘or’ highly reliable; whereas if we used any other truth table,
the deductive and inductive inferences would come out totally unreliable. Reliability considerations seem to
give just the sort of link between conceptual role and reference that we want in this case.
There are of course some holes here. One hole is that though it is true that no alternative truth function
makes our inferences involving ‘or’ at all reliable, this just shows that reliability considerations make the
usual truth table for ‘or’ more satisfactory than alternative truth functions; but maybe there is an alternative
to a truth functional account that would make us equally reliable? A second hole is that in explaining the
contribution of ‘or’ to truth conditions, we can't legitimately assume the contribution that ‘not’ makes to
truth conditions unless that can be independently established; so unless it can be independently established
(which is doubtful), or unless we can avoid mentioning it in our account of what determines the truth table
for ‘or’, then we really need an account of how reliability considerations give us the rules of truth for ‘or’
and ‘not’ together. (Using another operator like ‘if . . . then’ or ‘implies’ instead of ‘not’ would give rise to
similar problems.) This deepens the rst hole: for now we need to compare the package containing the usual
truth functional accounts of ‘or’ and ‘not’ to alternative packages in which both truth rules are varied, and
where there is no constraint that either truth rule be truth functional.
Even if the second hole can be avoided, the problem with the rst hole is greater for more complicated
operators, like quanti ers: for instance, in the case of ‘some’ our usual deductive inferences turn out truth
preserving if we suppose that its contribution to truth conditions is that of the unrestricted objectual
existential quanti er, but making it a restricted quanti er or substitutional quanti er of a certain sort
would also make the inferences truth preserving, and (depending on the details of the restriction) might
make us at least equally reliable— even with the truth rules for the truth‐functional connectives and
‘implies’ unchanged.
So what determines that our word ‘or’ or ‘not’ or ‘some’ makes the contribution to truth conditions that we
assume it makes? An in ationist has three choices. Either she can nd some sort of naturalistic facts that
could be cited in answer to this question (facts involving reliability considerations might work in the end,
despite the questions above); or she can say that there is simply no fact of the matter, that we have a
surprising example of referential indeterminacy here; or she can say that it is a non‐naturalistic fact about
us that our word ‘some’ contributes to truth conditions according to the rules of the unrestricted objectual
quanti er and that ‘not’ and ‘or’ contribute according to the usual truth tables. But this third option strikes
me as rather repellent; the rst may be hard to carry out; and the second may not be altogether free of
philosophical di culties.
p. 114 The same sort of problem arises in the case of the predicate ‘is identical to’ (and the numerical quanti ers
such as ‘there are exactly two’ that are de nable from it). The axioms that we accept as governing this
predicate determine (given a reliability assumption) that it stands for a congruence relation, that is, an
equivalence relation for which substitutivity holds; but this is not enough to determine that it stands for
genuine identity, that is, for the relation that everything bears to itself and to nothing else. It is especially
not enough if the extensions of the other predicates in the language are up for grabs: as Quine has famously
pointed out, it isn't so easy to say what facts about us make ‘identical to’ stand for identity and ‘rabbit’ for
rabbits, rather than ‘rabbit’ for rabbit stages and ‘is identical to’ for the relation of being stages of the same
object. And even if we can nd facts about usage that would rule out this example as violating a plausible
reliability requirement, it is a tall order to nd facts about usage which would rule out all choices of
nonstandard congruence relations. Again, an in ationist is apparently faced with the three options of
nding such facts, or accepting it as simply a brute fact that our word stands for genuine identity, or
accepting a surprising level of referential indeterminacy in our basic logical vocabulary. This is a choice that
not everyone would be happy to have to make.
12
A main motivation for de ationism is that it apparently avoids having to make this sort of choice.
According to the simplest version of de ationism— that relying on the pure disquotational truth predicate
mentioned earlier— it is an entirely trivial matter to explain why one's own word ‘or’ obeys the truth table
it does: this follows from truth functional logic together with the logic of the disquotational truth predicate,
with no mention of any facts at all about our usage of ‘or’. Recall that if ‘true’ is used purely
disquotationally, then ‘ “p” is true’ is cognitively equivalent to ‘p’, for any sentence ‘p’ that we understand.
As a result, we get that each instance of the ‘disquotation schema’
(T) ‘p’ is true if and only if p

holds of conceptual necessity, that is, by virtue of the cognitive equivalence of the left and right hand sides.
But for any sentences q and r, instances of the following schemas are also instances of (T), and hence
conceptually necessary:
‘q or r’ is true if and only if q or r
‘q’ is true if and only if q
‘r’ is true if and only if r.
And now you can use the latter two to substitute into the right hand side of the rst, so as to get the
conceptual necessity of each instance of the following:
(TF) ‘q or r’ is true if and only if ‘q’ is true or ‘r’ is true.
p. 115 The conceptual necessity of the instances of (TF) really isn't enough to justify the claim that ‘or’ obeys the
usual truth table: we need the conceptual necessity of the generalization
(TFG) For all sentences S1 and S2 of our language, ⌈S1 or S2⌉ is true i S1 is true or S2 is true.
But it is easy to get that if we start not from (T) but from some generalized form of (T). One such generalized
form of (T) employs a universal substitutional quanti er:
13
(TG) Πp[‘p’ is true if and only if p].
(I assume a theory of substitutional quanti cation that avoids the semantic paradoxes). There are also ways
to get the generalization without substitutional quanti ers. One alternative is to incorporate schematic
letters for sentences into the language, reasoning with them as with variables; and then to employ two rules
of inference governing them: (i) a rule that allows replacement of all instances of a schematic letter by a
sentence; (ii) a rule that allows inference of ∀x(Sentence(x)⊃A(x)) from the schema A(‘p’), where A(‘p’) is a
schema in which all occurrences of the schematic letter p are surrounded by quotes. Such a formalism
corresponds to a very weak fragment of a substitutional quanti er language, and is probably preferable to
using the full substitutional quanti er. In such a formalism, (T) and (TF) themselves are part of the
language, rather than merely having instances that are part of the language; and from (T) we can derive
(TF) and thence (by rule (ii) and a bit of syntax) (TFG).
Note that on any of these versions of the pure de ationary account, facts about the meaning of our word
‘or’— e.g., its conceptual role— need not be explicitly referred to in explaining why our word ‘or’ obeys the
usual truth table. Of course, we do need to use logical reasoning, and in particular, the deductive inferential
rules that are in fact associated with the word ‘or’. But we needn't mention in the explanation that these rules
are associated with ‘or’; in that sense, the meaning of ‘or’ plays no role in the explanation.
Does this mean that a de ationist can't make sense of the idea that ‘or’ obeys the truth table it does because
of its conceptual role? Not really: the fact that the deductive inferential rules for ‘or’ are used in the
explanation of ‘or’ having the truth table it has is enough to give one quite natural sense to the claim that it
obeys that truth table because it obeys those deductive inferential rules. However, the sense of ‘because’
here does not support counterfactuals. That is, because the fact that these rules are associated with ‘or’ plays
p. 116 no role in the explanation of ‘or’ having this truth table, we don't get the conclusion that if di erent rules
had been associated with ‘or’, its contributions to truth conditions would have been di erent. (At least, we
don't get this conclusion on the most straightforward reading of the counterfactual.) Indeed, it is clear that
this counterfactual (on its straightforward construal anyway) is unacceptable if ‘truth conditions’ is
understood in a purely disquotational sense. (This may seem an objection to the purely disquotational
notion of truth, but later on I will argue that it is not. I will also consider whether a de ationist can make
sense of a modi ed notion of truth conditions according to which such a counterfactual would be
straightforwardly true; if so, the conceptual role of ‘or’ might have to be explicitly referred to in explaining
why ‘or’ 's truth conditions in this modi ed sense of truth conditions are those of the usual truth table.)
What I've said here about the explanation of the truth‐theoretic properties of the logical connectives goes
for other words as well. Consider ‘rabbit’: an in ationist presumably thinks that the set or property that my
term ‘rabbit’ stands for is determined from the facts about this word's conceptual role for me, together with
its conceptual role for other members of my community, together with the facts about what my believing
various ‘rabbit’ sentences tends to be correlated with, together with the same sort of facts for other
members of my community, and so on. This raises the question of precisely how it is determined; and it

seems to me that if in ationism is to be believable then the in ationist needs to have some story to tell here.
Of course, Quine's well‐known di culty about rabbits v. rabbit‐stages would be solved if we solved the
problem for identity: reliability with respect to sentences like ‘For all x and y, if x and y are nearby rabbits
then x = y’ ties the extension of ‘rabbit’ to that of ‘identical’ in such a way as to handle such individuation
problems. But there are further problems: for instance, what makes ‘rabbit’ stand for the rabbits rather than
the rabbits‐or‐realistic‐imitations? I don't say that the in ationist can't tell a reasonable story about this,
only that there is a story to be told, and perhaps there is room for skepticism about the possibility of telling
it adequately. If so, that provides a motivation for de ationism. For the de ationist view is that there is
nothing here to explain: it is simply part of the logic of ‘refers’ (or ‘is true of’) that ‘rabbit’ refers to (is true
of) rabbits and to nothing else.
The de ationary view of truth and reference as I've presented it here applies only to words and sentences
that we understand. This may well seem worrisome, and it is important to ask both whether it should seem
worrisome and whether it could be avoided. I'll return to these matters in later sections, but rst I want to
further explore the contrast between the de ationist and in ationist viewpoints.
p. 117
4. Inverting the Theory of Reference
One qualm that one might reasonably have about the de ationist perspective is that a lot of work that has
gone into the theory of reference in recent years seems to be onto something, and it seems at rst hard to
explain just what it could be onto if truth conditions play no central role in the theory of meaning. After all,
if truth conditions play no central role, reference can hardly play a central role: whatever importance
reference has surely derives from its contribution to truth conditions.
Let's consider rst Kripke's observation (Kripke 1972) that description theories of the reference of our
14
proper names are incorrect. If truth conditions play no central role in meaning, and truth is fully explained
by the disquotation schema (and of value only as a logical device, in a manner soon to be explained), then
the same is true of reference: for the reference of singular terms, the relevant schema is
(R) If b exists then ‘b’ refers to b and nothing else; if b doesn't exist then ‘b’ doesn't refer to anything.
But if this tells us everything we need to know about the reference for our own words, what could Kripke's
critique of description theories be telling us?
We need a concrete example before us. Consider Kripke's case against a version of the description theory
according to which the referent of our term ‘Gödel’ is determined by the associated description ‘prover of
the incompleteness theorem’: the referent of the name (if it has one) is to be whatever uniquely ts the
description. Kripke's case against this view is a thought experiment, in which we discover the following fact:
(F) The incompleteness theorem was proved by a man baptized ‘Schmidt’ and who never called himself
anything other than ‘Schmidt’; a certain person who called himself ‘Gödel’ and got a job under that
name at the Institute for Advanced Study stole the proof from him.
In this situation, Kripke asks, who is it natural to say we have been referring to when we used the name
‘Gödel’, the guy who called himself ‘Schmidt’ and proved the incompleteness theorem, or the guy who
called himself ‘Gödel’? Nearly everyone says the latter, so the description theory (or this version of it) is
wrong. Surely there is something important in this critique, and if the de ationist can't make sense of it
then something is wrong with de ationism.
I think that the de ationist can make sense of Kripke's observations. On the de ationist viewpoint, though,
the observations aren't at the most basic level about reference but about our inferential practice. That is, what
Kripke's example really shows is that we would regard the claim (F) as grounds for inferring ‘Gödel didn't
prove the incompleteness theorem’ rather than as grounds for inferring ‘Gödel was baptized as “Schmidt”
p. 118 and never called himself “Gödel” ’. Reference is just disquotational. It does comes in indirectly: from (F) I
can indirectly infer
‘Gödel’ doesn't refer to the guy that proved the incompleteness theorem.
But that isn't because of a causal theory of reference over a description theory, but only because I can infer

Gödel isn't the guy that proved the incompleteness theorem,
and then ‘semantically ascend’.
This does seem to me a fairly plausible account of what the Kripke point shows. We see that at least in this
case, the de ationist picture leads to a reasonably plausible inversion of standard views, and tends to
demote the importance of theories of reference and truth conditions from accounts of language use and
cognitive functioning.
But how about the positive view of reference that emerges from the writings of Kripke, Putnam, etc.? The
positive view is that a typical name of mine refers to what it does because of a causal network of beliefs and
utterances involving that name: in the simplest cases, some people acquired beliefs involving a name as a
result of direct causal interaction with the thing named; these beliefs led to their using the name in
utterances, which led other people to have beliefs involving the name; these in turn passed beliefs on to
others, and so forth. And it is because my uses of (say) ‘Hume’ stand in a causal network of roughly this
sort, a network whose dominant causal source is Hume, that my uses of the name refer to Hume. The
previous discussion shows how a de ationist can partially capture the force of this: he can say that it is just
part of our inferential procedure to regard claims of roughly the form ‘The dominant causal source of our
beliefs involving ‘b’ is b’ as pretty much indefeasible. But this doesn't seem to fully capture the importance
of the causal theory of reference. It has seemed to many that the causal network emanating from Hume to
my uses of the name ‘Hume’ explains what is otherwise mysterious, namely, how my name could be about
Hume. Obviously a de ationist can't say this: the whole point of de ationism is that the only explanation we
need of why my word is about Hume is given by the disquotation schema.
Nonetheless, the de ationist can agree that this causal network story is explanatory of something: what it
explains is the otherwise mysterious correlation between a knowledgeable person's beliefs involving the
name ‘Hume’ and the facts about Hume. You probably believe quite a few sentences that involve the name
‘Hume’, and a large proportion of them are probably disquotationally true: that is, the conditional
probability that Hume was Φ given that you believe ‘Hume was Φ’ is quite high. Surely this correlation
15
between your ‘Hume’ beliefs and the Hume‐facts cries out for explanation. And the general lines of the
p. 119 explanation are clearly suggested in the Kripke–Putnam account: you acquired your ‘Hume’ beliefs
largely through interactions with others, who in turn acquired theirs from others, and so on until we reach
believers with a fairly immediate causal access to Hume or his writings or whatever. Moreover, the causal
network has multiple independent chains, and contains historical experts who have investigated these
independent chains systematically, so the chance of large errors surviving isn't that high. The role of
‘experts’ that gures heavily in Putnam's account of reference thus also has its analog when focus is put
instead on explaining our reliability— indeed, when the focus is put on reliability it is obvious why the
reliance on ‘experts’ should have such a central place.
Earlier I pointed out that the reliability of my beliefs under the disquotation schema is simply an objective
fact about me, stateable without semantic terms, which a de ationist can hardly be debarred from taking
note of in his account of meaning. Here I am expanding the point, to observe that he can hardly be debarred
from wanting an explanation of it; and the explanation is bound to involve some of the ingredients that
in ationists tend to put into their theories of reference.
This of course reraises the possibility mentioned earlier, that by the time the de ationist is nished
explaining this and similar facts, he will have reconstructed the in ationist's relation ‘S has the truth
conditions p’, in fact if not in name. My guess is that this will turn out not to be the case, but to assert that
conclusion with con dence requires a more thorough investigation than I will be able to undertake in this
paper. All I really hope to motivate here is that we should be ‘methodological de ationists’: that is, we
should start out assuming de ationism as a working hypothesis; we should adhere to it unless and until we
nd ourselves reconstructing what amounts to the in ationist's relation ‘S has the truth conditions p’. So
methodological de ationism is simply a methodological policy, which if pursued could lead to the discovery
that de ationism in the original sense (‘metaphysical de ationism’) is workable or could lead to the
discovery that in ationism is inevitable. It could also turn out that we end up constructing something that
might or might not be regarded as the in ationist's relation ‘S has the truth conditions p’; in that case, the
16
line between in ationism and metaphysical de ationism will turn out to have blurred.

5. More on Disquotational Truth
It is time now to be a bit more precise about what exactly de ationism involves. In order to do this, it will
help to ask what a de ationist should say about why we need a truth predicate. If truth conditions aren't
p. 120 central to meaning, why not drop talk of truth altogether? As is well known, the de ationist's answer is
that the word ‘true’ has an important logical role: it allows us to formulate certain in nite conjunctions and
17
disjunctions that can't be formulated otherwise.
There are some very mundane examples of this, for instance, where we remember that someone said
something false yesterday but can't remember what it was. What we are remembering is equivalent to the
in nite disjunction of all sentences of form ‘She said “p”, but not‐p’.
A more important example of this which has been widely noted arises in discussions of realism. ‘Realism’
has been used to mean many things, but one version of it is the view that there might be (and almost
certainly are) sentences of our language that are true that we will never have reason to believe, in contrast to
‘anti‐realist’ doctrines that identify truth with long‐run justi ability or whatever. To assert realism in this
sense one needs a notion of truth. But the reason for this is purely logical: that is, if only nitely many
sentences could be formulated in our language, we could put the realist doctrine without use of a predicate
of truth: we could say:
It might be the case that either the number of brontosauruses that ever lived is precisely 75,278 but
we will never have reason to believe that; or the amount that Michael Jackson spent on underwear
in his lifetime is exactly $1,078,852.72 but we will never have reason to believe that; or . . .
where in place of the ‘ . . .’ goes similar clauses for every sentence of the language. It is because we can't
complete the disjunction that we need a notion of truth. Or perhaps I should say, because we can't otherwise
complete the disjunction: for the claim that it might be the case that some sentence of our language is true
but that we will never have reason to believe it can be viewed as simply a way of formulating the
18
disjunction.
Another example of ‘true’ as a device of in nite conjunction and disjunction is the desire to utter only true
sentences or to have only true beliefs: what we desire is the in nite conjunction of all claims of the form ‘I
utter “p” only if p’ or ‘I believe “p” only if p’. It is sometimes claimed that a de ationist cannot grant that
19
p. 121 there is any ‘substantial norm’ of assertion beyond warranted assertibility. This seems to me a serious
mistake: any sane de ationist will hold that truth and warranted assertibility (even long‐run warranted
assertibility) can and do diverge: as the previous paragraph should make clear, their divergence is a
consequence of the truth schema together with quite uncontroversial facts. Consequently, a norm of
asserting the truth is a norm that goes beyond warranted assertibility. But there is no di culty in desiring
that all one's beliefs be disquotationally true; and not only can each of us desire such things, there can be a
general practice of badgering others into having such desires. Isn't this enough for there being a ‘norm’ of
asserting and believing the truth? Admittedly, this account of norms in terms of badgering is a bit crude, but
I see no reason to think that on a more sophisticated account of what a norm is, norms of striving for the
truth won't be just as available to the de ationist as they are on the crude account.
I'll give a fourth example of the utility of a device of in nite conjunction and disjunction, since it clearly
brings out some points I want to stress. Consider some theory about the physical world, formulated with
nitely many separate axioms and nitely many axiom schemas (each schema having in nitely many
axioms as instances). For an example of such a theory, one can take a typical rst order version of the
Euclidean theory of space (which is not nitely axiomatizable). Suppose that one rejects this theory without
knowing which speci c part of it to reject; or alternatively, suppose that one accepts it but regards it as
contingent. In the rst case one will put the rejection by saying ‘Not every axiom of this theory is true’; in
the second case, by saying ‘It might have been the case that not every axiom of the theory was true.’ But the
intended purpose in the rst case is of course to deny the in nite conjunction of the axioms, and in the
second case to assert the possibility of the negation of this in nite conjunction.
My reason for focussing on this example is that it shows clearly the importance of what I earlier called pure
disquotational truth. Pure disquotational truth involves two important features that certain other truth
concepts lack. The rst is that I can understand ‘Utterance u is true’ only to the extent that I can understand

utterance u; the second is that for me, the claim that utterance u is true in the pure disquotational sense is
cognitively equivalent to u itself as I understand it. (The rst pretty much follows from the second: if I can't
understand u, and if an attribution of truth to u is cognitively equivalent to u, then I can't understand an
20
p. 122 attribution of truth to u.) The second feature of the pure disquotational notion of truth means that this
notion is of a use‐independent property: to call ‘Snow is white’ disquotationally true is simply to call snow
white; hence it is not to attribute it a property that it wouldn't have had if I and other English speakers had
used words di erently.
In ordinary English we seem to use a truth predicate that does not share these two features. It is not entirely
obvious, though, that what we say can't be understood indirectly in terms of disquotational truth. (More on
this in Sections 8 and 9.) In any case, these two features of pure disquotational truth make it ideally suited
to serve the logical need for a device of in nite conjunction and disjunction illustrated in the examples
above, particularly the Euclidean geometry example. In the rst place, the only sentences we ever literally
conjoin or disjoin are sentences we understand, so it is clear that a notion that is inapplicable to utterances
we don't understand will serve our needs for truth as a device of conjunction and disjunction. Second and
more important, the use‐independence of disquotational truth is required for the purposes just reviewed. For
if ‘All sentences of type Q are true’ is to serve as an in nite conjunction of all sentences of type Q, then we
want it to entail each such sentence, and be entailed by all of them together. This would fail to be so unless
‘S is true’ entailed and was entailed by S. But the only way that can be so is if ‘true’ doesn't ascribe a use‐
dependent feature to S. Suppose for instance that Euclidean geometry is true, and that we try to express its
contingency by saying that the axioms together might have been false. Surely what we wanted to say wasn't
simply that speakers might have used their words in such a way that the axioms weren't true, it is that space
itself might have di ered so as to make the axioms as we understand them not true. A use‐independent
notion of truth is precisely what we require.
Of course, there is another use‐independent notion of truth besides disquotational truth that would be
usable for these purposes: truth as applied to propositions, where propositions are construed as language‐
independent (rather than, say, as equivalence classes of utterances). But I think that pure disquotational
truth is better for these purposes, for two reasons. The rst and less important is ontological: it is better to
avoid postulating strange entities unnecessarily. The more important reason is that unless one is very
careful to limit the use made of the notion of expressing a proposition, the introduction of such a notion of
21
proposition would beg the question in favor of in ationism. There may be good arguments for
p. 123 in ationism, but the need to express in nite conjunctions and disjunctions can be handled with the more
minimal apparatus of purely disquotational truth, and it is best to use only the more minimal apparatus as
long as the need of the more powerful apparatus is unargued.
I have been arguing that in ationists as well as de ationists need some use‐independent notion of truth as a
device of in nite conjunction and disjunction, and that such a notion is needed only for sentences that one
understands. Pure disquotational truth serves the need admirably; and I think that a de ationist should take
pure disquotational truth as the fundamental truth concept. This is not to say that it is the only notion of
truth available to the de ationist: in Section 9 I will consider the possibility of introducing a modi ed kind
of disquotational truth, which both applies to sentences in languages we can't understand and is not use‐
independent. But I have argued that a de ationist needs a notion of pure disquotational truth, and I think
that he should regard it as the basic notion of truth in terms of which others are to be explained.
6. Disquotational Truth versus Tarskian Truth
In this section I consider the relation between Tarskian truth de nitions and disquotational truth. To
facilitate the discussion I will pretend that English is a language without indexicals or demonstratives or
ambiguous sentences, so that we can apply talk of truth to sentence types. (I will consider what the
de ationist should say about indexicality, ambiguity, and the like in Section 10.)
As I have explained disquotational truth, axiomatic status is given to some generalized version of the truth
schema
(T) ‘p’ is true if and only if p.
The generalized version might be the result of pre xing the schema with a universal substitutional
quanti er; alternatively, we might prefer the weaker approach involving schematic variables, mentioned

earlier. (Again, I assume su cient restrictions on the schema to avoid semantic paradoxes.) Actually, if our
language contains a modal operator we need something a bit stronger, as the Euclidean geometry example
of the previous section indicates: the schema (T) should be replaced by:
(NT) □[‘p’ is true if and only if p].
But even when the language doesn't have a modal operator, the left hand side of (T) is to be understood as
p. 124 cognitively equivalent to the right hand side. (Any view, no matter how in ationist, accepts the instances
of (T) as material biconditionals.)
Tarskian approaches are somewhat di erent. First I should remind the reader that though Tarski was
interested in explicitly de ned truth predicates, he also proved a severe limitation of such explicitly de ned
predicates: they are available only for fragments of one's language. If we explicitly de ne a truth predicate
in a language, not only must we exclude its application to some or all sentences of that language that
contain semantic terms, we must also exclude its application to a substantial body of other sentences of the
language without semantic terms but with unrestricted quanti ers. And this of course limits the use of the
truth predicate as a device of in nite conjunction and disjunction: for instance, we can't use it to form
in nite conjunctions and disjunctions of sentences with unrestricted quanti ers, at least if arbitrarily large
numbers of alternations of those quanti ers appear among the conjuncts or disjuncts. If we want to avoid
such limitations on formulating in nite conjunctions and disjunctions, we should give up on the idea that
our truth predicate must be explicitly de ned.
Even if a Tarskian were to give up the insistence on de ning truth, there would still be an important
di erence between the Tarskian approach and the full‐ edged de ationary approach that takes a
generalized version of the truth schema as an axiom. For central to what is usually thought of as the
22
Tarskian approach (though perhaps it owes more to Davidson than to Tarski himself) is that truth is
23
characterized (inductively if not explicitly) in terms of compositional structure. This gives compositional
principles of truth a much more central role than they have on the full‐ edged de ationary account. Recall
the de ationist story I gave about why the word ‘or’ obeys the usual truth table: the principle
If S1 and S2 are sentences of our language then (S1 or S2) is true i S1 is true or S2 is true
is built directly into the inductive characterization of truth on the Tarskian approach, whereas on the
de ationary approach it is simply a consequence of the generalized truth schema (together with the
principle ‘∀S(S is a sentence ⊃ Σp(S = ‘p’)’, on the substitutional quanti er version of the generalized
p. 125 schema). Something similar holds for other compositional principles, such as that a sentence consisting
of a 1‐place predicate and a referring name is true i the predicate is true of what the name denotes: on a
de ationist account this is simply a consequence of generalized disquotational schemas for ‘true’, ‘true of’,
and ‘refers’ (together with principles like the one just given parenthetically, together with some obvious
24
syntactic principles and laws of concatenation and quotation marks).
Why does it matter whether such principles are built into an inductive characterization of truth or viewed as
consequences of generalized disquotational schemas? One reason why it matters is that there is no
guarantee that for all regions of discourse there will be such compositional principles that follow from the
generalized disquotation schemas. The compositional principles for ‘or’ and other truth functional
operators simply fall out of the logical rules of inference that govern those operators (together with the
disquotational principles for ‘true’); the same is basically true of other standard compositional principles
(except that we sometimes need subsidiary semantic notions such as satisfaction, and disquotational
principles governing them). But there is no obvious reason to think that in the case of all operators, e.g. non‐
extensional ones, there will be subsidiary semantic notions that yield compositional principles.
This shouldn't upset the full‐ edged de ationist: for the full‐ edged de ationist, such compositional
principles have no particular interest in their own right; we can explain why we have them when we do,
since they follow from the basic disquotational schemas whenever a substitutivity principle is part of the
logic, but they are not of foundational importance. For the Tarskian they are of much more fundamental
importance: they are needed in order to have a satisfactory notion of truth. This is one important way in
which a Tarskian approach isn't fully de ationist.
A Tarskian approach may or may not be partially de ationist: whether it is depends on the status that is
accorded the Tarskian ‘truth de nitions’. In particular, what (if anything) makes such a de nition correct

for a given population? For a view to count as in any serious sense de ationist, it must say either that there
is no sense at all to be made of speaking of one Tarski‐predicate for a population as ‘correct’, or that the only
sense that can be made of it is based on stipulating that the homophonic truth predicate counts as correct for
us.
To elaborate: it is easy to use Tarski‐predicates in a theory that is in no way de ationist. One view of the
signi cance of a Tarskian truth de nition (whether inductive or explicit) is as partially characterizing an
p. 126 abstract language, that is, a language viewed as an abstract entity that exists whether or not anyone
actually speaks it: the language is de ned by the rules governing it, including Tarskian truth rules. (See
Lewis 1975; Soames 1984; Stalnaker 1984.) So in addition to English there is an abstract language English*,
with the same rules of grammar but di erent truth rules: e.g. in English* ‘or’ might obey the truth table for
conjunction and ‘rabbit’ might be true of all and only the dinosaurs. Then questions about the truth
conditions of a person's sentences are relocated as questions about which abstract language she speaks. An
in ationist thinks that there are facts about a person's employment of her sentences by virtue of which it is
one abstract language rather than another that she is speaking; such facts determine that Aristotle spoke in
abstract Greek, and in the same way determine that we are speaking abstract English. The problem is to say
what these facts are, and how they do the determining. But a de ationist thinks that a homophony
condition guarantees that we are speaking English rather than English*, without the need of any such facts
25
about our employment of the language.
There is of course a strong suggestion of the de ationist viewpoint in Tarski himself, stemming from his
famous adequacy condition on truth de nitions, ‘Convention T’. (I should actually say, a strong suggestion
of the partial de ationist view, because of the points earlier in this section.) My point is only that if you
deemphasize these and focus on the truth de nitions themselves, and think it is a straightforwardly factual
question which truth de nition is correct for a given population, then there is nothing in the least
de ationist about the resulting view.
7. Objections to Deflationism
There are many di erent sorts of worries that one might have about de ationism. Some seem to me to be
based on misunderstandings. Under this heading I would include the commonly voiced worry that
de ationism cuts language o from the world. The worry is that if I simply accept ‘T‐sentences’ like
‘There are gravitational waves’ is true i there are gravitational waves,
then unless the sentence on the right hand side already has truth conditions of a more‐than‐disquotational
sort, it has nothing to do with gravitational waves, and so the T‐sentence doesn't really supply truth
conditions to ‘There are gravitational waves’. The response is that we do indeed need to establish a
connection between the use of ‘There are gravitational waves’ and gravitational waves, independent of the
truth schema. But de ationism allows for this (at least in the version I have sketched): it admits that among
p. 127 the important facts about the use of ‘There are gravitational waves’ are facts, stateable quite independent
of disquotational truth, that relate the sentence to gravitational waves. For instance, the laws of physics are
such that gravitational waves, if they exist, will cause pulses in a quadrupole antenna, and such pulses are
one of the things that would increase our con dence in the sentence ‘There are gravitational waves’. The
objection tacitly assumed that the only kind of connection between gravitational waves and the use of
‘There are gravitational waves’ (other than the derivative connection that arises simply from the use of
‘true’ in accordance with the disquotation schema) comes in the non‐disquotational assignment of truth
conditions to that sentence; but this is simply false.
In contrast, many of the worries that one might have about de ationism raise deep issues. In my view the
most serious worry about de ationism is that it can't make sense of the explanatory role of truth
conditions: e.g. their role in explaining behavior, or their role in explaining the extent to which behavior is
successful. Unfortunately it is a big job even to state the worry clearly, and a bigger job to answer it; I must
26
save this for another occasion. Another kind of worry about de ationism that is too big to discuss here is
that it can't make the distinction between vague and non‐vague discourse, or between discourse that is
thoroughly factual and discourse that falls short of this in various ways. I discuss this worry in Chapter 8.
But there remain some less serious objections that I can discuss here; discussing them will help clarify what

I am taking de ationism to involve. The objections to be discussed are
1. That de ationism can't handle the attribution of truth to utterances in other languages.
2. That de ationism gives the wrong modal properties to ‘true’.
3. That de ationism can't handle ambiguous utterances, indexicals, demonstratives, and the like.
4. That it can't make sense of how we learn from others.
I think all of these can be easily answered, but it is worth spelling out how this is to be done, for my
treatment will separate my version of de ationism from certain other less radical versions. I will treat these
objections in order in the nal four sections.
8. Applying ʻTrueʼ To Sentences in Other Languages
I have emphasized that a person can meaningfully apply a pure disquotational truth predicate only to
utterances that he understands. This raises the question of what we are doing when we talk of the truth or
falsity of sentences in other languages.
p. 128 There are at least three di erent approaches that a de ationist might take toward talk of truth for sentences
in other languages. Perhaps the most obvious— but to my mind the least satisfactory— would be to use a
notion of interlinguistic synonymy: regard ‘S is true’ (where ‘S’ stands for a foreign sentence) as equivalent
to ‘S is synonymous with a sentence of ours that is true in the purely disquotational sense’. This option
brings the semantic notion of synonymy into the characterization of truth for foreign sentences. I will call
truth as so de ned ‘extended disquotational truth’.
Some may object that extended disquotational truth is not a notion that a de ationist can allow himself,
since it involves interlinguistic synonymy, which must be understood as involving sameness of truth
conditions. I hesitate to say anything so strong; I say only that a de ationist who wants to employ a notion
of interlinguistic synonymy faces a serious challenge, the challenge of showing how to make sense of it
without relying on a prior notion of truth conditions. (Recall that the de ationist/in ationist contrast was
explained in terms of whether truth conditions play a role in semantics and the theory of content.) But
perhaps this challenge can be met. If for instance one were to adopt a crude veri cationism, synonymy
would be just interpersonal sameness of veri cation conditions— assuming of course that that can be
spelled out. On a more reasonable de ationist view, meaning will involve a variety of components: as
discussed earlier, the meaning of a sentence of mine will depend on its inferential role for me, its inferential
role for my fellow speakers, and its indication relations for me and my fellow speakers. So whether one of
my sentences is synonymous with a sentence used by someone else (e.g., a foreign speaker) will depend on a
variety of disparate facts. In that case there is no obvious way to get a useful and well‐behaved synonymy
27
relation. Still, it isn't idiotic to suppose that there is an unobvious way to do it; so it isn't initially clear that
a de ationist can't admit a useful and well‐behaved notion of extended disquotational truth.
But extended disquotational truth isn't the only option the de ationist has available for talking about truth
conditions for foreign sentences. A second option is more exible: simply de ne what it is for a foreign
sentence to be true relative to a correlation of it to one of our sentences: a sentence is true relative to the
correlation if the sentence of ours correlated with it is true in the purely disquotational sense. This approach
di ers from the previous in that no claim is made that the correlated sentences are synonymous. Of course,
if we accept the notion of interpersonal synonymy, we can use it to get the e ect of the rst option: we can
say that a foreign sentence S is true in the extended disquotational sense i there is a correlation of S to a
p. 129 synonymous English sentence such that S is true relative to this correlation. But the second option can be
applied by those like Quine who reject a notion of interpersonal synonymy, or by those who accept it but
want to consider truth relative to correlations that violate it, or by those who want to keep track of where
notions like synonymy are being used and where they aren't.
I should note that even those like Quine who reject a notion of interpersonal synonymy grant that there are
standards of translation: it is beyond controversy that some translations of a foreign sentence are better
than others, at least for certain purposes. If someone hears an utterance of ‘Comment ça va?’ and translates
it as ‘You have just passed your French exam’, then that grossly violates any reasonable standard of good
translation. The skeptic about interpersonal synonymy holds that though we of course have standards of

translation, they are a matter of being better or worse, not of right and wrong, and also are highly context‐
dependent (since the purposes for which they are better or worse vary from one context to the next); and
that these features together keep them from generating any useful notion of synonymy. I don't want to
discuss whether this rejection of interpersonal synonymy is a reasonable position. But note that even if it is,
standards of better and worse translation can be employed to partly capture the import of claims about
extended disquotational truth: what we are doing when we conjecture whether some utterance we don't
understand is true is conjecturing whether a good translation of the utterance will map it into a
disquotationally true sentence we do understand. If ‘good translation’ is a highly context‐sensitive and
interest‐relative notion that doesn't re ect an objective synonymy relation, then there is a certain non‐
objectivity to the question of whether the utterance we don't understand is true, but that consequence is not
obviously undesirable.
(Even a de ationist who thinks there is an objective notion of synonymy for good translations to re ect will
have a similar consequence to swallow. For presumably if there is an objective synonymy relation, then
there could be utterances that we know don't bear this relation to any utterances we understand, and yet
presumably it could still sometimes make a certain amount of sense to discuss whether such an utterance
was true. An in ationist can take such a discussion at face value; but as far as I can see, the only way for a
de ationist to deal with this, even if he accepts a notion of ‘objective synonymy’, is to appeal to context‐
sensitive and interest‐relative standards of translation that do not re ect objective synonymy.)
In addition to extended disquotational truth and truth relative to a correlation, there is a third option for a
de ationist who wants to apply ‘true’ to foreign utterances, and that is simply to use the concept of pure
disquotational truth as originally de ned in connection with the foreign utterance, without relativization.
This may seem odd: didn't I say that my concept of pure disquotational truth applied only to utterances in
my own language? No: I said that it was de ned only for utterances that I understand. I understand the
sentence ‘Der Schnee ist weiss’. Following Quine (1953b: 135), I hold that I can apply schema (T) to it,
p. 130 getting
‘Der Schnee ist weiss’ is true i der Schnee ist weiss,
which I can perfectly well understand despite its not conforming to the grammatical rules of any standard
language. (If it is objected that there would be a problem had I picked a sentence with a di erent meaning in
German than in English, my response is that in that case ‘Der Schnee ist weiss’ would be ambiguous for me,
and there would be no problems in this case that don't arise equally for ordinary ambiguity within a
language. I will discuss whether ambiguity creates a problem for de ationism in Section 10.)
I don't see any reason to choose between the second and third options: the de ationist can use whichever
one suits his purposes of the moment. For some purposes the third option is better than the second. For
instance, if I understand a foreign sentence that has no exact equivalent in English, the third option can be
used to give more adequate disquotational truth conditions than the second. The third option is also more
useful in certain explanatory contexts, when we want to explain a foreigner's behavior without bringing the
English language into the explanation. But the second option is often more useful than the third, in that it
can in principle be used even for sentences we don't understand. Sometimes that broader application can
come in handy: for instance, in trying to come to understand a foreign sentence we may try out several
di erent correlations to our own sentences to see which makes most sense. And in some contexts we want
to use the second option in connection with semantic or quasi‐semantic notions like synonymy or
acceptable translation: for instance, in a perjury trial we might want to know whether there is any
acceptable translation of an utterance that makes it come out true. Finally, there are contexts in which the
second option is useful even in connection with our own utterances: if we are considering a counterfactual
situation in which my use of words is very di erent, I may be interested in the truth conditions of my
sentences relative to a mapping of my language into itself that is not the identity mapping. So a de ationist
should not dispense with the second option. In many contexts though I think that the third option is the
most natural. It is the one that accords with my original gloss on disquotational truth: a sentence is
disquotationally true i it is true‐as‐I‐understand‐it.
I think then that the notion of extended disquotational truth should be avoided if possible: it is not obvious
that a de ationist can make sense of it, it is less obvious that he needs it, and it seems better to keep the
logical aspects of truth cleanly separated from any semantic and quasi‐semantic elements.

9. The Modal Properties of ʻTrueʼ
A further point about extended disquotational truth as I have de ned it is that it is a concept of little
theoretical utility. That is because it is a curiously hybrid notion: whether a foreign utterance is true in this
p. 131 sense depends on semantic facts, but whether one of our own sentences is true in this sense doesn't (since
as applied to our own sentences, extended disquotational truth is equivalent to pure disquotational truth,
which is use‐independent). Recall that certain logical uses of the pure disquotational truth predicate ‘truepd’
(for instance, the modal version of the Euclidean geometry example) require that □ (‘Snow is white’ is truepd
i snow is white). So even if ‘snow is white’ had been used in English in pretty much the way that ‘Grass is
red’ is actually used, ‘snow is white’ would still have been true in the purely disquotational sense, and hence
in the extended disquotational sense as well. Moreover, if in addition grass and the German language had
been as they actually are, then ‘Das Gras ist rot’ would have been synonymous with ‘Snow is white’, and
hence would have been true in the extended disquotational sense too. The counterfactual supposition of a
drastic change in the use of English sentences leaves their extended disquotational truth conditions the
same but alters the extended disquotational truth conditions of foreign sentences! This, surely, is not a
theoretically useful way to make truth conditions use‐dependent.
Obviously what we would need to do, if we wanted a more useful notion of truth conditions that has
semantic features built into it, is to build in such features for our own sentences as well as for the sentences
of others. And of course in ationary theories of truth conditions do precisely this. The question is, can one
do this on a theory of truth conditions with any claims to being de ationary?
There is an obvious modi cation of the extended disquotational approach: I don't know if a view of this sort
should be called de ationary or in ationary, so I'll call it quasi‐de ationary. It requires that we have not
only a notion of synonymy, but a prior notion of meaning such that two sentences are synonymous if they
have the same meaning; but meaning is to be de ned independently of truth conditions. (The crude
illustration would be that meanings are just veri cation conditions; slightly less crudely, perhaps meanings
are some sort of equivalence classes of pairs of conceptual roles and indication relations; the point of using
equivalence classes being of course to allow that small di erences of conceptual role don't make for a
di erence of meaning.) Then we de ne quasi‐disquotational truth (truthqd) and quasi‐disquotational truth
conditions by:
□ (S is trueqd i Σp[∃m (m is the meaning of S and @(m is the meaning of ‘p’)) and p]),
and analogously,
□ [S has the quasi‐disquotational truth conditions that p i ∃m(m is the meaning of S and @(m is the
meaning of ‘p’))];
28
where ‘@’ is an ‘actually operator’ which ‘temporarily undoes the e ects of’ the modal operator. This
p. 132 seems to have the modal properties we desire if we want to mimic an in ationary truth predicate in
making the truth of sentences use‐dependent.
Indeed, it mimics it well enough so that it is natural to wonder whether it shouldn't count as an in ationary
notion of truth and truth conditions. For note that according to it, a su cient condition for having the truth
conditions that snow is white is having a certain ‘meaning’ m: perhaps a certain combination of such things
as conceptual role, indication relations, and the like. Why then shouldn't this count as an explication of
truth conditions in terms of such things as conceptual role and indication relations?
It does nonetheless seem to me that there may be something to be said for counting a view like this as
somewhat de ationary, if the idea of a meaning is explained in a su ciently ‘un‐truth‐theoretic’ way. After
all, it is compatible with this view that there be no very systematic connection between ‘meanings’ and
truth conditions: for instance, it is compatible with this way of de ning truth conditions, albeit not very
plausible, that the ‘meaning’ of ‘Snow is white or grass is green’ have few systematic links to the
‘meanings’ of ‘Snow is white’, ‘Grass is green’, and ‘or’. Note further that this view assigns truth conditions
only to sentences that are synonymous with English sentences (or anyway, sentences that we understand).
This points up the fact that there need be no ‘natural connection’ between the ‘meanings’ it assigns and
truth conditions: the connection between the meanings it invokes and truth is supplied entirely by the
disquotation schema for sentences we understand. So the view is somewhat de ationary, though just how

de ationary it is will depend very much on the details of what it says about ‘meanings’.
One kind of worry about views of this sort concerns whether any acceptable notion of ‘a meaning’ and of
‘having a meaning’ will do the job required. Putting aside purely ontological concerns, the main worry
concerns the notion of synonymy (having the same meaning) that would be generated by any such view of
meaning and the ‘having’ of meanings. Long ago Quine observed that it is an open question whether
interpersonal synonymy and intrapersonal synonymy can be viewed as two aspects of the same general
equivalence relation. (Quine 1953a, 56; see also Quine 1960, Sections 9 and 11.) Obviously we employ
di erent criteria in the two cases— for instance, in the intrapersonal case we use a speaker's willingness to
substitute one expression for the other, and this criterion is unavailable in the interpersonal case— and
re ection on the criteria we do use in the two cases can lead to skepticism as to how well they cohere. I
won't try to elaborate this skepticism here, I simply want to note that such skepticism is possible, and that it
would make it impossible to regard intrapersonal synonymy and interpersonal synonymy as both cases of
p. 133 the general relation of ‘having the same meaning’. (In addition, the explanation of synonymy as having
the same meaning requires synonymy to be an equivalence relation; this is another assumption about
synonymy that has been questioned.)
I'm not sure how seriously to take these worries, but as I said in connection with extended disquotational
truth, I think it advantageous to cleanly separate the semantic assumptions one is employing from the
logical aspects of truth: failing to do so can easily lead to obscuring the role to which one is putting one's
semantic assumptions. (I think in fact there is a serious danger of this in the case of quasi‐disquotational
truth conditions: it is easy to fall into trying to give them a kind of explanatory role that in fact is precluded
given the peculiar way they are de ned. But this and other issues about explanation are beyond the scope of
this paper.) In any case, I think a full‐ edged de ationist should make no commitment to a notion of
interpersonal synonymy, let alone to interpersonally ascribable meanings.
Let us return now to counterfactuals like
(1) If we had used ‘Snow is white’ in certain very di erent ways it would have had the truth conditions
that grass is red.
Presumably the average person would call such a sentence true. Doesn't this show that the average person is
clearly not using the word ‘true’ in its purely disquotational sense? And doesn't that in turn show that a
version of de ationism that puts purely disquotational truth at the center of things, and which refrains
from endorsing intersubjective meanings and hence quasidisquotational truth, is gratuitously departing
from common sense? I don't think so. We could after all say that the ‘cash value’ of (1) is
(1*) in considering counterfactual circumstances under which we used ‘Snow is white’ in certain very
di erent ways, it is reasonable to translate it in such a way that its disquotational truth conditions
relative to the translation are that grass is red;
and that this is all the ordinary person really means to assert. However, I am suspicious of this and all other
claims about what the ordinary person means in making assertions involving ‘true’: I rather doubt that
there is a consistent way to make sense of all ordinary uses of this notion. I am rather inclined to think that
many ordinary uses of ‘true’ do t the purely disquotational mold, though I regard the question of whether
this is so as of only sociological interest. If, as may well be true, there is an ordinary meaning of (1) that (1*)
fails to capture, then that would show that ordinary speakers are committed to a notion of truth that goes
beyond the purely disquotational. But if we can lessen those commitments in a way that is adequate to all
practical and theoretical purposes, and if in doing so we can still capture the ‘cash value’ of ordinary
utterances as well as (1*) captures the cash value of (1), then the charge that we are ‘gratuitously departing
from common sense’ is quite unfounded.
p. 134
10. Ambiguity and Indexicals
So far I have been a bit cavalier about whether a disquotational notion of truth applies to sentence‐types or
to utterances. I want it to apply to utterances, so that if an ambiguous sentence or a sentence containing an
indexical or demonstrative is uttered on di erent occasions, we can regard some utterances of it as true and
29
others as false. One substantial worry about de ationism is whether it can accommodate this.

In dealing with this worry it is important to bear clearly in mind that talk of truth conditions as I am
primarily construing it is thoroughly non‐semantic. ‘True’ in the purely disquotational sense means ‘true as
I understand it’: it doesn't mean ‘true on the correct understanding of it’, because the idea of a ‘correct
understanding’ of a sentence or utterance is a semantic notion that has no place when we are discussing
2
purely disquotational truth. If on my understanding of ‘Der Schnee ist weiss’ it is equivalent to ‘E = mc ’,
2 30
then for me this sentence is disquotationally true i E = mc . Anyone in the grip of the Frege‐Russell
tradition will think that this shows that we need a notion of truth conditions very di erent from the
disquotational one; but I don't think it at all obvious that they are right. As I observed in Section 8, a
de ationist can grant that there are standards of adequacy of translation that do not presuppose truth
conditions, and can grant the legitimacy of saying that relative to a translation manual that meets those
standards the sentence will have di erent truth conditions. So a notion like ‘true as I ought to understand it
(given my goals of translation together with the facts about how the sentence is used)’ certainly make
sense; it just needs to be distinguished from the purely disquotational notion that I am taking to be primary.
Can the purely disquotational notion be applied to ambiguous utterances and indexical utterances? Let's
start with ambiguity. I believe that it poses little problem for the de ationist. There is a rather
commonsensical story of how we process ambiguous sentences, which I assume the de ationist can help
himself to: the story has it that when we come upon a two‐way ambiguous sentence like ‘Visiting relatives
can be boring’ or ‘I met my lover at the bank’, there are two alternative ways of processing it and using it in
inferences, one corresponding to each of the interpretations; indeed, interpreting it one way rather than the
other just is processing it in one way rather than the other (for instance, storing it in memory in such a way
that it will be used in inferences of one kind rather than the other). When we are undecided as to how to
interpret an ambiguous sentence, what we are undecided about is how to process and store it and which of
p. 135 the two sorts of inference to make with it. The fact that we can process and store a sentence in two
di erent ways can be put metaphorically by saying that we attach ‘inner subscripts’ to lexically ambiguous
elements and ‘inner syntactic markers’ to mark di erent ways of resolving the syntactic ambiguities. This
metaphor allows us to talk, if we like, as if each person thinks in an ambiguity‐free language. On this way of
talking, to say that an utterance is disquotationally true is to say in e ect that the sentence in my ambiguity‐
free inner language which I associate with the utterance is disquotationally true. Of course, if I am
undecided how to interpret the utterance, there is no unique ambiguity‐free inner sentence to use and hence
no unique disquotational truth conditions will be generated. We can regard that as a case where we don't
understand the utterance, so that the notion of disquotational truth doesn't apply— though of course we
can also ascribe it truth conditions relative to each of the ways of understanding it. The metaphor of the
ambiguity‐free language is not really playing an essential role here: I could equally well have said that I
accept all instances of ‘That utterance of “Visiting relatives can be boring” is true i visiting relatives can be
boring’, but may process the right hand side in either of two ways on di erent occasions. (I disallow
inference from the right hand side processed one way to the right hand side processed the other way.)
Now let's turn to sentences containing indexicals and demonstratives. Here it is natural to divide up the
account of truth into two stages. The rst stage concerns sentence types: here of course there is no hope of
de ning an unrelativized truth predicate, since sentence‐types like ‘I don't like her’ don't have a truth
value, but we can associate a truth value to this type relative to a pair of objects <b,c>; to say that ‘I don't
like her’ is true relative to <b,c> is simply to say that b doesn't like c. (I suppose that this isn't strictly
‘disquotational’ in that it involves a grammatical adjustment from ‘don't’ to ‘doesn't’, but surely we can
allow the disquotationalist the machinery required for this grammatical adjustment.)
The second stage is to provide an account of unrelativized truth for sentence‐tokens. Given the rst stage,
this simply amounts to associating objects with each of the indexical elements in the sentence, for then we
can declare the token true i it is true relative to the sequence of associated objects. How are we to do the
association? If we focus only on indexicals like ‘I’ and ‘now’, there is a simple rule that would work pretty
well: always relativize ‘I’ to the producer of the token and ‘now’ to the time of production. But this rule isn't
invariably such a good one: consider the subway advertisement ‘Stop smoking now’. At any rate, there
seems to be no such simple rule for ‘she’, or ‘that’: the ‘correct’ object to assign, if it makes sense to talk of
correctness here, depends in very complex ways on the intentions of the producer. In these cases anyway,
and probably even in the cases of ‘I’ and ‘now’, we must regard all talk of the ‘correct assignment’ as a
semantic matter which cannot appear in a purely disquotational account of truth conditions.

Still, nothing stops us from applying talk of disquotational truth conditions to tokens: once we remember
p. 136 that ‘disquotationally true’ means ‘true‐as‐I‐interpret‐it’, interpret‐it', the obvious thing to say is that an
utterance of ‘p(i1,. . . ,in)’ is disquotationally true (for me, that is, as I understand it) i the sentence is true
31
relative to the values of a1,. . . ,an I regard as appropriate to associate with the indexicals. When I say that I
‘associate values’ with an indexical, of course, what I do is associate a mental occurrence of one of my own
expressions (possibly itself indexical) with it. If I can't associate a term with an indexical in a sentence, then
I can't attach disquotational truth conditions to the sentence. This is just an extension of a point made
earlier for non‐indexical utterances: sentences that I don't understand have no disquotational truth
conditions for me.
I've said that the expression I associate with an indexical may itself be indexical: I may assign
disquotational truth conditions to an utterance of ‘She is here now’ by thinking ‘She is here now’. As with
ambiguity, the de ationist needs to say something about how thoughts involving indexicals are processed,
but the story is very similar to the story for ambiguity. When I think a thought involving ‘she’ to myself on a
given occasion, that thought will typically hook up causally to a certain ‘internal le drawer’ of thoughts
involving other singular terms, perhaps ‘Sheila’ and/or ‘that woman I saw at the beach last Friday’. (It is
possible that all the singular terms in the ‘ le drawer’ are indexical: you can use an indexical to ‘open a new
le drawer’. Even when there are other terms in the ‘ le drawer’, nothing need pick out any one person
uniquely: the function of these associated terms isn't to explain how we can be referring to a certain person,
if indeed we are; the function is simply to tell an obvious story of what it is for me to regard a given
occurrence of ‘she’ as ‘about Sheila’ or ‘about that woman I saw at the beach’.) Again, you could if you like
say that the internal occurrences of indexicals are ‘subscripted’ so as to remove their indexicality; I take this
to be just a dispensable manner of speaking for something better stated in terms of the internal processing.
We see that there is no special di culty in explaining disquotational truth conditions for indexical tokens. If
indexicals raise any special di culty for de ationism, it is that for indexicals it is less believable that we
don't need a more in ationist notion of truth conditions. Surely, it may be said, there will typically be a
correct answer to the question of who another person was referring to with a particular application of ‘she’;
and the de ationist seems unable to accommodate this.
It seems to me though that the internal processing story does a lot to accommodate it. In a typical case
where we misinterpret a token of ‘she’— where we incorrectly interpret the speaker as meaning Mary when
in fact she meant Sheila— we do so because of false beliefs about the speaker's internal processing: we think
that her token was connected up to an internal le drawer of thoughts involving terms like ‘Mary’ when in
p. 137 fact it was connected up to a le drawer involving terms like ‘Sheila’. Standards of appropriate
translation are going to rule that in that case, ‘Mary’ is a bad translation of ‘she’. The sort of facts that this
brings into the standards of good translation are not in themselves semantic, so it seems hard to argue that
the de ationist isn't entitled to appeal to them. Of course, it may be possible to argue that when we describe
the standards of acceptable translation for indexicals in detail we will have to bring in machinery that is
powerful enough to provide a reduction of the semantic notion of reference to non‐semantic terms; if this is
so, then the would‐be de ationist is in fact turning himself into a reductionist in ationist. As I remarked
earlier, the distinction between de ationism and reductionist in ationism may not in the end be altogether
clear. At any rate, it certainly isn't obvious without argument that the standards of acceptable translation
for indexicals give the machinery necessary to reduce the semantic notion of reference to non‐semantic
terms.
11. Learning from Others
The nal objection that I will consider is that you need an in ationist view of truth conditions to make sense
of how we learn from others. Much of our information about the world is acquired from others— in
particular, from their utterances, and from the beliefs we infer them to have. The notion of truth gures in
this process: typically, what we do is assume that certain things the other person tells us are probably true—
or that certain things we can see that she believes are probably true. It might be thought that an
understanding of this process requires a non‐de ationary notion of truth; or at least, that it requires more
than purely disquotational truth. There are actually two distinct lines of argument that might be given for
this conclusion.
The rst is that since we learn from other people, including people who speak di erent languages,
translation must somehow be involved, so that some notion of interpersonal synonymy is presupposed in

the inference. If this were right it would show that pure disquotational truth, without a synonymy relation,
was inadequate for these purposes: you'd need at least extended disquotational or quasi‐disquotational
truth, and maybe a more thoroughgoing in ationary notion, for the purpose. I'll get back to this after
discussing the other line of argument.
The second line of argument purports to show that even pure disquotational truth plus synonymy isn't
enough. Let's slur over the possible need for a synonymy relation, by imagining that I am learning from
Charley, a speaker of my idiolect. Charley says: ‘You know, on one day in 1936 there was over a foot of snow
on the ground in Mobile Alabama.’ Do I infer that one day in 1936 there was over a foot of snow in Alabama?
For most Charleys and most circumstances, surely not. But suppose that in the past Charley has asserted
each of the following: ‘You know, there are parts of Virginia that are north of parts of New Jersey’; ‘You
p. 138 know, in 1928 the Soviet government secretly supplied arms to Chiang Kai‐Shek to be used against Mao’;
‘You know, Leon Russell was one of the studio musicians for the Fleetwoods.’ Each time I've found the claim
almost unbelievable, but on checking it has turned out true. If he has never said ‘You know, p’ for a p that
has turned out false, then I think I might well believe his claim about Mobile.
A crude way to formalize my inference is as an enumerative induction: all the sentences of a certain sort that
Charley has uttered under certain circumstances that have been independently checked have been true;
‘There was a foot of snow in Mobile’ is a sentence of that sort uttered under those circumstances; so (in the
absence of defeating evidence) probably that sentence is true. In addition to the inductive inference, we need
an instance of the disquotation schema, to get from the claim about truth to the object level claim. Obviously
the disquotationalist has no trouble with the last step. But the inductive part of the inference might seem
more questionable. For suppose we were to try to formalize the inductive inference without use of the word
‘true’. What we would get is this:
1. There are parts of Virginia that are north of parts of New Jersey.
n. In 1928 the Soviet government secretly supplied arms to Chiang Kai‐Shek to be used against Mao.
n+1. Charley said ‘You know, there are parts of Virginia that are north of parts of New Jersey.’
2n. Charley said ‘You know, in 1928 the Soviet government secretly supplied arms to Chiang Kai‐Shek
to be used against Mao.’
2n+1. Charley said ‘You know, on one day in 1936 there was over a foot of snow in Mobile Alabama.’
Therefore (probably): On one day in 1936 there was over a foot of snow in Mobile Alabama.
And a possible reaction to this inference so formulated is that it has no inductive force whatever: none of the
premises have anything to do with snow or Mobile; the rst n have to do with diverse topics, and the last n+1
have to do only with noises that Charley uttered. So, it might be argued, when we reformulate the premises
and conclusion of the inference in terms of truth, this can't be the innocent reformulation that the
disquotationalist says it is: for the displayed inference has no inductive force, but the reformulation in
terms of truth does have inductive force. So the reformulated inference works by attributing a more
substantive property than disquotational truth to Charley's utterances, a substantive property on which it is
legitimate to enumeratively induce.
p. 139 I have tried to set out this line of argument persuasively, but in my view it rests on a very naive theory of
induction. (I'm not talking about its use of enumerative induction: I take the assumption that learning from
Charley is based on an enumerative induction to be a simplifying assumption on which nothing important is
likely to turn.) I grant that to someone who had no concept of truth whatever, the displayed inference would
probably have no inductive force. But that doesn't imply that we who do have a concept of disquotational

truth should attach no inductive force to the very same inference (or equivalently, to the inference as
reformulated in terms of disquotational truth). To be sure, our attaching force to this inference does not
inevitably follow from our having a disquotational truth predicate; in principle, someone could perfectly
well have a disquotational truth predicate and regard it as ‘unprojectable’. But the fact that we aren't like
that, that we do regard it as ‘projectable’, doesn't seem to me to have much to do with whether the predicate
is ‘substantive’ in the sense employed in the objection: it doesn't show that ‘true’ isn't just a logical
predicate de ned by its role as a device of in nite conjunction. (It's worth noting that someone could
equally well introduce a more theoretically loaded truth predicate and nd it ‘unprojectable’: ‘grue’ after all
is a ‘substantive’ predicate in the sense in question here, that is, it is not a mere logical device in the way
that disquotational truth is.) Our acceptance of enumerative inductions on ‘true’ is presumably due to
32
having discovered that we get useful results by doing so, and such a discovery does not require that truth
be anything more than what the disquotation schemas tell us.
If this is right then the second argument that learning from others is incompatible with de ationism has no
force. How about the rst argument, that learning from others requires an interpersonal notion of
synonymy, so that pure disquotational truth by itself is inadequate to the job? This too seems wrong.
Suppose Charley speaks another language, which I think I understand: anyway, I have a translation manual
that I use for it. Suppose I have found out in the past that when Charley utters sentences, they usually turn
out to be true as I understand them— that is, their translations turn out true, on the translation manual I
use. Then we have an inductive argument that the next one will be true, on the manual I use: in this way, we
can inductively argue to the snow in Mobile, as before. As far as I can see it doesn't matter in the least
whether this manual accords with the genuine interpersonal synonymy relation between his sentences and
ours, assuming that such talk of the correct interpersonal synonymy relation even makes sense: truth‐
relative‐to‐the‐manual is the only notion we need in learning from others.
p. 140
12. Conclusion
I repeat that there are many other arguments to be considered for the need of a more‐than‐disquotational
notion of truth or truth conditions, some much more complicated to deal with than any given here. What I
have tried to do here is simply to motivate a fairly strong version of de ationism— strong in that it does not
rely even on a semantic notion of synonymy— and to sketch how such a version of de ationism can
overcome various objections. I think what I have done here makes some case for what I've called
‘methodological de ationism’, the idea that we should assume full‐ edged de ationism as a working
hypothesis. That way, if full‐ edged de ationism turns out to be inadequate, we will at least have a clearer
33
sense than we have now of just where it is that in ationist assumptions about truth conditions are needed.
p. 141
Postscript
I'll start with two quasi‐technical issues, then move on to issues of broader philosophical interest.
1. Proving Generalizations About Truth
Tarski pointed out long ago that we do not get an adequate theory of truth by simply taking as axioms all
instances of the truth schema: this doesn't give the generalizations we need (such as that whenever modus
ponens is applied to true premises, the conclusion is true), but only gives their instances. In section 3 I made
a proposal for how to get around the problem, but what I said could have used more explanation.
What I suggested takes o from an idea of Feferman (1991) and others, of building schematic variables into
the language and subjecting them to a rule of substitution. This allows their scope to be automatically
extended as the language expands. Feferman used the idea in connection with schematic theories like
number theory and set theory. It is a bit more complicated to apply the idea in connection with the theory of
truth, since the schematic letters appear both inside and outside quotes. My proposal was to handle this (in
a language with quotation mark names) by using not only a substitution rule, but also a rule that allows you
to pass from a schematic theorem in which all occurrences of a certain schematic letter appear inside quotes

to a generalization about all sentences.
One thing I should have said is that the syntactic theory needs to be done with schematic variables as well,
for we need a schematic version of syntax in the suggested approach to truth theory. Consider the passage
from the schema
(TF) ‘q or r’ is true if and only if ‘q’ is true or ‘r’ is true
(derived from three applications of the truth schema, using a substitutivity principle) to the generalized
version
⌉
(TFG) For all sentences S1 and S2 of our language, ⌈S1 or S2 is true i S1 is true or S2 is true.
The required derivation uses schematic syntax to go from (TF) to
∧ ∧
(TF*) ‘q’ ‘or’ ‘r’ is true if and only if ‘q’ is true or ‘r’ is true,
p. 142 which by rule (ii) of Section 3 yields
∧ ∧
(TFG*) For all sentences S1 and S2 of our language, S1 ‘or’ S2 is true i S1 is true or S2 is true;
(TFG) is simply a rewrite of this using the corner‐quote notation.
How does this schematic variable approach compare with Tarski's? (Or rather, with the variant of Tarski's
approach that gives up the idea of de ning truth, but takes over the compositional clauses that Tarski built
into his de nition as axioms. My reasons for favoring the axiomatic version of Tarski over the de nitional
are given in Section 6 of the Chapter.) I'm not sure that the di erence between the schematic variable
approach and the axiomatic variant of Tarski is all that signi cant, but I do see a few advantages to the
schematic variable approach. First, we have the same advantage that Feferman stresses for schematic
number theory and schematic set theory: the theory of truth doesn't need to be revised as the language is
expanded. Second, the use of ‘ “p” is true if and only if p’ (understood now as a schematic formula that is
part of the language) in the axiomatization seems to more directly capture the core of the notion of truth.
(That's very vague, and I wouldn't put a great deal of weight on it.) Third and most signi cant, the theory
doesn't depend on our having a compositional account of the functioning of the other devices in the
language. An axiomatic Tarskian truth theory for certain constructions, for instance, belief sentences, is
notoriously hard to provide; the schematic variable approach works without such an account.
This last reason may well be thought to back re: surely the compositional structure built into Tarski's
axiomatization is important, and a theory of truth that leaves it out would be de cient. But the schematic
variable approach doesn't leave it out, for I just sketched how a typical compositional axiom (the disjunction
rule) can be derived. The derivation was based on a prior schematic derivation of (TF):
‘p or q’ is true i p or q
‘p’ is true i p
‘q’ is true i q
So ‘p or q’ is true i ‘p’ is true or ‘q’ is true.
The last line of this prior derivation follows from the earlier three only by a substitutivity principle that has
no analog for problematic constructions like belief sentences, explaining why compositional principles are
not generally available. The fact that truth is compositional in some cases but not others isn't fundamentally a fact
about truth, but rather about the underlying logic of the domains to which it is applied.
In summary, it is this last point that provides the main advantage of the schematic variable approach over
1
the axiomatic Tarskian approach. But in most respects, the axiomatic Tarskian approach is itself quite
p. 143 ‘de ationist’; for instance, the de ationistic ‘inversion’ of the theory of reference discussed in Section 4
2
would work just as well on a Tarskian approach as on a schematic variables approach.
2. Semantic Paradoxes

The paper was slightly cavalier in its treatment of the paradoxes, mostly because I have vacillated as to how
best to avoid them. I think that our ordinary concept of truth involves principles that in classical logic lead to
contradiction; any way of avoiding the contradiction within classical logic can only be a recommendation
for how to improve our concept. (Generally I nd the distinction between revising our concept and revising
our views while keeping the concept xed to be a murky one at best, but this is one case that clearly seems to
fall under the former heading.)
Actually I should be more cautious: any reasonable candidate for our ordinary concept of truth involves
principles that in classical logic lead to contradiction. The reason for the retreat to the more cautious
statement is that it is not entirely implausible that ‘our ordinary concept’ bifurcates over whether certain
instances of the schema ‘if p then “p” is true’ are correct (e.g., instances where ‘p’ crucially contains vague
terms, or evaluatives: see the distinction between weak and strong truth in Chapter 8). Even so, it seems
almost beyond doubt that on our ordinary concept, the converse schema holds, and that when one has
produced a solid argument for ‘p’ one is entitled to conclude ‘ “p” is true’. These are all that are needed to
derive a contradiction involving Liar sentences in classical logic.
We can view the disquotational theory as put forth in this paper either as an account of our ordinary
concept, or as an account of a concept that improves on our ordinary concept in certain ways. (As I've said, I
don't think the distinction between these alternatives to be entirely clear.) But because of the paradoxes,
further improvements in the concept will be needed if classical logic is assumed to apply to it. (For a very
useful survey of some of the revised theories of truth that are available in classical logic, see Friedman and
Sheard 1987.)
Will the revisions needed for a consistent theory of truth in classical logic undermine the ‘de ationary’
nature of the resulting conception? Certainly not, if we count a pure Tarskian theory (the kind of axiomatic
theory discussed in Section 6) as ‘de ationary’. For all the revisions would do is complicate the axioms; they
wouldn't, for instance, undermine the de ationistic ‘inversion’ of the theory of reference discussed in
Section 4. On the other hand, to the extent that one builds into de ationism a special role for the schemas,
de ationism would be somewhat undermined.
I'm not entirely content to leave the matter there, because the revisions in the theory of truth required to
p. 144 restore classical consistency also tend to undermine central ways in which we use the notion of truth.
(That's why the restoration of consistency seems such a clear case of alteration of the concept.) For this
reason, I am tempted by the idea that we ought to keep the standard truth schemas, but weaken the
underlying logic so that these schemas will no longer lead to contradiction. It is not clear that this requires a
general weakening of classical logic: I'm tempted to think of the weakened logic as simply a special system
of conventions designed to restore coherence to truth and related concepts. At any rate, if we can keep the
schemas by weakening the logic then we don't need to qualify the de ationary nature of the truth theory in
the least.
As a result of Kripke's in uential work (Kripke 1975), the rst thing one thinks of under the heading of a
revision in classical logic to deal with the paradoxes is the use of a logic based on the strong Kleene truth
tables: more particularly, the logic obtained by taking the valid inferences to be those that are guaranteed to
preserve ‘correct assertion’, and taking an assertion to be correct if and only if it has the ‘highest’ of the
three semantic values. Unfortunately, this ‘Kleene logic’ as it stands does not fully support de ationism as
we've been understanding it, because the Tarski biconditionals do not all come out correct. The inference
from ‘p’ to ‘ “p” is true’ and its converse can be maintained (as it can in classical logic); more generally (and
unlike the situation with classical logic), one can maintain that ‘p’ and ‘ “p” is true’ are everywhere
intersubstitutable in extensional contexts. Maybe the latter preserves enough of de ationism, but it would
3
certainly be desirable to be able to assert the Tarski biconditionals. (Moreover, the Kleene logic seems
unsatisfyingly weak, in that ‘if A then A’ is not generally assertable.)
One initially attractive response is to add a new kind of conditional A→B, not equivalent to ¬A∨B, together
4
with the corresponding biconditional. This may require that in the semantics, the underlying space of
semantic values be enlarged, in a way that doesn't alter the valid principles for the other connectives. An
especially appealing proposal along these lines is to use the Lukasiewicz continuum‐valued semantics; the
principle that every continuous function from the unit interval into itself has a xed point yields an easy
argument that any ordinary paradoxical sentence can consistently be assigned a semantic value in this
semantics, and in a very appealing way. (‘Ordinary’ paradoxical sentences include all those in which the
only role of the quanti ers is to achieve self‐reference. In particular, any Curry paradox sentence ‘If this

sentence is true then p’ gets a truth value, even when ‘p’ has a value other than 0 or 1: its value is always
(p+1)/2.) Unfortunately, certain non‐ordinary paradoxical constructions give rise to a serious problem:
p. 145 though the truth schemas don't produce outright inconsistency when applied to them, they do produce
5
an ω‐inconsistency in number theory and hence in protosyntax: see Restall 1992. I should also note that the
inferential role of ‘→’ that is validated by the semantics is quite unnatural: for instance, the inference from
A→(A→B) to A→B is disallowed. Probably a still further weakening of the logic would allow us to escape the
ω‐inconsistency problem, but such a logic is likely to be even less natural.
More attractive, I'm now inclined to think, is an idea that has been popularized by Graham Priest (e.g.,
Priest 1998): on Priest's view, the Liar sentence and its negation are each correctly assertable (as is their
conjunction), and the rules of logic are weakened so that this does not allow the assertion of just anything.
The particular version of this that I think most appealing (Priest's LP) is also based on the strong Kleene 3‐
valued truth tables, and again takes the valid inferences to be those that are guaranteed to preserve ‘correct
assertion’; but it takes an assertion to be correct if and only if it has one of the two highest of the three
semantic values. The truth schema can be consistently added, as can the intersubstitutivity of ‘p’ and ‘ “p”
6
is true’ even in the interior of sentences. (The Curry paradox is also blocked, since the only conditional in
the language is the material conditional, i.e. the one de ned in the usual way from ¬ and ∨, and this
7
conditional does not fully validate modus ponens in this logic.)
The distinction between the Kleene logic and the Priest variant is commonly described as being that
Kleene's takes ‘deviant’ sentences (e.g. the Liar) to have truth value gaps, i.e., to be neither true nor false,
but takes no sentences to have truth value gluts, i.e. to be both true and false; whereas Priest's takes deviant
sentences to have gluts and takes no sentences to have gaps. But for anyone who wants to maintain an
equivalence between ‘ “p” is true’ and ‘p’ (even in the interior of sentences), this is wholly misleading. For
to assert a truth value gap in a sentence ‘A’ would be to assert ‘¬[True (“A”) ∨ True (“¬ A”)]’, which should
be equivalent to ‘¬(A ∨ ¬ A)’; but no sentence of that form can ever be a legitimate assertion to an advocate
p. 146 of Kleene logic, whereas when ‘A’ is deviant this is a correct assertion according to Priest's logic!
Similarly, to assert the absence of a truth‐value glut in sentence ‘A’ would be to assert ‘¬[(True (“A”) & True
(“¬ A”)]’, which should be equivalent to ‘¬(A & ¬ A)’; and an advocate of Kleene logic can not assert this
absence for deviant sentences, whereas an advocate of Priest's logic can.
If one wants to state the distinction between the logics in terms of a de ationary notion of truth, the right
way to do so is this: (i) on the Kleene logic one can't assert of a ‘deviant’ sentence either that it has a truth‐
value gap or that it doesn't, nor can one assert either that it has a glut or that it doesn't; (ii) in Priest's logic,
one can assert both that it has a truth‐value gap and that it doesn't, and one can also assert both that it has a
8
glut and that it doesn't. There is no distinction between gaps and gluts in either logic! What di erentiates
the logics is simply the ‘threshold of assertability’: deviant sentences are always assertable in Priest's, never
in Kleene's. Since sentences attributing truth or non‐truth or falsity or non‐falsity to deviant sentences are
themselves deviant, this means that the advocate of Kleene logic can say nothing whatever about the truth
9
value of deviant sentences, whereas the advocate of Priest logic can say anything she pleases about them.
My own view is that Priest's logic LP is quite appealing as a logic for dealing with semantic concepts, now
that we know that they engender classical inconsistencies: it is probably the simplest way of coping with
classically inconsistent concepts. (It does not, I think, have much appeal elsewhere, e.g. in dealing with
vague and indeterminate concepts.)
To summarize: (1) The paradoxes do not undermine de ationism as a reconstruction of our ordinary truth‐
theoretic concepts; (2) they certainly don't undermine de ationism even for our improved concepts, if
‘de ationism’ is used in the weak sense on which a Tarskian theory is de ationist; and (3) there are several
ways of maintaining even a strong form of de ationism for improved truth‐theoretic concepts.
3. The Generalizing Role of ʻRefersʼ

I stressed in the paper (following Quine and Leeds) that the term ‘true’ increases the expressive power of
our language, by serving as a device for expressing in nite conjunctions and disjunctions (which could have
been expressed by more obviously logical means like substitutional quanti ers). The idea obviously works
equally well for ‘true of’. But one might doubt that the same holds for ‘refers’ as applied to singular terms:
p. 147 we already have quanti ers that play a generalizing role in the name position, so it might seem that no
expressive power is gained.

I think this argument incorrect: ordinary quanti ers don't allow for generalizations of names that appear
both inside and outside quotation marks, but that is what we would need to express what is said by ‘Every
name that came up in Department X's discussion of who to hire referred to a male’ without use of ‘refers’.
4. Untranslatable Utterances (1)

I now think that my restriction of an agent's disquotational truth predicate to the sentences the agent
currently understands wasn't quite right, and is in considerable tension with my remarks on our
commitment to extending the truth schema as we expand the language. Those latter remarks suggest that
once we come to regard an expression S as an acceptable declarative sentence, then even if we have no
understanding of it (or virtually none) still we ought to accept the corresponding instance of the truth
schema. Admittedly, the cognitive equivalence thesis implies that to the extent that we don't yet understand
S, we don't understand the attributions of truth to it; this may seem to make the extension of the truth
schema to it idle. But it is not completely idle, for we tie any future improved understanding of ‘true’ as
applied to S to the future understanding of S. One way to think of the matter is in terms of indeterminacy: a
sentence I don't understand at all is maximally indeterminate in content for me, and so is an attribution of
truth to it; but the indeterminacies are ‘tied together’ (see the discussion of ‘correlative indeterminacy’ in
Chapter 7; and Chapter 9, sects. 1 and 2) in such a way that the truth schema holds.
The main point of modifying my view in this way is to better accommodate talk of truth for untranslatable
utterances, utterances that are in no sense equivalent to anything in our current language. When I wrote the
paper I was tempted to bite the bullet and say that we simply can't apply the notion of truth to such
utterances; I wasn't happy with this, but could see no good alternative. Stewart Shapiro (unpublished)
presented a nice problem case for this position. In Shapiro's example, we have a guru who makes
pronouncements about set theory; a disciple who thinks that everything the guru says is true, but who
doesn't understand set theory; and a logician who distrusts the guru's set‐theoretic pronouncements, but
likes to draw their number‐theoretic consequences, which the disciple does understand. Shapiro argues that
if in addition the disciple trusts the logician's acumen about logic (though not about set theory), then the
disciple ought to be able to reason that since everything the guru says is true, and consequence preserves
truth, and the logician truly says that the number‐theoretic sentence ‘p’ is a consequence of what the guru
says, then ‘p’ must be true, so p. But though the disciple understands this conclusion, the reasoning is
blocked if we can't meaningfully apply ‘true’ to the guru's utterances.
p. 148 There are ways of handling this example without modifying the view of the Chapter, but they aren't entirely
10
natural, and I'm not sure that they would extend to all alterations of the example. But the modi ed view
suggested two paragraphs back handles the example very neatly: the disciple regards the guru's sentences
as in a potential expansion of the disciple's language, so that there is no di culty in his carrying out the
reasoning. It may seem mysterious that the reasoning can be carried out in this framework, since according
to this framework the guru's utterances and the notion of truth for these utterances have quite an
indeterminate content for the disciple. But the joint acceptance of the claims (i) that the guru's utterances
are true, (ii) that they logically imply the number‐theoretic claim ‘p’, (iii) that logical consequence
preserves truth, and (iv) the truth schema, give just enough determinacy to enable the reasoning to be
11
carried out. (The reasoning could be carried out even if the guru's language were disjoint from the
disciple's, rather than an expansion of it; though in that case some might prefer to appeal to expansions of
the disciple's language that translate the guru's utterances rather than that include them.)
Incidentally, the guru problem is a prima‐facie problem not only for the version of de ationism in the
paper, but for versions of de ationism that take truth to be attributed primarily to propositions. The latter,
if they are to have any claims to the title of de ationism, must explain what it is for a sentence to express
the proposition that p in terms of equivalence in content to our sentence ‘p’; but this explanation is
unavailable for the guru's sentences. For those views as for mine, the idea that the attributions have a quite
indeterminate content, constrained only by such beliefs as that they have speci c number‐theoretic
implications, provides the way out.
5. Untranslatable Utterances (2)

The incorporation model for dealing with foreign utterances has wider application than my remarks in

Section 8 of the Chapter suggest. Indeed, in the next to last paragraph of Section 8 I explicitly ruled out
using it for sentences that we don't understand. As the discussion of Shapiro's example should make clear, I
recant.
p. 149 Consider our reaction when on a certain occasion Z we hear another speaker, Mary, use a proper name such
as ‘George’, and we take her to be ‘talking about someone we have never heard of before’ (as we colloquially
put it). If we are interested in what she says, we may pick up the name ‘George’ from her and start
speculating with it ourself. (‘I wonder if George lives in California.’) When I say that we pick it up from her, I
don't just mean that we start using the sound ‘George’: we probably used that sound already, e.g. in
connection with various U.S. presidents. But we pick it up with a new use, not equivalent to these prior uses,
and a use that is in some way deferential to Mary's: we base our own beliefs on hers (more accurately, on
12
what we take her beliefs to be). If you like, you can put this by saying that we mentally introduce a new
term of form ‘Georgej’ where ‘j’ is an ‘inner subscript’ that we haven't previously used in connection with
‘George’, and we use ‘Georgej’ to translate those of Mary's assertions that we regard Mary as having
‘mentally subscripted’ by the same subscript that she mentally attaches on occasion Z.
I do not see any reason to think that understanding this incorporation of Mary's term requires an
antecedent grasp of the notion of reference. Of course, once we have a disquotational notion of reference, we
can use it in this connection: I can say ‘ “George” (as I'm using it now) refers to George’, using the term
‘George’ to incorporate Mary's use of it on the occasion in question. Or on the ‘hidden subscript’ picture:
‘ “Georgej” refers to Georgej (and to nothing else)’. Since we translate Mary's use of ‘George’ on occasion Z
with ‘Georgej’, we can also say that Mary's use of ‘George’ on occasion Z refers to Georgej (and to nothing
else). In other words, I can conclude:
Georgej is identical to the referent of Mary's term ‘George’ on occasion Z.
This allows me to use the phrase ‘what Mary was referring to by “George” on occasion Z’ instead of
‘Georgej’. Since the inner subscripts are silent (and other people don't know my inner subscripts even were I
to vocalize them!), doing so is sometimes useful: it is a very good way to make clear which way I'm using
‘George’ on this occasion. Of course, I could have introduced other means for doing the disambiguating: I
could have just said ‘I’m going to introduce the new term ‘GeorgeMary, Z’ (or ‘Shrdlu’) as an equivalent of
Mary's use of ‘George’ on occasion Z; but since we have a notion of disquotational reference already, there is
no need for such new terms.
The approach carries over straightforwardly to demonstratives. Suppose that on occasion Z Mary uses the
term ‘that’, and suppose that I have no idea how to pick out in English (either demonstratively or
descriptively) what I take her to be talking about; alternatively, suppose I have little or no idea what to take
her as talking about. Here it might be misleading to incorporate her use of ‘that’ into my language with my
p. 150 own use of ‘that’: normal conventions about the use of ‘that’ might suggest that my term stands for
something quite di erent. But I could always introduce some special term, say ‘Oscar’ or ‘THATMary, Z’, as a
device for incorporating her use of ‘that’ on this occasion. But if I did so, I could argue just as above that in a
disquotational sense of ‘refers’ (extended by translation), Oscar is identical to the referent of Mary's term
‘that’ on occasion Z; so given that we have a notion of disquotational reference already, there is no need for
these special terms.
The approach just suggested is quite similar to, and perhaps identical to, the proposal of Brandom 1984.
What I've said is that we should view the phrase ‘the referent of Mary's “that” on occasion Z’ as functioning
as a device for incorporating her use of ‘that’ on occasion Z into our language. What Brandom says is that it
functions as a device of cross‐speaker anaphora. I don't entirely like Brandom's way of putting things,
because taken by itself it seems to suggest that there is a non‐de ationary notion of reference applicable to
Mary's pronoun, and that our anaphorically dependent phrase gets its referent from it. However, Brandom
says things incompatible with that understanding of anaphora, and in support of some sort of de ationary
story, and I think the incorporation model is at least very close to what he intended.
The point that I've been making for reference can be made for truth as well. There are many reasons why a
direct incorporation of another person's utterance into my language could be inconvenient (e.g. if I can't
pronounce it) or misleading (e.g. if it contains indexicals that would shift their reference were I to use
them). In such cases, we can use ‘Her utterance is true’ as a means of incorporating her utterance. This
indeed is what Grover, Camp, and Belnap (1975) see as the main function of ‘true’. I prefer to view the main

function of ‘true’ as the disquotational function. But as with reference, I can argue from the disquotational
use of ‘true’ to the incorporation use. For if I were to introduce a new sentence, say ‘UTTGuru, Z’, to
incorporate the guru's unpronounceable utterance on occasion Z, then the disquotational properties of
truth give an equivalence between
(1) ‘UTTGuru, Z’ is true
and
(2) UTTGuru, Z;
but since ‘UTTGuru, Z’ is my translation of the guru's utterance, (1) is equivalent to
(1′) The guru's utterance is true,
and so (1′) must be equivalent to (2). That is, (1′) is legitimized as a way of incorporating the guru's
utterance, so we don't need the special sentence ‘UTTGuru, Z’ any more.
The discussion in this section (and in Brandom, and in Grover, Camp, and Belnap) shows another way,
besides as a device of in nite conjunction and disjunction, in which ‘true’ and ‘refers’ can increase
p. 151 expressive power: or at least, can increase the range of what can be expressed easily and in a way not
subject to confusions of ambiguity. Again, this expressive function could have been achieved by other means
(‘GeorgeMary, Z’ or ‘Shrdlu’ in the case of ‘refers’); but ‘refers’ and ‘true of’ are a convenient way to do it,
and I have argued that if we did use another device for doing it we would have no need for the other device
once we had the disquotational use of ‘refers’ and ‘true’.
6. ʻPure Disquotationalʼ and ʻQuasi‐Disquotationalʼ Truth

The central feature of ‘pure disquotational truth’ is that ‘ “p” is true’ is cognitively equivalent to ‘p’ (at
least, modulo the existence of the sentence). I say in the chapter that ‘true’ in the pure disquotational sense
is to be understood as something like ‘true‐as‐I‐understand‐it’; what I really meant was ‘true‐as‐I‐actually‐
understand‐it’. As I emphasized, this is just a heuristic, and I claim that the notion does not require that we
take ‘ways of understanding’ to be understood in terms of propositional content. I have a bit more to say
about this in the next chapter.
The paper recommends using this notion of pure disquotational truth where possible, but it of course
recognizes that we use the notion of truth in connection with other people's utterances and in connection
with our own utterances in counterfactual circumstances, and it suggests ways of accommodating this fact.
One way is to use what I call ‘quasi‐disquotational truth’; I down‐grade it because it assumes a stand on
Quinean issues about interpersonal synonymy that I prefer to remain neutral about. But the general idea
behind quasi‐disquotational truth could have been put in a way that is more neutral about interpersonal
synonymy:
(*) S is trueqd (at possible world v) ↔ S is to be translated by a sentence of mine (in the actual world) that
is purely disquotationally true (at v).
My method of ‘explaining away’ modal intuitions about the truth of our sentences at the end of Section 9
really amounts to suggesting that it is trueqd in the sense of (*) rather than pure disquotational truth that
we are operating with in many contexts.
I have come to think that it is unnecessary to use two distinct truth predicates, the purely disquotational and
the quasi‐disquotational. We can use a single truth predicate as long as we take the entities in its extension
not as orthographic types but as computational types: equivalence classes of (potential) tokens under the
relation of computational equivalence. I explain what I mean by computational equivalence in the next
chapter, but an important feature of it is that it is de ned only within an individual X in a given possible world
u: it doesn't make sense to ask if one of my tokens is computationally equivalent to a token of yours, or to a
token of a counterpart of me in another possible world. So we can rewrite (*) with the individual and the
p. 152 world made explicit, as follows:
(**) SX,u is trueqd (at possible world v) ↔ SX,u is to be translated by a sentence of mine (in the actual

world) that is purely disquotationally true (at v).
But then ‘pure disquotational truth’ can be viewed as just the special case where the individual is me and the
**
world is the actual world (by assuming that in that case the ‘translation’ is just the identity function); ( ) is
merely a way to generalize from the special case of me in the actual world to others and to my counterparts.
(Of course the heuristic ‘true‐as‐I‐actually‐understand‐it’ is appropriate only for the special case where
translation drops out. It is worth emphasizing, though, that this special case plays a central role in the
account: the other cases result from the special case by translation.) If sentences are typed orthographically,
the same sentence can be used in distinct ways in distinct worlds and we need to distinguish between a truth
predicate that ‘holds meaning constant’ and one which doesn't; but if sentences only exist within a single
world then no such distinction is required.
**
If ordinary or quasi‐disquotational truth is de ned either as in the text or by (*) or ( ), it has the curious
feature that utterances not translatable into our language are not true. It seems more natural to suppose it
indeterminate (or maybe just undetermined) whether they are true. The matter may be somewhat academic:
if the points made in the two preceding sections of this post‐script are correct, the notion of an
untranslatable utterance does not have entirely clear application. Still, I would now prefer to do things in the
more natural way. The way to do so is clear: instead of de ning ordinary or quasi‐disquotational truth in
terms of purely disquotational truth, we explain it by a schema:
(***) If SX,u is translatable as ‘p’ then □(SX,u is true i p). [And if SX,u is translatable as ‘p’ then □(SX,u
has the truth conditions that p).]
In the paper I attached some importance to the idea that we ought to de ne quasi‐disquotational truth, in
terms of the more‐or‐less logical notion of purely disquotational truth together with translation. I must have
thought that the motivation for demanding a substantive theory of truth and truth conditions and
reference, like that advocated in Chapters 1 and 2, could only be undercut if these notions are explicitly
de ned in terms of more‐or‐less logical notions plus translation. But this seems a mistake: the argument for
a substantive theory of truth conditions and reference depends on taking truth conditions and reference as
having a certain kind of ‘causal explanatory’ role, as noted in the postscript to Chapter 1; and introducing a
***
notion of truth conditions by means of the schema ( ) does nothing to make the notion ‘causal
***
explanatory’. Of course, using ( ) to introduce the notion of truth conditions doesn't guarantee against
putting the notion to the relevant sort of ‘causal explanatory’ use, but as long as one doesn't do this— and
also doesn't make unwarranted determinacy claims for these notions (see footnote to postscript to Chapter
1)— then one can maintain a de ationist position.
p. 153 7. Bigger Issues

There are two big areas in which much more needed to be said than I said in this Chapter. First, there is little
discussion of the aspects of meaning that go beyond truth, reference, and related notions. Don't we need a
de ationary account of those aspects of meaning too? The answer is that we do need a de ationary account
of meaning generally, but that there is no special di culty for getting one once we have a de ationary
account of truth and reference; I hinted as much at the beginning of the chapter, and say more about it in
the next chapter.
The other area in which a lot more needed to be said was the explanatory role of the assignment of truth
conditions to mental states, both in the explanation of behavior and in the explanation of the extent to
which behavior is successful in achieving various results. In a paper written some years earlier (Field 1986),
I had irted with de ationism but ended up tentatively arguing against it, on the ground that such
explanations required a role for the assignment of truth conditions to mental states that the de ationist
could not legitimize. The argument was so abstract and convoluted it couldn't possibly have convinced
anyone; I was skeptical myself, but couldn't pinpoint what was wrong with it. I now think it made a number
of mistakes that collectively deprived the argument of all force. Or as Jimmy Carter said of his attempt to
rescue the American hostages in Iran (an attempt that had to be aborted with eight deaths before the rescue
helicopters even reached Iran): it was ‘an incomplete success’. It isn't worth going through the argument in
detail here, but I'll sketch the sort of considerations it involved and what I now think a de ationist should
say about them. One key point (which was recognized in the 1986 paper, but not made su ciently salient)
will be that there is nothing in de ationism that prevents the use of ‘true’ in explanations as long as its only

role there is as a device of generalization.
It is perfectly obvious that in explaining how a pilot manages to land a plane safely with some regularity,
one will appeal to the fact that she has a good many true beliefs: beliefs about her airspeed at any moment,
about whether she is above or below the glideslope, about her altitude with respect to the ground, about
which runway is in use, and so forth. (None of these beliefs need be based very directly on observation; she
might be ying in bad weather with some of her instruments not working, so that she must rely on
complicated cues.) The de ationist obviously needs to grant this explanatory role for the truth of her
beliefs, and will have to say that it is somehow licensed by the generalizing role of ‘true’.
Can this de ationist strategy be maintained? A detailed explanation of how the pilot functions would
involve the existence of some class C of internal representations, intuitively representing airspeed, such
that when she believes a representation in C that represents too high an airspeed she slows the plane and
p. 154 when she believes one that represents too low a speed she speeds it up; and the representations in C that
she believes tend to be true. The last part can of course be rephrased as a generalization: she tends to believe
a representation in C that represents too low a speed when the plane is in fact too slow, etc. But is this
restatement of the claim that she has true beliefs about airspeed ‘innocent’ from the de ationist viewpoint?
What may well seem a problem is that it is put in terms of what the pilot's internal representations
‘represent’. The basic idea behind the tortuous argument of the 1986 paper was that the de ationist is
forced to understand the sense in which the representations ‘represent’ airspeed in terms of their
translation into the explainer's language, but that this is inappropriate since this should be an objective
13
explanation in which the explainer plays no causal role.
An obvious strategy for responding to this argument is to say that talk of representation is serving a merely
heuristic role in the explanation of the pilot's ability; put without the heuristic, the explanation involves the
existence of some class C of internal representations in the pilot and two subclasses C1 and C2 of C such that
(i) when she believes a representation in C1 she slows the plane and when she believes one in C2 she speeds it
up, (ii) there is a 1‐1 function f from C to a certain set of real numbers such that (a) C1 is that subclass of C
that is mapped into numbers above a certain threshold and C2 is that subclass of C that is mapped into
numbers below a certain (slightly lower) threshold, and (b) she tends to believe a representation r in C when
the airspeed in knots is approximately f(r). This makes clear that we have a perfectly objective explanation,
expressible without translating the pilot's representations or talking of their truth conditions or of what they
represent. Of course part (ii)(b) of the explanation uses an indication relation, but no de ationist could
object to that. (See the postscript to Chapter 2.) The function mapping internal representations into
airspeeds needn't even give the intuitive truth conditions of those representations in all cases: one could tell
a story in which the pilot's beliefs about what she was doing were so weird that it would be natural to assign
quite di erent truth conditions to her representations. (Perhaps she believes she isn't in an airplane at all,
but is using the controls to direct US ground forces on a foreign mission.) The representations would be
reliably correlated with airspeed but would represent something quite di erent that they were not reliably
correlated with.
It is also important to realize that in normal cases (as opposed to cases where the pilot has very weird beliefs
p. 155 about what she is doing) we can explain the pilot's competence in less detail, by simply saying that she
tends to believe truths about the airspeed. (We would have to rest content with this if we had no idea that the
pilot needed to maintain airspeed within a certain range to safely land, but knew only that she needed to
base her actions somehow on her airspeed.) The objective core of such an explanation is clear: it is that a
functional correspondence between internal representations and airspeeds like that mentioned above is
playing some sort of role that we may not be in a position to specify. But when we are not in a position to
specify that role with enough precision, it is inevitable that we use the notion of truth in one way or another.
One way to do so would be to just say: some explanation roughly like the one in the previous paragraph is
true; here it is transparent that truth is playing simply a role in generalizing, and so clearly this way of
proceeding is available to the de ationist. But this way of proceeding requires that we have a sample
objective explanation, however crude, to use as a model, and it is not always convenient to provide one. But
the alternative way of proceeding mentioned at the start of this paragraph does not require this: if we just
say ‘She tends to believe truths about the airspeed, and this somehow enters into her landing successfully’,
we can be vague on the details without even sketching a sample precise model.
14
Is this latter way of proceeding available to the de ationist? When we give this sort of explanation, we say
in e ect (i) that she has certain internal representations that are similar enough in their role to our
representations of form ‘The airspeed is n’ to count as ‘saying the same thing’, (ii) that they tend to be

disquotationally true under the translation scheme just alluded to, and (iii) that the fact that their
disquotational truth conditions under this mapping tend to be satis ed plays an important role in
explaining the safe landing. This is a ‘projectivist’ or ‘second class’ explanation, in that we make use of a
similarity between the agent and ourselves to avoid the need to ll in explanatorily crucial details; but it is a
projectivist explanation of a broader sort than those considered in Section 4 of the postscript to Chapter 2.
The projectivist explanations discussed there are ones that in e ect assert the existence of fuller
explanations in the agent's computational psychology, explanations which they leave only vaguely speci ed.
Here, on the other hand, the projectivist explanations in e ect assert the existence of fuller explanations in
the agent's extended psychology which they leave only vaguely speci ed; where the extended psychology is
p. 156 the computational psychology together with the assumptions about correlations between the agent's internal
states and the external world. But the central point is the same: assignment of truth‐conditional content is
15
something we need only when we don't know how to ll in the details of the explanation.
The same basic point holds in cases where the agent is less reliable in his beliefs about the external world.
Suppose I explain Kennedy's having avoided nuclear war over Cuba in terms of a lucky guess as to what
Khrushchev would do. Again, the objective core of the explanation is that Kennedy's action tends not to lead
to war if Khrushchev acts as he did but to lead to war otherwise, and that the action was crucially based on
his having believed a certain representation; if we knew a lot of detail about Kennedy and his decision‐
making process, we could say a great deal about this representation and the role in his psychology, but
typically we don't know enough to do this. So here we specify the representation by its truth conditions; or
what amounts to the same thing, by a translation into our own idiolect. That is, our explanation is that
Kennedy believed (or anyway, assumed as a basis for action) some representation which had for him
roughly the role that ‘Khrushchev will blink’ has for us, and his believing or assuming this was a salient
cause of his actions, and that those actions didn't lead to war only because Khrushchev blinked. Again, it is a
‘second class’ explanation, in that a comparison to our psychology is used in place of specifying the relevant
details of the agent's psychology. As such, it is nothing that causes any problem for a de ationist.
Notes
1 The schematic variable approach can also be used if what we take as basic isn't the Tarski schema, but the equivalence
between A[True(ʻpʼ)] and A[p] where the context A[. . . ] isn't quotational or intentional or anything like that. Strictly
speaking, it is that rather than the Tarski schema that I recommend taking as basic in sect. 1 of the chapter.
2 Shapiro (1998) and Ketland (1999) argue that the schematic variable approach undermines deflationism, at least if one
assumes that logic is first order. For a reply, see Field (1999).
3 However, a proponent of Adams' (1975) thesis about conditionals might argue that what really ought to be involved in a
strong deflationism has nothing to do with the acceptance of sentences involving a biconditional connective. Rather, what
ought to be involved is conditional degrees of belief: Cr(p | ʻpʼ is true) and Cr(ʻpʼ is true | p) should both be 1. I don't know if
the details of this position could be satisfactorily worked out, but if so it would be another way of defending a deflationism
somewhat stronger than one that relies on compositional axioms. It would also remove the parenthetical di iculty that
follows in the text.
4 Typically such a conditional will not have the monotonicity property that the Kleene connectives have, in which case
Kripke's fixed‐point constructions will obviously be inapplicable.
5 Consider a sentence P that we can informally write as ʻThere are natural numbers n for which my n‐fold jump is not trueʼ;
where the jump of a sentence A is ¬(A → ¬ A) (which is a strengthening of A in this logic), and where the n‐fold jump is the
result of iterating the jump n times. (In e ect P says ʻI am not super‐trueʼ, where to be super‐true is to have all of one's n‐
fold jumps true, which on any reasonable way of relating truth to the semantic values is to have semantic value 1.) Even if
we enlarge the value range from [0,1] in the reals to [0,1] in a non‐Archimedean field and generalize the Lukasiewicz
semantics accordingly, it is clear that the only value that can be assigned to P consistently with the truth schema in the
semantics is within an infinitesimal of 1. But then for any standard natural number n, the n‐fold jump of P also has values
within an infinitesimal of 1; so the truth schema demands that for standard n, ʻthe n‐fold jump of P isn't trueʼ has a value
within an infinitesimal of 0. Clearly the only consistent resolution involves taking the ʻthere are natural numbersʼ in P to
have nonstandard numbers in its range; in other words, the only consistent resolution involves a protosyntax with
sentences (in particular, jumps of P) that are not genuinely finite in length.
6 Restricting to transparent contexts, of course.
7 There is something counterintuitive about the absence of a stronger conditional, but the counterintuitiveness can be
somewhat ameliorated by using conditional probability judgements as a surrogate for conditionals, as in fn. 3.
Alternatively, one could add stronger conditionals, as long as they fail to obey either modus ponens or the deduction
theorem (or contraction): there are natural ways to do this by explaining the conditional modally, or in terms of
derivability in an appropriate formal system.
8 In Priest's logic one can also assert of any deviant sentence that it is ʻsolely trueʼ (true and not false), and that it is ʻsolely

falseʼ (false and not true).
9 Priest o en expresses his view as the claim that contradictions can be true. It might be better to say that sentences of form
ʻp and not‐pʼ aren't, or aren't always, genuinely contradictory. In any case, the claim that some such sentences are true is
a bit misleading as a statement of the view, since it tends to make one overlook the fact that on his theory these true
ʻcontradictionsʼ are also not true!
10 For instance, in the example as it stands, where the guru and the disciple share an underlying logic, the disciple has a
notion of consequence that applies to the guru's language; one might argue that the disciple's faith in the guru is
inadequately represented by the claim that everything the guru says is true, it should be represented by the claim that all
consequences of what the guru says (indeed, all consequences of those together with other truths) are true. In that case,
we would get the desired conclusion without the need to reason as in the previous paragraph.
11 It isn't essential to suppose that the disciple accepts the application of the truth schema to the guru's sentence prior to his
knowing that an extraordinarily reliable guru uttered it and prior to knowing that it has the number‐theoretic
consequence. These pieces of information do give the disciple some very minimal understanding of the guru's sentence,
so it isn't really necessary to hold that we can apply ʻtrueʼ to sentences of which we have no understanding at all.
12 This is so even if we know Mary to be unreliable. For instance, if we know her to have exaggerated beliefs, we might merely
accept ʻGeorge is over 6′4″ ʼ when Mary accepts ʻGeorge is over 6′7″ ʼ. Or if Mary gushes over George, we might accept ʻMary
is infatuated with Georgeʼ instead of ʻGeorge is a wonderful guyʼ.
13 As noted in Leeds (1995: 28–9), arguing in such a manner seems prima facie to be misguided: of course it is the correlation
between the agent's states and external conditions that is of primary explanatory importance, but why should the fact
that we use a correlation between an agent's states and our sentences as a means of setting up the correlation be thought
to undermine this? Why should we think that there must be some means of specifying the relevant correlation that
doesn't go via translation into our language but is given by a substantive theory of truth conditions? I would rather not
press this line, however, because doing so leads quickly to complicated issues. (Indeed, the most confusing parts of the
1986 paper concern precisely this.) Instead of arguing that the basic line of argument against the deflationist is misguided
in very conception, I will argue merely that it cannot be carried out in detail. I believe that this way of proceeding has the
additional advantage of making clearer the role that talk of representation plays in the explanation.
14 In probably the most crucial passage in my 1986 paper (p. 97 middle to 99 top), I assumed not, without any clear
argument. (In the immediately preceding pages I had discussed avoiding mention of truth conditions in explanations,
along the lines mentioned two paragraphs above. I then raised the question about what to do when we didn't know the
full explanatory details. The discussion is obscure: it recognizes that it is legitimate for a deflationist to use a
disquotational truth predicate as a way of giving an explanation sketch in absence of full knowledge of the details (and
that even an inflationist would need to resort to this), but concludes for reasons that it doesn't make at all clear that we
would need something more ʻinflationistʼ in addition.) Stephen Leeds rightly focuses much of his critique of my paper on
this crucial passage (Leeds 1995: 17–20), and is understandably ba led as to what my argument could have been. For
what it's worth, my own diagnosis is given in the next footnote.
15 I think the key problem in the 1986 paper was an ambiguity about ʻprojectivist explanationʼ. In some passages I used it in
the more inclusive sense, as when I argued that the deflationist could appeal to the truth conditions of another agent's
states only in projectivist explanations. But in other passages I used it in the narrower sense, as when I argued that the
role to which we put the assignment of truth conditions in explanations of ʻsuccess phenomenaʼ like landing the plane
with regularity can't be projectivist. The confusing structure of the paper disguised the ambiguity.
1 Because of the paradoxes, exceptions must be made for certain utterances u that contain ʻtrueʼ; I won't be concerned here
with just how the exceptions are to be carved out.
2 There is more than one acceptable way to understand ʻcognitively equivalentʼ here. My own preferred reading, for what it's
worth, is that to call two sentences that a person understands ʻcognitively equivalentʼ for that person is to say that the
person's inferential procedures license a fairly direct inference from any sentence containing an occurrence of one to the
corresponding sentence with an occurrence of the other substituted for it; with the stipulation, of course, that the
occurrence to be substituted for is not within the context of quotation marks or an intentional attitude construction.
(Cognitive equivalence relative to some other assumption is the same, except that that assumption is allowed to be used in
the inferences.) I would also take the claim of cognitive equivalence to imply that the inferences are more or less
indefeasible. (More specifically, that they are empirically indefeasible, and close to indefeasible on conceptual grounds as
well, and that the person is not in possession of defeaters for them. These stipulations are motivated by the assumption
that we should describe someone who doesn't know the semantic paradoxes as a person for whom ʻ “p” is trueʼ is
cognitively equivalent to ʻpʼ across the board; as the person comes to terms with the paradoxes he revises his standards of
cognitive equivalence on conceptual grounds.)
3 Certain uses of truth conditional talk in explanations seem to me the most likely target for excision.
4 More radical, I think, than the one advanced in Horwich 1990. While I like much that Horwich says I have substantial
disagreements: see Field 1992b.
5 Of course, conceptual or computational role can be described at di erent levels of abstraction, so there is more than one
notion of conceptual role that meets this description. I think the notions of meaning and content are too indeterminate for
there to be a right answer about which notion of conceptual role to include; one could even include more than one.
6 If the probability of S given E is higher than the probability of S, then (especially if this fact is rather ʻrobustʼ, that is, if
except for very special sentences F, P(S|E&F) remains higher than P(S|F)) it is natural to include this fact in the conceptual
role of S, even if E is in no sense ʻobservationalʼ and could never be established with enough certainty or whatever to
count as evidence for anything. It was central to verificationism to exclude such facts from verification conditions when E
was not observational.

7 Part of the idea behind this assumption is that when you read or hear a given unambiguous sentence, there is a type of
thought state that you typically undergo in processing it, where this type is identifiable in purely computational terms;
and that this type of thought state also typically occurs when you utter such a sentence. This coupled with some other
plausible assumptions about the computational processes of the language‐user make it possible to define in
computational terms a correspondence between many of the person's states of believing and desiring and their
unambiguous sentences. A natural computational story about the processing of ambiguous sentences allows us to extend
this to such sentences too. I will not attempt to give the details of any of this here.
8 The deflationist can also formulate the distinction for other peoples' belief states, by relying on translation, though to the
extent that that is indeterminate the distinction there can obviously be given on objective significance.
9 I have heard the objection that a deflationist is free to give truth conditions an explanatory role as long as it is only
ʻdeflationary truth conditionsʼ and not ʻheavy duty truth conditionsʼ that are given that role. This seems to me a confusion.
I think it is quite misleading to speak of two kinds of truth conditions, the heavy duty ones and the disquotational ones:
this suggests that the advocate of ʻheavy dutyʼ truth conditions thinks that we should ascribe to ʻSnow is whiteʼ some
truth conditions other than that snow is white, and that of course is absurd. It would be better to say that there are two
kinds of relation between truth conditions on the one hand and utterances and mental states on the other, the
disquotational relation and the heavy duty relation. But the only ways I can see to make sense of the distinction between
these relations directly or indirectly preclude giving the disquotational relation certain kinds of explanatory role. (In my
view, the preclusion is indirect, and stems from the deflationist's account of how truth conditions attach to sentences and
mental states.)
10 This last way of putting things gives a way to make content social without relying on an independent notion of meaning. It
thus leaves room for explaining meaning in terms of content if so desired.
11 I mention ʻnotʼ because the deductive inference rules I listed include the rule that we can infer ʻnot (A or B)ʼ from ʻnot Aʼ
and ʻnot Bʼ together. It is possible to replace this by a rule involving ʻif . . . thenʼ instead of ʻnotʼ; or (as in natural deduction
systems and sequent calculi) by a rule involving a notion of implication.
12 It may not avoid the threat of indeterminacy in the end: I discuss this in Ch. 8. Even so, the account to follow o ers an
attractive alternative to the inflationist's approach to the determination of the way that our logical symbols contribute to
truth conditions; and I will generalize it in Sect. 6.
13 The argument from (T) to (TF) generalizes as an argument from (TG) to
ΠpΠq[ʻp or qʼ is true if and only if ʻpʼ is true or ʻqʼ is true].
By use of the additional axiom
∀x[x is a sentence of our language ⊃Σp(x = ʻpʼ)],
we get (TFG).
14 Or at the very least, description theories that use only non‐metalinguistic descriptions.
15 This incidentally is why the Benacerraf problem about mathematical knowledge (Benacerraf 1973) isn't dissolved by a
disquotational theory of truth. [See the reformulation of the problem in sec. 5 of ch. 11.]
16 Methodological deflationism doesn't even preclude that we might in the end come to accept an unreduced inflationist
relation S has the truth conditions that p: we might conceivably see the need for introducing non‐physical relations as
explanatory. I think it does put the burden of proof against such a position, but I think that doing so is appropriate.
17 This needs two small qualifications. The first is that the generalizations can be formulated otherwise if the language
contains certain devices of infinite conjunction such as substitutional quantifiers. However, this qualification is not a
terribly severe one, since the presence of such substitutional quantifiers would allow you to define ʻtrueʼ: S is true i Πp(S
= ʻpʼ ⊃ p). (Again, I assume a theory of substitutional quantification that avoids the paradoxes.)
Note that the use of schematic letters as an alternative to substitutional quantification, mentioned in Sect. 3, does not
allow us to formulate infinite disjunctions without ʻtrueʼ, and therefore does not allow us to explicitly define ʻtrueʼ.
The second qualification is that the view I've given (in either the substitutional quantifier version or the free schematic
variable version) allows statements that are really a bit stronger than infinite conjunctions, in the same way that first order
quantifications are stronger than the totality of their instances even when every object has a name: see the discussion in
Sect. 3 of how to get the generalization (TFG).
18 For present purposes I am regarding sentence types as ʻnecessary existentsʼ, so that the fact that the disjuncts don't all
entail the existence of sentence types doesn't debar a sentence that does entail this from counting as their ʻinfinite
disjunctionʼ.
19 Both Hilary Putnam (1983: xiv–xv, 279–80) and Crispin Wright (1992: 12–24) object to deflationism on this ground.
However, their discussions are directed at a version of deflationism which says that truth is not a property (Putnam) or not
a ʻsubstantial propertyʼ (Wright), and I'm not clear enough as to what that is supposed to mean to know whether the
authors would have intended to be arguing against deflationism as I have defined it. (In a long footnote, Wright does say
that he thinks his objection applies to the version of deflationism in Horwich 1990, despite the fact that Horwich disavows
the ʻno propertyʼ claim.)
20 Opponents of deflationism sometimes try to pin on it the claim that when we come to understand new sentences, or when
new words and hence new sentences are added to our language, our concept of truth changes. But a deflationist can
agree that on the most natural ways to individuate concepts over time, adding new sentences to the language (or to our
domain of understanding) leaves the concept of truth unchanged: a er all, once we have come to understand the new

sentences, the truth schema dictates how the word ʻtrueʼ is to be applied to them. This doesn't conflict with what is said in
the text: the point there was that we don't now understand attributions of disquotational truth to sentences containing
future words. (Also, there is no reasonable sense in which such attributions now have disquotational truth conditions,
since what truth conditions they may come to have will depend on how the future words will be used.)
21 We can introduce a purely disquotational notion of what it is to express a proposition, with the property that claims of the
form ʻ “p” expresses the proposition that pʼ are necessary truths. We can also introduce certain impurely disquotational
notions of what it is to express a proposition; these are analogous to the impure disquotational views of truth that we will
consider later. Deflationists about meaning‐that and believing‐that think that such disquotational notions of expressing
are the only legitimate ones; inflationists disagree. This distinction between inflationist and deflationist notions of
expressing a proposition obviously needs to be clarified, if one is going to talk in terms of propositions; I think that some
of the rest of the paper suggests a way to clarify it, but I will obviate the need to discuss this by avoiding talk of
propositions.
22 Or a more basic notion like satisfaction from which truth is defined.
24 Let P be a one‐place predicate and N a name. By the assumptions indicated, ΣF(P = ʻFʼ) and Σa(N = ʻaʼ). By laws of
∧
concatenation and quotation marks, it follows that ΣFΣa(P N = ʻFaʼ).
By syntax, ΠFΠa[ʻFaʼ is a sentence], so by the truth schema, ΠFΠa[ʻFaʼ is true i Fa]. By first order logic, we can rewrite this
as ΠFΠa[ʻFaʼ is true i ∃ x(Fx and x = a)]. But then the appropriate schemas for truth‐of and reference will allow us to
rewrite this as ΠFΠa[ʻFaʼ is true i ∃ x(ʻFʼ is true of x and ʻaʼ refers to x)]. Combining with the previous paragraph, we get
∧
that P N is true i ∃ x(P is true of x and N refers to x).
The step labelled ʻby first order logicʼ implicitly assumes that N denotes, that is, that Σa[N = ʻaʼ and ∃ x(x = a)]. If this
supposition is abandoned, some form of free logic must be used; the details of the free logic a ect the details of the
compositional principle that is derived.
25 At least, this is so for what I've called a ʻpure deflationistʼ. The idea of ʻimpure deflationismʼ will be considered in Sect. 9.
26 I made a rather confusing attempt to state the problem in Field 1986, Sections IV and V . I now think there is a way around
the problem there raised. (Stephen Leeds helped set me straight on this: see Leeds 1995, a dra of which I received just as
this paper was being completed.) [For further discussion, see sec. 7 of the postscript.]
27 I'm inclined to think that the problem isn't just that interpersonal synonymy (ʻis a good translation ofʼ) is a highly vague
notion, but that it isn't a fully factual notion at all; rather, it is an evaluative notion. This is compatible with many claims of
interpersonal synonymy being factual relative to the goals of the translator; but not all interpersonal synonymy claims
need be factual even relative to the goals. (For more on the idea of evaluative claims as ʻnot fully factualʼ, see Chs. 8 and
13.)
28 See e.g. Crossley and Humberstone 1977. Quantification over meanings seems necessary in this definition: certainly you
can't replace the right hand side by ʻΣp[@(S is synonymous with “p”)) and p]', since this makes only the actual meaning of
S relevant to whether S would be true in a non‐actual context, contrary to intentions. And you can't simply take meanings
to be equivalence classes of expressions under the (actual) synonymy relation: for then the proposed definition would
collapse into the inadequate one just mentioned. In these remarks I'm assuming that you don't quantify over possible
worlds: if you do, then you can use the relation expression e as used in world w is synonymous with e' as used in w', and
take meanings to be equivalence classes of pairs of expressions and possible worlds under this equivalence relation.
29 Incidentally, I remind the reader that I am counting it as an example of ambiguity if someone understands the same
sentence as meaning one thing in German and something else in English: this was required by my adopting the ʻthird
optionʼ for dealing with sentences in other languages, discussed in Sect. 8.
2
30 Since it is disquotationally true i der Schnee ist weiss, and hence, by the equivalence hypothesis, i E = mc .
31 Typically these values will be the ones I take the producer of the utterance to have intended, but not always: e.g., ʻnowʼ on
the sign intended to be read by various readers at di erent times. And since we're talking disquotational truth for a hearer,
the actual intentions of the producer don't matter, what matters is the reading the hearer gives.
32 We may well also have an innate predisposition to believe other people, barring evidence to the contrary; this does not
a ect my point.
33 I've had helpful conversations with many people about these issues in recent years. Among those whose comments have
influenced my presentation are Marian David, Michael Devitt, Paul Horwich, Barry Loewer, and Stephen Schi er. I have
also incorporated some useful suggestions by the editors.

Field - Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Field - Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Field - Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Truth and the Absence of Fact

4 De ationist Views of Meaning and Content 

https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242895.003.0004 Pages 104–156

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

1. Two Views of Meaning and Content

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

3. The Semantics of Logical Operators

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

(T) ‘p’ is true if and only if p

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

‘q or r’ is true if and only if q or r

‘q’ is true if and only if q

‘r’ is true if and only if r.

(TF) ‘q or r’ is true if and only if ‘q’ is true or ‘r’ is true.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

and then ‘semantically ascend’.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

(T) ‘p’ is true if and only if p.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

(NT) □[‘p’ is true if and only if p].

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

‘There are gravitational waves’ is true i there are gravitational waves,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

2. That de ationism gives the wrong modal properties to ‘true’.

4. That it can't make sense of how we learn from others.

8. Applying ʻTrueʼ To Sentences in Other Languages

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

‘Der Schnee ist weiss’ is true i der Schnee ist weiss,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Let us return now to counterfactuals like

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

(TF) ‘q or r’ is true if and only if ‘q’ is true or ‘r’ is true

The required derivation uses schematic syntax to go from (TF) to

p. 142 which by rule (ii) of Section 3 yields

(TFG) is simply a rewrite of this using the corner‐quote notation.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

3. The Generalizing Role of ʻRefersʼ

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

4. Untranslatable Utterances (1)

5. Untranslatable Utterances (2)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

Georgej is identical to the referent of Mary's term ‘George’ on occasion Z.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023

(1) ‘UTTGuru, Z’ is true

but since ‘UTTGuru, Z’ is my translation of the guru's utterance, (1) is equivalent to

(1′) The guru's utterance is true,

6. ʻPure Disquotationalʼ and ʻQuasi‐Disquotationalʼ Truth

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2299/chapter/142427466 by University of Southampton user on 03 January 2023