4. Materiales y Métodos
4.2 Respuesta de biotipos de P paniculatum al glifosato
Just as there is no single correspondence theory of truth, there is no single
not wish to set myself up in a trap by saying what defines all and only deflationary theories, for any such account will likely be susceptible to immediate refutation by counterexample. Wolfgang Künne, finding ‘deflationism’ to be so amorphous a term as to be without any salvageable consistent meaning, recommends adding it to Otto Neurath’s Index Verborum Prohibitorum (2003: 20). Let us rest content with taking deflationism as a notion admitting
merely of family resemblance. Thankfully, there is a fair consensus as to what views count as deflationary. Loci classici include Ramsey 1927, Strawson 1949, Ayer 1952, Quine 1970,
Grover, Camp, and Belnap 1975, Leeds 1978, Williams 1986, Horwich 1990, and Field 1994a. David 1994 is perhaps the most thorough analysis and critique of the deflationary camp. Such views attempt to distinguish themselves from more substantive or “inflationary” views like the correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, and epistemic accounts.1
There are various theses to which various figures in the deflationary camp subscribe, though it is hard to find any universal agreement. F. P. Ramsey (1927) is typically heralded as the father of the redundancy view of truth, which offers that to predicate truth of a sentence is merely to produce a sentence that says nothing more than the original (see also Ayer 1952). To say that ‘Snow is white’ is true is no more than to say that snow is white. Hence the predication of truth is merely redundant, or, in Blackburn’s helpful phrase, “transparent” (1984b). The redundancy theorist’s view here, however, is not proprietary to redundancy theory. Frege admits it whole-heartedly (1956), though few if any find his primitivism about truth (or his thinking that truth is the referent of all truths—see his 1952)
1Where does Tarski fall? I leave the matter to Tarski scholars. For some discussion see Musgrave 1996 and
deserving of the label ‘deflationist’.2 Moreover, I think that everyone should admit the transparency claim, deflationist or not.3 Subtleties aside, it seems that the truth of granting that ‘‘Snow is white’ is true’ and ‘Snow is white’ are equivalent in some sense is guaranteed by the validity of the truth schema,4 here in its disquotational version:
(T3) ‘p’ is true if and only if p.
It is difficult to imagine anyone disagreeing with the disquotation schema, at least under some interpretation or other. Under what conditions would the two sides of the biconditional have differing truth-values?5 Perhaps one could argue that although the truth-values never differ, the quoted side that predicates truth still may differ in meaning (or some other respect) from the disquoted side. Even so, there still would be some sense of equivalence obtaining between the two (even if only material equivalence). If anything distinguishes the
redundancy view from other theories of truth, it must be in claiming that there is nothing else to be said about truth.
Similar comments apply to the disquotational views defended by Quine (1970) and Field (1994a). (Disquotationalism is also the specific target of David 1994.) According to Quine, disquotationalism is “the valid residue of the correspondence theory of truth” (1990:
2Hence, Frege may best be understood as someone who is deflationist about the word ‘truth’ but not about truth
itself (understood as a concept or property). See the distinction below between the different kinds of deflationism.
3One example of a non-deflationist who nevertheless accepts Ramsey’s point about transparency may well be
Ramsey himself. In his 1927, Ramsey expresses sympathy with pragmatism, suggesting the possibility that he accepted the transparency view of ‘is true’ while adopting a pragmatic account of truth. See Loar 1980. But see also Young 2009, which places Ramsey in opposition to pragmatic theories, and in favor of correspondence theories.
4Which, in turn, is validated by the inferential role that ‘is true’ plays in English. One need not subscribe to
deflationism in order to embrace the T-sentences. One need only be a competent speaker of English.
5Indeed, there are subtleties at work here that may lead some to criticize the disquotation schema. Does the
schema ensure that meaning is preserved across the biconditional? What are meanings anyway? Can the schema adequately handle ambiguity and context-sensitivity? It is worth mentioning that Field, the most ardent
contemporary defender of the disquotational theory of truth, recommends an account of the disquotation schema that is more sophisticated than the one that I have offered (1994a).
93). The disquotationalists go beyond the redundancy theorists by articulating some of the logical properties of the truth predicate. After granting the legitimacy of the disquotation schema, advocates of the disquotational view note how the truth predicate enables us to make certain kinds of generalizations that otherwise would be inexpressible. We can make
generalizations such as ‘All conditionals of the form ‘p only if p’ are true’ without
enumerating each and every instance of the generalization. (Besides, it’s not at all clear that the enumeration of instances even means the same thing as the generalization—see David 2004. If not, then the truth predicate lets us say something that we couldn’t say without it. If they do mean the same thing, then the truth predicate is an enormous convenience.) Such an enumeration would be infinitely long, and so remain inexpressible by finite creatures like us. Similarly, we can state that surely something Kant said is true without bothering to mention the gigantic disjunction of each of Kant’s claims. Furthermore, we can use truth to state sentences like ‘What Bill said yesterday is true’ even if we have forgotten what Bill said. Here we have a case of using ‘true’ to make blind truth ascriptions.6 Had we remembered
that he had said that Cheney is a gorilla, we could simply have forgone the truth predicate and just said that Cheney is a gorilla. The fact that our language has a truth predicate proves to be a very useful feature of it.
But again: what here is up for debate? The account of the linguistic and logical properties of the truth predicate discovered and articulated by disquotationalists seems to be exactly right. They are common ground. Need the correspondence theorist deny the linguistic felicities enabled by the truth predicate? Of course not. If the disquotational view is to
separate itself from other views of truth, it must distinguish itself with a negative claim: that the linguistic properties of the truth predicate exhaust everything there is to say about truth.
For the disquotationalist, the truth predicate does not have the feature, say, of assigning to sentences a substantive property that admits of philosophical analysis.
Similar to disquotational theories are those theories that employ propositions rather than sentences (Horwich 1990 and 1998, Künne 2003). Such theorists subscribe to a denominalization schema rather than a disquotation schema:
(T2) The proposition that p is true if and only if p.
Worries about T2 arise immediately regarding just how to formulate this proposition
postulating position. (We can set aside for the moment any particular worries about
propositions themselves.) Horwich offers his “minimalist” theory of truth as being exhausted by the infinite list of the (non-paradoxical) instances of T2.7 As such, his theory of truth is, by
his own admission, not able to be stated. Others have attempted to accept T2 as a universal
generalization, and then appeal to an account of substitutional quantification (in a version which does not in turn depend upon the notion of truth) in order to render it intelligible (Hill 2002, Künne 2003). Again, there seems to be nothing objectionable to T2 as it stands.
Assuming it to be intelligible, it is nothing but a source of acceptable truths. Thus,
denominalizers must distinguish themselves by denying that there is more to be said about truth.
The prosentential theory does manage to set itself apart from the other deflationary views (Grover, Camp, and Belnap 1975, Grover 1992 and 2001).8 On the prosentential view, ‘true’ is no part of any predicate. It is instead part of a prosentence. The prosentential
application of truth is most apparent in exchanges like the following:
7As noted previously, Horwich later adds to his deflationary account the axiom that only propositions are true
(1998: 43).
Bill: Cheney is a gorilla. Jill: That is true.
According to the prosentential theory, Jill uses ‘is true’ not as a predicate applying to Bill’s sentence, but as part of a prosentence, namely, ‘That is true’. Rather than stating Bill’s very sentence again, Jill “lazily” uses the prosentence as a replacement. In effect, Jill just says what Bill says; she does not say something about what Bill said. Similarly, had she said ‘He
is a gorilla’, Jill “lazily” would have used the pronoun ‘he’ rather than mention Cheney again explicitly. There certainly is something correct about such anaphoric uses of ‘is true’;
everyone can admit that Jill is wielding ‘true’ in a perfectly acceptable fashion. What is distinctive to prosentential theories is that they take such anaphoric uses to be both primary and exhaustive: uses of ‘true’ always must be understood in the manner of prosententialism. Unlike the other deflationary theses, I think the prosententialist’s is proprietary and unique to
their camp. The prosentential view, like its other deflationary siblings, is motivated by the desire to dodge traditional philosophical problems involving truth. If ‘true’ is not even a predicate, then there arises no metaphysical question as to its status as a robust metaphysical property, or whatever.9 But given that the motivations underlying prosententialism can be satisfied by other deflationary views that do not require its distinctive and controversial commitments, I shall set it aside in what follows.
Setting prosententialism aside, then, we can see that most of the positive things that deflationists say about truth are claims that can and should be accepted by anyone,
9Maybe. For those who take the existence of properties to be a serious ontological matter, there will be no
identification of a property for every predicate. (Here we are employing a “sparse” sense of ‘property’ in the language of Lewis 1983.) But if there is no one-one correlation between properties and predicates, such that there are predicates that correspond to no property, then there might also be properties that correspond to no predicate. (Just think of any properties we have yet to discover.) I admit that holding that view about truth in particular would be in need of enormous defense, but the theoretical possibility exists.
deflationist or not. What is distinctive about deflationism is the set of negative claims that its proponents must endorse. For instance, deflationary theories of truth are often defined (more often than not, it is worth noticing, by their opponents) simply as the thesis that there is no property of truth (e.g., Boghossian 1990: 161, Kirkham 1992: 307, Alston 1996: 41, Lynch 1998: 112, Merricks 2007: 187, and Young 2009: 564). Sometimes we are told that
deflationists believe something along the lines of there being no “metaphysically
substantive” or “robust” property of truth (e.g., Putnam 1991: 2, Wright 1992: 13, Blackburn 1998: 75, and Engel 2002: 41). Those simple definitions are correct in spirit, but
unacceptably vague, and far too simple to capture the subtleties in various deflationary theories. Furthermore, the notion of a property is one of the most elusive in all of metaphysics, and the term ‘property’ is one of the most flexible. There are several
conceptions at work in the philosophical literature; as a result, appealing to properties in any philosophical definition without proper qualification is certain to lead to confusion,
ambiguity, and talking at cross purposes.
Besides, there is more to deflationism than just the question of whether there is a property of truth.10 If we follow Dorit Bar-On and Keith Simmons (2007), we can divide deflationism into three distinct theses: linguistic, conceptual, and metaphysical
deflationism.11 Only metaphysical deflationism speaks to the issue as to whether there is a (substantive) property of truth or not. Metaphysical deflationists, naturally, do not believe
that there is such a property. We take up this thesis in great detail below. Linguistic deflationists uphold the thesis that the predicate ‘is true’ does not serve to introduce
10See O’Leary-Hawthorne and Oppy 1997 and Azzouni 2006 for nice discussions of the varieties of deflationary
truth.
11Cf. Lynch’s very similar tripartite account of deflationism: “that the concept of truth is a mere logical device,
that the property of truth is a metaphysically transparent property, and that truth plays no significant explanatory role” (2009: 108).
propositional or cognitive content to a statement, but rather has purely logical functions (denominalizing, disquoting, generalizing, etc.). We have already seen a variety of competing views that take certain linguistic features as more primary than others. The idea common to linguistic deflationists is that the various logical roles of the truth predicate exhaust its linguistic use. Conceptual deflationists argue that truth is not an explanatory concept, or one
that can be used to elucidate other philosophical notions such as assertion, meaning, and belief. Beyond its role as a logical device, truth bears no explanatory weight (though its logical features may be exploited in giving accounts of other notions). Neither do conceptual deflationists think that we need to appeal to any other semantic or metaphysical notions to understand the nature of truth. Truth is conceptually isolated—it stands on, and holds up no other important concepts. Here is Michael Williams: “the function of truth talk is wholly
expressive, thus never explanatory. […] What makes deflationary views deflationary is their
insistence that the importance of truth talk is exhausted by its expressive function” (1999:
547; see also chapter 3 of Horwich 1990 and Williams 2002). Hence, deflationists think that they can account for everything there is to account for about truth by relying on nothing more than the minimal resources of their theories.12
To get a better sense of the deflationary thesis that truth is conceptually thin, consider two cases. One is handled easily by the deflationist; the other poses more substantive
difficulties. Suppose, falsely, that knowledge is justified true belief.13 Here we have an analysis of knowledge that explicitly appeals to truth. Sans truth, there is no guarantee of
knowledge to be found merely in justified belief (pace Sutton 2007). Still, the presence of
12Gupta calls this the “adequacy thesis” (1993: 361). See David 2002 for discussion. Field argues against
conceptual deflationism in his 1986 before adopting it in his 1994a.
truth in our account of knowledge is handled easily by the deflationist. True, S knows that p
only if p is true. But the deflationist (and non-deflationists too, for that matter) may claim
that ‘true’ is used in the analysis merely as a useful shortcut. For S knows that p only if p is
‘Snow is white’ and snow is white, or if p is ‘Cheney is a gorilla’ and Cheney is a gorilla, or
if p is ‘Bill kills Jill’ and Bill kills Jill, and so forth. The appeal to truth in our false account
of knowledge poses no problem for conceptual deflationism.
Contrast the knowledge case with that of assertion. Here, Bar-On and Simmons (2007) have argued forcefully against the deflationist by arguing that an adequate account of
assertion requires a conceptual connection to truth that cannot be allowed by the deflationist. Following Frege, they suggest that we do not succeed in making an assertion merely by predicating ‘is true’ of some thought. The actor on the stage no more asserts that Cheney is a gorilla by saying ‘It is true that Cheney is a gorilla’ than by saying ‘Cheney is a gorilla’. As Frege writes, “In order to put something forward as true, we do not need a special predicate: we only need the assertoric force with which the sentence is uttered” (1979: 233). To
understand what assertoric force is, one must rely on a prior understanding of truth. But that reliance on truth goes beyond its role in disquotation and denominalization. For if what it is to assert p is to put forward p as true, we cannot simply drop the use of ‘true’ here in typical
deflationist fashion. To assert p is not simply to put forward p. We can conjecture that p, we
can deny that p, we can wonder whether p. All are modes of putting forward p. But to capture
what is distinctive about assertion, we must rely on a prior conception of truth, one that goes beyond truth’s role as a device for disquotation and denominalization. Hence, Bar-On and Simmons argue against conceptual deflationism on the grounds that we have an important
conceptual connection between truth and assertion that is left unaccounted for by the various linguistic and logical properties of the truth predicate.14
Different theorists adopt different combinations of these deflationary theses. Frege (1956) upholds linguistic deflationism, but rejects conceptual deflationism (and probably metaphysical deflationism, too, depending upon how it’s construed). Horwich (1990)
upholds linguistic and conceptual deflationism, but rejects metaphysical deflationism.15 Jody Azzouni adopts (something like) linguistic and metaphysical deflationism, but stresses how they must be argued for along very different lines (2006: 109). Ultimately, I advance a view that is metaphysically deflationist and conceptually substantivist (because primitivist). As for linguistic deflationism, it seems compelling, at least for “first-order” appearances of ‘true’ like ‘It is true that snow is white’ that directly apply truth to truth-bearers. Certain “second- order” appearance of ‘true’ such as in ‘To assert is to present as true’, however, are
potentially more problematic (see Simmons 2006). Still, once the issues of metaphysical and conceptual deflationism are resolved, nothing terribly philosophically interesting will remain that turns on linguistic deflationism (at least for the purposes of the present project). In any event, we shall not be focusing on linguistic deflationism, and truthmaking puts no particular pressure on it.16
14See also Bar-On, Horisk, and Lycan 2000 for an argument to the effect that deflationists cannot offer an
adequate theory of meaning. Wright (1992, chapter 1 and 2001) puts forward for an argument that deflationists cannot capture a distinct norm involved in truth. In my 2009 I argue that constructive empiricism, via its reliance on the semantic conception of theories, cannot adopt a deflationary conception of truth in articulating what is at stake between realists and anti-realists. See also Gupta 1993, which shares the suspicion that deflationists cannot account for “all the facts about truth”.
15At least, Horwich admits that there is a property of truth, but not a substantive property of truth (1990: 38-41).
Perhaps the best interpretation of Horwich is that he would agree with metaphysical deflationism, at least as we