Truth and Disquotation

According to the redundancy theory of truth, famously championed by Ramsey, all uses of the word ‘true’ are, in principle, eliminable: Since ‘snow is white’ is true if, and only if, snow is white, and ‘grass is green’ is true if, and only if, grass is green, and so forth, an attribution of truth to an explicitly mentioned sentence can always be replaced by the use of that same sentence. It has, however, become clear that, even if the attribution of truth to an explicitly mentioned sentence is redundant, not all uses of the word ‘true’ will be eliminable. In particular, truth is sometimes attributed not to sentences explicitly mentioned but to sentences merely indicated. I might not know what Russell just said about baseball, but, having the utmost faith in his honesty and knowledge, I might still insist that, whatever he said, it was true. Other examples involve generalization. Someone might say that everything Clinton said about Whitewater was true, even if she had no idea what he had said. Since we do not know what Russell or Clinton said, we cannot eliminate these uses of ‘true’. Of course, in these cases, one could perhaps find out what was said, and so one might regard these uses as in principle eliminable. But there are other examples, in which one generalizes over infinitely many sentences, and so in which even that strategy fails: Someone might say that all of the infinitely many axioms of Peano arithmetic are true. There is no obvious way to eliminate the word ‘true’ from that claim, no matter how loosely we construe the notion of elimination. So the redundancy theory will not do. Its spirit, however, survives in various sorts of ‘deflationary’ views of truth. According to these views, what the failure of the redundancy theory shows is simply that the word ‘true’ serves an important expressive function: Without it, we would be unable to say certain things we can say with it. For example, we would be unable to say what we can now say by uttering: