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Linguist and Philos (2011) 34:397410 DOI 10.1007/s10988-012-9105-1
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Mainstream semantics deationary truth
Alexis Burgess
Published online: 21 February 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract Recent philosophy of language has been profoundly impacted by the idea that mainstream, model-theoretic semantics is somehow incompatible with deationary accounts of truth and reference. The present article systematizes the case for incompatibilism, debunks circularity and modal confusion arguments familiar in the literature, and reconstructs the popular thought that truth-conditional semantics somehow presupposes a correspondence theory of truth as an inference to the best explanation. The case for compatibilism is closed by showing that this IBE argument fails to rule out two kinds of deationism: the position Field famously accused Tarski of having; and a less familiar version of the view that denes reference in terms of a deated notion of truth. Finally, the distinction between unifying and constitutive explanation is used to forestall the response that correspondence theory is literally part of mainstream semantics.
Keywords Model-theoretic semantics Truth conditions Deationism Truth
Reference
The bulk of contemporary semantics aims to recover the intuitive truth-conditions of indicative sentences (and implication relations between them) by appealing to hypotheses about the meanings or semantic values of their signicant parts; in accordance with some version of the vague but venerable principle of compositionality. Mainstream semantics is widely thought to be at odds with deationisma family of theories about the meaning or expressive role of the locution is true, often attended by effacing metaphysical claims about the nature of truth itself. In print and in person, practitioners of truth-conditional or model-theoretic
A. Burgess (&)
Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Building 90, Stanford, CA, USAe-mail: [email protected]
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semantics routinely accuse deationists of willful blindness to the advancements their formal frameworks have facilitated, and deationists routinely complain that the philosophical commitments implicit in those frameworks have been inadequately scrutinized by technocrats in linguistics.1
This is a false dilemma. Deationism about truth is perfectly compatible with mainstream semantics; or so I will argue.2 Following a brief introduction to the main positions and players on this stage (Sect. 1), my case for compatibilism begins with responses to three opposing arguments: from collapse, modal confusion, and circularity (Sect. 2). A fourth, more formidable argument is then...