Theories of Truth and Convention T

Patterson, Douglas

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Theories of Truth and Convention T

Douglas Patterson

December 2002, Volume 2, No. 5, pp. 1-16

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0002.005

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Abstract

Partly due to the influence of Tarski's work, it is commonly assumed that any good theory of truth implies biconditionals of the sort mentioned in Convention T: instances of the T-Schema "s is true in L if and only if p" where the sentence substituted for "p" is equivalent in meaning to s. I argue that we must take care to distinguish the claim that implying such instances is sufficient for adequacy in an account of truth from the claim that doing so is necessary. The claim that doing so is sufficient is a common component of deflationary theories of truth, while the claim that it is necessary, though often assumed, must be denied by proponents of rival inflationary theories of truth. I discuss the clarification of the debate between these views of truth that results from distinguishing the necessity and the sufficiency claims, and examine the prospects for its resolution.

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Its influence is surely deserved, but I believe nevertheless that there is a great deal of confusion about the importance of Convention T. It is commonly assumed that a definition of truth—or, more generally, any good theory of it—must imply, for the sentences of a given language, a set of biconditionals of the form delimited in clause (), in which the sentences embedded on the right-hand side are equivalent in meaning to those mentioned on the left-hand side. In 1 I will draw and justify some distinctions, and in particular stress the importance of distinguishing the claim that it is sufficient for adequacy in a theory or definition of truth that it imply biconditionals of the sort mentioned in clause () from the claim that it is necessary for adequacy in a theory or definition of truth that it do so. I will then discuss the role of the sufficiency claim in currently popular deflationary theories of truth. In 2 I will explain that inflationary theories of truth, by contrast, should not be required to imply such biconditionals, taking a typical if somewhat schematic correspondence theory of truth as my example. I will then comment in 3 on why the claims of 2 are so often missed, and in 4 on what the results established there tell us about truth and the debate between deflationary and inflationary or substantivalist theories thereof.

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