Talk:Deflationary theory of truth

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Contents 1 A conjecture 2 The role of Ramsey 3 So what is or are this/these theory/ies? 4 Awbrey !? 5 Course Notes Do not Count As WP:Reliable Sources 6 Problem 1. Correct Description 7 Problem 2. Comparative Description 8 Quantification over Propositional Variables

[edit] A conjecture

"So, if pigs fly, if pigs do indeed fly, then it's true that pigs fly" Anyone care to add to this conjecture? Bensaccount 23:52, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] The role of Ramsey

I don't know about attributing the deflationary theory to Ramsey. Certainly he is important in its development, but we could equally credit Frege or Ayer. Maybe there are good reasons to attribute it to Ramsey that I'm not aware of?

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.104.250.115 (talk • contribs) 21:29, October 5, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] So what is or are this/these theory/ies?

The deflationary theory of truth is a family of theories which all have in common the belief that statistics that count the number of words of a statement do not provide any substantive information or insight into the nature of truth. Hopefully you, reader, agree with me. I further contend that the preceding sentence does not provide any substantive information or insight into the nature of the deflationary theory (or theories) of truth. Agreed? Well, I think the same holds for the intro of the article. It tells us that these theories do not believe something. (Can a theory believe?) It does not tell us any "positive" tenet of these theories, like what is meant by "truth", or what might provide insight into its nature. If you do not already know about this/these theory/ies, you still don't know a thing after reading the intro. It does not facilitate the comprehension of the rest of the article. --Lambiam^Talk 20:22, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

yes, alright wise ass. The choice of term "Belief" was sloppiness and the intro is not perfect. What am I god?? The fact is that deflationary theories probably should not even be called theories. But they are so called and it's not my place to state my own opinions here and eliminate/distort the current usage in the academic and professional philosophical communities.

Anyway, if the rest of the article is clear enough you should be able to clear up the intro yourself. But instead of, for example, simply changing the word "belief" into claim or assert, we get the usual wacky wiki nonsense where someone comes along after three months and says "Oh man, I don't like that formulation. " It's pretty easy to sit back in anonymity and whine about the inadequacy of the work of others isn't it? Damnit, that house really is ugly. Why did they put the veranda over there instead of over here? What's the matter with that idiotic Ronaldo, I would've put kicked the ball over here!! Yeah, that't it!! Give us a look at your own masterpieces, for christ's sake. Let me make this clearer than clear: deflationist do not beleive that truth MEANS anything nor that is HAS a nature to be explaned. Period. It is just an occasionally (but only occasionally) useful linguistic phenomenon. If you don't like the idea, that's too bad!! Read another article. It's not my fucking fault that that's the position. --Lacatosias 17:20, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Awbrey !?

Alright, I'm not going to argue with you on this Awbrey. You're a madman. That is something I respect and applaud. Therefore, I will leave the "see also" section as is. But try getting something like this through FAC!! Take a look at this Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Hilary Putnam artcle I have barely succeeded in getting through that process. The madness that erupted was somethihng to behold. Did you know that there is now an automated bot prose style and Wiki standards verify. The bots have taken over, my friend, as you predicted way back when. What's to be done? They basically insisted that every word I wrote was too technical, textbook-like and things of that nature. Too bad you missed it.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 19:29, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

JA: Hi, F². I know that you mean Madman in the nicest possible way, and yes we do have our way of being Prophets, too. Jon Awbrey 23:00, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Re madman. Exactly and that's in fact one of my favorite prose-poems on mj bookselves.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 07:48, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Course Notes Do not Count As WP:Reliable Sources

JA: 'Nuff said. They might be okay as external links, but they do not validate the "neologism of the week" for what are basically very ancient ideas. Jon Awbrey 06:00, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problem 1. Correct Description

JA: Persistence of Error. The lead contains the same old mistatement of the entire issue that I thought we had eliminated some time ago. Will begin to fix it tomorrow. Jon Awbrey 06:24, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

You've truly botched the lead pretty badly. It is NOT accurate. Period. But, then, that IS the sort of thing that you and Kenosis do best. I will stay out of it, while you fellows transrom into an FA, as usual!! (;.

JA: So it was you ! All I did was reinstate the oldest lead in the history by way of beginning a review. Here is the "YOU WERE THERE — Or Not" for that date:

• -Date 23:30, 16 April 2004, Bensaccount (FROM truth):

The deflationary theory of truth (also called the redundancy theory of truth) is the theory that is truth is redundant with is. In other words, to assert that a statement is true is just to assert the statement itself. The original version of this bare-bones theory was called was due to F.P. Ramsey and Alfred Ayer, English philosophers who wrote their works in the 1920s and 1930s. This has loose connections with the "performative theory of truth", associated with Peter Strawson.) The redundancy theory of truth is really a special version of what is now called The Deflationary Conception of Truth, or deflationism for short. Deflationism has two major versions. A version called Minimalism, which has been developed by Paul Horwich (see Horwich 1998, Truth). And a version called Disquotationalism, which has been developed by Hartry Field (see Field 2001 Truth and the Absence of Fact). The minimalist theory takes truth bearers to be propositions and takes, as constituting the notion of truth, statements of the following form: (T*) The proposition that P is true if P. The disquotational theory in contrast takes sentences as the central truth bearers, and its basic principles take the following form: (T**) The sentence "P" is true if P. Roughly, statements of any of the forms (T), (T*) or (T**) are called "T-sentences", and deflationists take T-sentences to be central in characterizing the notion of truth. The idea is that, instead of saying, "It is true that some dogs bark," you could, without loss of meaning, say simply, "Some dogs bark". In principle, we could always eliminate talk of truth, in favor of simply forthrightly asserting whatever it is that we say is true.

JA: It appears that FF (aka Lacatosias) came in here:

• -Date 18:42, 24 March 2006, Lacatosias (started work on deflationay theories, back tomorrow), Diff.

JA: Let's see if we can get clear, one more time, about what's wrong with the change in the lead that FF made in the above edit.

• Before

The deflationary theory of truth is really a family of theories which all have in common the claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a property called truth to such a statement.

corrected version.

--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 16:04, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

• After

The deflationary theory of truth is really a family of theories which all have in common the belief that assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not provide any substantive information or insight into the nature of truth.

JA: There is a curious inversion that has taken place here. The question was whether assertions that predicate truth of statement provide any substantive information or insight into the nature of the statement. This is a question about the nature or substance of statements, whether they have a nature or a property that can be denoted by the logical values true or false.

JA: Assertions that predicate truth of a statement were never intended to provide any substantive information or insight into the nature of truth. (There are in fact principles of duality arising in very special settings by which this can happen in the aggregate, but it is not the primary intention of the assertion.) So that was never the claim, and denying it is not a theoretical innovation, but simply a misunderstanding of the question. Jon Awbrey 15:50, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

This is valid.

[edit] Problem 2. Comparative Description

JA: It's pretty clear that all of these isms — deflation-ism, disquotation-ism, mini-mall-ism, redundant-ism, and probably- a-few-that-came-down-the-pike-this-week-isms — are nothing but the "ten-thousand-names" for a theme out of Tarski. Jon Awbrey 12:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you that they are all variations on the basic theme of (probably not Tarski but) Ramsey or Frege. But the fact is that there are these variations. They are discussed in influential texts (Robert Brandom, "Making It Exlicit" for example) in the Stanford Encylopedia and in acadmeic papers. In an article on truth, it may be fine to state that deflationary theory is essentially reducnay with minor varitains. But this is an article specifically on deflationary theories. As such, it should give the reader an exhaustive rendereing of the four or five variatains that have been discussed and that can be documented. Please remember that all the words in human language begin as neologisms. All that has to be assured here is that they are not MY neologisms; that is, I am not making them up and engaging in OR. I can cite places where the terms and their associated concepts are discussed in the literature. When Kant first started tossing around terms like "synthetic" , "analytic" "apriori", "practical reason" "categorial imperative" and so on, they were neologisms. Now, they are standard terms of the philosophical lexicon. Morever, the basic idea of functionalism is claimed by some people to derive from Aristole. But even if the basic idea of functionalism really did have such ancient roots, this does not mean that the term functionalism was coined by Aritostle or that it is a useless neologism. In some cases, an idea may have ancient roots, but the term for it does not. Functionalism is now part of the standard philopshical jargon. What will end up of ideas like "disquotationalism and "prosententialism"? Who knows? They may vanish by next summer or one of them might turn into a fully developed idea which lasts as long as synthetic apriori. To prejudge the issue is to engage in a bit of (not really POV-pushing) but suppression of info. Just let the info out there and let people decide if it's nonsense or not. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 13:45, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

JA: That is not the problem here. I'm a pragmatist about language, and I mean that in the next-to-the-lowest possible sense of the word. If a significant proportion of the population is found to be using the word truth as a synonym for My Left Foot, and to be persisting in that practice for a significant period of time, then there's nothing for it but to document the fact. But we document the circumstance as what it is. This involves (1) indexing the usage by the population in question, (2) documenting the origin and history of the usage, and (3) describing the usage in the appropriate descriptive terminology. Not all of the appropriate descriptive terminology will be internal to the movement in question, but will come from external disciplines that are adapted to the purpose of such description. Jon Awbrey 14:24, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Never mind.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 16:09, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Quantification over Propositional Variables

This article has running all through it the mistaken notion that quantification over propositional values is an uncontroversial tool that can be used to express ideas about truth. That is NOT the case. See the Kirkham book listed in the bibliography. I'm removing all these passages.

The article is also filled with original research. I'm removing this.

Finally, it makes dubious, uncited, attributions; such as that the prosentential theory orginated with Ramsey. If a citation for these claims is not made soon, I'll return in a few days and delete them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.16.98.193 (talk) 21:28, 9 March 2008 (UTC)