Seminar in Philosophy of Language: Deflationism
What is it for a sentence to be true? What is it for a thought to represent a certain state of affairs? What is it for a word to refer to a particular object? Traditional answers to these questions presuppose that we can give informative analyses or reductions of the relevant representational properties (truth is "correspondence with reality"; reference is a certain causal/historical relation; etc.). However, an increasingly popular position in the philosophy of language and representation denies that these properties - truth, reference and the like - have any substantial nature to be analyzed at all. According to semantic deflationism, as I'll call it, there is nothing more to truth than what is contained in the schema ‘S' is true iff S; there is nothing more to reference than what is contained in the schema ‘t' refers to t; and similarly for other representational notions. Semantic deflationism promises to demystify the properties of truth and reference precisely by showing that they have no substantial nature to be mystified about.
Semantic deflationism - its content, its plausibility, its implications - has been investigated from many angles. But one aspect of this view that has received relatively little attention is its relation to matters of ontology. It is this, then, that will be our focus in this seminar. In particular, I'd like to think about whether semantic deflationism entails a certain type of ontological deflationism - roughly, the view that answers to questions about what exists are themselves "insubstantial" or "easy" or able to be simply "read off of our language" in some important sense. And if so, does this sort of ontological deflationism entail a sort of ontological or conceptual relativity? My suspicion is that the answer to both of these question is "yes": semantic deflationism inevitably leads to a sort of ontological deflationism and thus conceptual relativity. But this is just a suspicion, and it is one of my goals in this seminar to determine whether this suspicion is sound.
We will begin with background on theories of truth and reference generally, paying special attention to the contrast between traditional and deflationary views. We'll then investigate semantic deflationism further. Our goal here will be to try and determine exactly what the deflationary position amounts to and begin to assess its plausibility. During this time we will pay specific attention to whether or not semantic deflationism is compatible with the mainstream, truth-conditional/representational approach to theories of meaning (as practiced in both philosophy and linguistic departments). Finally, in the second half of the semester, we will consider a number of recent articulations of ontological deflationism and try and determine which, if any, are implied by semantic deflationism.
Primary figures to be discussed: Paul Horwich, Hartry Field, Amie Thomasson, Claire Horisk, Augustine Rayo, Bob Hale.
This course I hope will be of interest to anyone interested in philosophy of language, metaphysics, the metaphysics of language, meta-ontology, neo-logicism (in philosophy of math), realism/anti-realism, or the general relationship between mind and world.