Abstract

There is a core metaphysical claim shared by all deflationists: truth is not a genuine, substantive property. But anyone who denies that truth is a genuine property must still make sense of our pervasive truth talk. In addressing questions about the meaning and function of ‘true’, deflationists engage in a linguistic or semantic project, a project that typically goes hand-in-hand with a deflationary account of the concept of truth. A thoroughgoing deflationary account of truth will go beyond the negative metaphysical claim about truth and the positive linguistic account of the word ‘true’: it will also maintain that the concept of truth is a ‘thin’ concept that bears no substantive conceptual connections to other concepts to which it is traditionally tied.