New Paper: Against Disquotation

Abstract

Disquotationalism is the view that the only notion of truth we really need is one that can be wholly explained in terms of such trivialities as: “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. The `Classical Disquotational Strategy' attempts to establish this view case by case, by showing that each extant appeal to truth, in philosophical or scientific explanations, can be unmasked as an appeal only to disquotational truth. I argue here that the Classical Strategy fails in at least two cases: attributions of truth to context-dependent utterances and uses of truth psychological explanations of behavioral success or, more fundamentally, appeals to falsity in psychological explanations of behavioral failure.

Find it here.

As a side note, I tend to sit on papers a long time, working them over until I'm really satisfied with them. This one might set a record. I first delivered it as a lecture, in St Andrews, in June 2019: almost ten years ago. I've given it as a lecture several times since, and I only got around to writing it in Spring 2018. It wasn't just laziness. There was always this one objection I couldn't quite see my way past. But I did finally figure it out a couple years ago. I always knew that the case of false beliefs (or other mental states) would prove crucial, but it took me a long time to figure out why.