Between Deflationism & Correspondence Theory

Front Cover
Taylor & Francis, 2000 - Philosophy - 140 pages
McGrath's dissertation, written at Brown U. between 1996 and 1998, represents the first stage of a projected larger work on the nature of truth. It examines the correspondence theory, which states that a proposition is true if it corresponds to some fact in the world, and the competing theory of deflationism, which treats truth as a device for increasing a language's expressive powers, or as a means for stating information that could not efficiently be stated otherwise. While McGrath writes that he set out to defend the correspondence theory from its deflationist detractors, in the end he finds himself defending a form of deflationism that he calls "weak deflationism." c. Book News Inc.
 

Contents

Deflationism Rejected Weak Deflationism Presented
27
Questions for Weak Deflationism
41
Does Weak Deflationism Have the Resources to Explain
51
Why Cant We Use HigherOrder Quantification to Formulate
58
A Challenge from David Lewis
65
Truthmaking
87
The Liar Paradox
101
Categorial Preliminaries
108
A Dilemma?
127
Bibliography
135
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2000)

Matthew McGrath is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University.

Bibliographic information