Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Deflationism'
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Thomas, Andrew Stephen. "Truthmaking and Deflationism." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.500896.
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Walton, Sean Thomas. "Deflationism : a critical study." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.438602.
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Rami, Adolf. "Die Grenzen des Wahrheitsdeflationismus." Doctoral thesis, Saechsische Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Dresden, 2006. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:swb:14-1153322363333-86419.
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Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit werden zwei allgemeine Ziele verfolgt: ein negatives und ein positives. Das negative Ziel besteht darin, den Nachweis zu liefern, daß auf der Grundlage einer deflationistischen Konzeption der Wahrheit keine angemessene philosophische Analyse der Wahrheit gegeben werden kann. Meine kritische Aufmerksamkeit galt dabei vor allem den Varianten dieser Art von Wahrheitskonzeption, die gegenwärtig auch tatsächlich (noch) vertreten werden. Das positive Ziel besteht darin, eine plausible und alternative Konzeption der Wahrheit zu entwickeln, die manche richtigen Beobachtungen deflationistischer Konzeptionen der Wahrheit in sich aufnimmt, aber vor allem die Fehler und Schwächen dieser Konzeptionen vermeidet und ausräumt.
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Collins, John Patrick. "The meaning of truth : Tarski, deflationism, and interpretation." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.298277.
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The aim of my thesis is to develop a third way to truth, between traditional substantive theories, and deflationist accounts which seek to show that truth has no content. I begin with Tarski's definition of truth, and show that the definition enables the elimination of 'is true' in terms of the concepts expressible in the object-language (+logic/set theory). The definition, therefore, appears to provide a basis for deflationism. I consider a variety of deflationisms. Their common denominator is the thought that the content of truth is exhausted by the content of the sentences to which truth is applied: truth has no independent content; it has a mere grammatical convenience. While I admit the deflationist hue of Tarski's definition, I show that the definition contains resources to account for ". substantive features of our semantic competence. Extrapolating from these resources, I claim that a suitably constrained truth theory is an interpretive theory (ITT). The significance of the notion of an ITT is that it provides an interpretive conception of truth. I show that such a conception is neither reductionist nor deflationary. Further, I argue that an adequate ITT, although extensional, does capture the distinctions taken to be constitutive of our concept of meaning. From the perspective of an ITT, I argue that none of the deflationist theories can account for central features of truth: principally, the semantic paradoxes and heterophonic ascriptions. I conclude that deflationism is, at best, an etiolated account of truth.
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David, Marian Alexander. "Substantivism and deflationism in the theory of truth." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185084.
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The main concern of this work is to understand and evaluate the debate between substantivism and deflationism in the theory of truth. According to substantive theories, truth consists in, and has to be explained in terms of, a special relation between the truth bearing item and reality. According to deflationism, such theories offer a needlessly inflated account of truth. Chapter one sketches a paradigmatic substantive theory of truth that explains the notion of truth by invoking the notions of representation and states of affairs. It says that for something to be true is for it to represent a state of affairs that obtains. Chapter two introduces physicalism, i.e., the thesis that everything there is can be explained in terms amenable to physics. For physicalism to be correct one of the following has to be the case: either the notion of representation (and the notion of a state of affairs) can be explained in physicalistic terms, or there simply are no representations (and no states of affairs). So if the relevant explanations are not to be had, the physicalist has to become an eliminativist with respect to representations (and states of affairs). Such an eliminative physicalism provides the major motivation for a deflationist attitude towards truth. It engenders the need to search for a deflationist ersatz-account of truth; an account that does not invoke substantive notions like representation. Chapter three develops the best, most prominent, and so far only serious candidate for a deflationist account: the thesis that truth is disquotation. Chapter four raises four grave problems for disquotationalism and discusses the costs of solving these problems. Chapter five concludes that the costs are too high. Disquotationalism is not an acceptable ersatz-theory of truth. As long as there is no other serious candidate for a deflationist account of truth that does not succumb to the same problems as disquotationalism, the substantive theory of truth has to be accepted. That means, if physicalism is to succeed it has to be able to provide explanations of substantive notions like representation. If no such explanations are to be had, it is more plausible to relinquish physicalism than to embrace deflationism with respect to truth.
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Båve, Arvid. "Deflationism : A Use-Theoretic Analysis of the Truth-Predicate." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Filosofiska institutionen, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-999.
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I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to be unambiguous. Ch. 2 is a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier.
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Nicolai, Carlo. "Truth, deflationism and the ontology of expressions : an axiomatic study." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a87eb43c-9657-4f13-b962-b18e04cff2e6.
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Philosophical enquiry on the notion of truth has traditionally involved the identification of a class of objects to which truth is ascribed. At the same time, formal investigations are often required when the notion of truth is at issue: semantic paradoxes force in fact philosophers to shape their arguments in a precise way. Objects of truth, in formal context, are always reduced to other, more manageable objects that mimic their structural properties such as numbers or sets. This form of reduction renders the distinction between linguistic or syntactic objects, to which truth is usually applied, and their mathematical counterparts opaque, at least from the point of view of the theory of truth. In informal metatheoretic discussion, in fact, they are clearly different entities. In this thesis we focus on an alternative way of constructing axiomatic theories of truth in which syntactic objects and mathematical objects belong to different universes. A brief introduction tries to situate the proposed theories in the context of different investigations on axiomatic truth. Chapter 2 is devoted to the discussion of historical and more theoretical motivations behind the proposed alternative. Chapter 3 will present the syntactic koinè spoken by our theories. Morphological categories of the object language and logical concepts concerning the object theory will be formalised in a recent axiomatisation of hereditarily finite sets. In Chapter 4 we finally introduce theories of truth with a built-in syntactic theory and examine some of their consequences. We briefly focus on disquotational truth, then consider compositional axioms for truth. Chapter 5 investigates a possible application of the setting just introduced: a realisation of the all-present interaction, in metamathematical practice, between informal metatheoretic claims and their (suitably chosen) coded counterparts. In the final chapter, after a brief characterisation of the key doctrines of the delflationary conception of truth, we evaluate the impact that the theories of truth studied in this work can have on the debate on the so-called conservativeness argument, which tries to match the alleged insubstantiality of the notion of truth, advocated by deflationists, with the deductive power of deflationary acceptable theories of truth.
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Rami, Adolf. "Die Grenzen des Wahrheitsdeflationismus." Doctoral thesis, Technische Universität Dresden, 2005. http://deposit.d-nb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=981342779.
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Lavers, Antony John. "Knowing what one believes : Substantialism and Deflationism in the philosophy of self-knowledge." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.393100.
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Dimech, Dominic. "A New Approach to the Coherence Theory of Truth." Thesis, Department of Philosophy, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/10245.
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This paper does not argue that the coherence theory should be the accepted theory about what truth is. It aims, rather, to present the coherence theory of truth in a new light, in a way that sheds understanding on why the theory has had such prominence in the history of the philosophy of truth. Thus, although this paper is not a defence of the theory per se, it offers a charitable interpretation of it. The coherence theory has a paradoxical status in the literature, since it is considered the chief competitor with the correspondence theory and yet critiques of it are often extremely scathing. This paper is designed to reveal a better grasp and understanding of what the coherence theory’s status should be. The first important result is that coherence is a perfectly acceptable extensional description of truth, as it simply predicates something about all the true things. The second even more interesting result is that if coherentists want their theory to achieve an analysis of the meaning of truth then they must be committed to an ontological position, specifically, some form of idealism. The conclusions of this paper therefore are informative about the theoretical space that coherentists have to move in today and also hopefully illuminative of why the coherence theory has been attached to the philosophical doctrines and positions that it has been associated with historically.
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Wright, Crispin. "Verdad: un debate tradicional revisado." Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú - Departamento de Humanidades, 2012. http://repositorio.pucp.edu.pe/index/handle/123456789/113163.
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Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed”. This paper proposes a critical review of the presuppositions at the background of the traditional discussion on truth. Despite acknowledging that the said discussion rationalizes many of the movements and tentatives of its main characters to clarify the facts, it isascertained that, since it is centered in a reductive analyses of truth, it is not apt to generate the most adequate interpretation of the same. The theories in dispute will be expounded and criticized: deflationism, intrinsicalism, and both forms of relationism –coherentism and correspondence. An alternative to theanalytical-theoretical approach to truth –which in its different guises has served as basis of the traditional debate– will be purported.El artículo plantea una revisión crítica de los presupuestos sobrelos cuales se funda el debate tradicional acerca de la verdad. A pesar de reconocerse que dicho debate racionaliza muchos de los movimientos e intentos de clarificación hechos por sus protagonistas, se afirma que, en la medida en que está centrado en un análisis reductivo del concepto en cuestión, no es elindicado para generar la interpretación más adecuada del mismo. A lo largo del trabajo, se expondrán y criticarán las teorías que han entrado en disputa en este terreno: el deflacionismo, el intrinsecalismo y las dos formas de relacionismo, el coherentismo y la correspondencia. Hacia el final se llega a sostener una aproximación a la verdad que se erige como alternativa frente ala analítico-teorética, la cual, en sus muchas y diversas formas, ha constituido la base del debate tradicional.
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Horton, Michael Brady. "INFLATIONARY TRUTH-THEORETIC SEMANTICS." UKnowledge, 2012. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/philosophy_etds/1.
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I argue that satisfaction and reference—and therefore, truth—are multiply realizable properties. I advocate a novel approach motivated by a commitment to the robustness and fruitfulness of truth-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics.
DEFLATIONISM: Philosophers keen on deflating the metaphysical pretensions of truth theories claim that we need not appeal to a substantive truth-property. Recently, however, some philosophers have sought to combine deflationism about truth with the view that our concept of truth or the truth-predicate can play an important role in natural language semantics.
TRUTH-THEORETIC SEMANTICS: The goal of a formal semantic theory of a natural language is to provide both the semantic values of that language’s lexically primitive items as well as the semantically significant modes of combining those basic elements into meaningful and more complex expressions. Most approaches have in common a commitment to finite stateability and compositionality as well as a commitment to something like Davidson’s “Convention T.”
PLURALISM: Pluralists about truth argue that different areas of discourse have different truth-properties. Can pluralism successfully be combined with a commitment to truth-theoretic semantics?
OPEN SEMANTIC FUNCTIONALISM: The pluralist approaches to truth are unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. The only option, I argue, is to regard truth as multiply-realizable. Specifically, we should view the set of truth’s realizers as possessing non-actual members—as being “open.” Truth is defined in the usual way in terms of reference and satisfaction, but these latter two relations are to be understood as multiply realizable but open. The property of truth can be specified using the Ramsey/Lewis method. My final view—Open Semantic Functionalism—respects compositionality and finite stateability, avoids triviality, handles plurality, and fits with robust, explanatorily significant natural language semantic theories.
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Hou, Richard Wei Tzu. "Between Quine's Disquotationalism and Horwich's Minimalism." University of Sydney, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1131.
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Doctor of PhilosophyMany criticisms of the prevalent deflationary theories of truth stem from some misunderstanding. Clarification can be found from considering Quine's reasoning on the disquotational feature of the truth predicate. Quine's disquotationalism and Horwich's minimalism are similar theses with respect to the concept of truth, though the difference between the choices of the primary truth bearers and the divergence in their accounts of meaning and reference are striking. Chapter Two is devoted to making plain Quine's reasoning regarding the disquotational concept of truth, and to constructing a disquotational theory of truth. Also in this chapter, the topic of how to enhance the deductive power of this theory is discussed. The following chapter aims to square Quine's theses of inscrutability of reference and ontological relativity, with an account of the disquotational schema of reference. Whether or not a disquotational schema of reference and all its instances can be seen as providing a genuine reference scheme, as claimed by Horwich and most deflationists, is also discussed. In Chapter Four, after an introduction of Horwich's minimalist conception of truth, there are a number of issues considered, in particular Horwich’s use-theoretic account of meaning and compositionality, along with the divergence between his account of meaning and Quine's. The final chapter, Chapter Five, provides a thorough analysis of three important factors regarding the disquotational theory and the minimal theory of truth. Among them, the first factor discussed is what sort of equivalence relation occurs within each instance of the disquotational schema or each axiom of the equivalence schema. Following this, there is an analysis of in what way the disquotationalist and the minimalist can explain all general facts involving truth. The last factor involves considering the proper ascription of the disquotational or the minimal truth predicate. Along with the analysis of these three factors, the issue regarding which theory of truth is preferable is elaborated.
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Hou, Richard Wei Tzu. "Between Quine's Disquotationalism and Horwich's Minimalism." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1131.
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Many criticisms of the prevalent deflationary theories of truth stem from some misunderstanding. Clarification can be found from considering Quine's reasoning on the disquotational feature of the truth predicate. Quine's disquotationalism and Horwich's minimalism are similar theses with respect to the concept of truth, though the difference between the choices of the primary truth bearers and the divergence in their accounts of meaning and reference are striking. Chapter Two is devoted to making plain Quine's reasoning regarding the disquotational concept of truth, and to constructing a disquotational theory of truth. Also in this chapter, the topic of how to enhance the deductive power of this theory is discussed. The following chapter aims to square Quine's theses of inscrutability of reference and ontological relativity, with an account of the disquotational schema of reference. Whether or not a disquotational schema of reference and all its instances can be seen as providing a genuine reference scheme, as claimed by Horwich and most deflationists, is also discussed. In Chapter Four, after an introduction of Horwich's minimalist conception of truth, there are a number of issues considered, in particular Horwich’s use-theoretic account of meaning and compositionality, along with the divergence between his account of meaning and Quine's. The final chapter, Chapter Five, provides a thorough analysis of three important factors regarding the disquotational theory and the minimal theory of truth. Among them, the first factor discussed is what sort of equivalence relation occurs within each instance of the disquotational schema or each axiom of the equivalence schema. Following this, there is an analysis of in what way the disquotationalist and the minimalist can explain all general facts involving truth. The last factor involves considering the proper ascription of the disquotational or the minimal truth predicate. Along with the analysis of these three factors, the issue regarding which theory of truth is preferable is elaborated.
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Lefftz, Grégoire. "L'identité des objets ordinaires : essai d'ontologie déflationniste." Thesis, Sorbonne université, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018SORUL185.
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À quelles conditions deux objets singuliers sont-ils identiques, ou distincts au contraire ? Cette thèse choisit de ne pas aborder cette question de front, en proposant immédiatement des critères – des conditions nécessaires et suffisantes – d’identité pour certains types d’objets (les personnes, les artefacts, les objets inanimés…). Elle commence bien plutôt par prendre du recul, en demandant ce que sont de tels objets ordinaires, quelle est leur ontologie, et quelle est par conséquent la nature d’une relation d’identité entre eux. La conclusion de cette enquête, menée dans une perspective néo-carnapienne, est déflationniste : les relations d’identité numérique entre objets ordinaires ne sont pas déjà présentes dans le monde, comme des faits substantiels que nous n’aurions plus qu’à découvrir. Après avoir élaboré cette théorie de l’identité dans une première partie, cette thèse la met ensuite au travail, pour résoudre dans une deuxième partie les principaux paradoxes de l’identité dont la littérature regorge : problèmes liés au vague, aux modalités, à la coïncidence, problèmes enfin d’identité personnelleUnder what conditions are two singular objects identical or distinct? This thesis chooses not to tackle this question upfront, by directly putting forward criteria – that is, necessary and sufficient conditions – of identity for certain kinds of objects (such as persons, artefacts, inanimate objects…). It rather begins by stepping backwards, in order to tell a story about ordinary objects, about their ontology, and consequently about the nature of the relation of numerical identity between two such objects. The upshot of this enquiry, led under the guidance of a neo-Carnapian meta-philosophy, is deflationary: numerical identity relations between ordinary objects are not already there in the world, like substantial facts waiting to be discovered. After elaborating such a theory of identity in the first part, this thesis then uses it to solve most of the well-known problems of identity, in the second part: those related to vagueness, essentialism and modality, spatio-temporal coincidence, and eventually personal identity
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Fischer, Martin. "Davidsons semantisches Programm und deflationäre Wahrheitskonzeptionen." Frankfurt, M. [i.e.] Heusenstamm Paris Lancaster New Brunswick, NJ Ontos-Verl, 2007. http://d-nb.info/988916665/04.
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Fischer, Martin. "Davidsons semantisches Programm und deflationäre Wahrheitskonzeptionen /." Frankfurt, M. [i.e.] Heusenstamm ;Paris ;Lancaster ;New Brunswick, NJ : Ontos-Verl, 2008. http://d-nb.info/988916665/04.
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Wang, Chern-Shuh, and 王辰樹. "on the nonequivalence deflations for solving lambda matrices eigenvalue problems." Thesis, 1994. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/77689017162979399531.
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