Does the Strategy of Austerity Work?

Abstract

In what follows I shall draw freely on the so-called ‘deflationary’ arguments about truth¹ The focus in such arguments is on truth predicates, and the general aim is to show that such predicates are inessential either because they do not supply any information that cannot be conveyed by simply asserting the proposition, or propositions, concerned, or because the function they perform in the context in which they are actually used can be performed more effectively by other predicates, or by expressions which strictly are not ‘predicative’ at all; or else, if such predicates are not altogether dispensable, that their function nevertheless does not go beyond signalling the existence of certain purely inferential relationships between certain proposition; and so forth. I do not propose to engage specifically with any of these views. Rather I shall make free use of their arguments to sketch out what I shall call the ‘strategy of austerity’ in the theory of truth. This strategy basically unfolds in three main steps, and its overall aim is to establish that an account of truth does not require a consideration of issues that transcend the boundaries of logic.