Three Norms of Assertibility, or How the Moa Became Extinct

Deflationism about truth combines two claims: (i) that truth is not a substantial property; and (ii) that the key to our use of the concept of truth lies in its disquotational character—i.e., in the fact that (DS) " p " is true if and only if p holds for all central declarative sentences. According to deflationists, the key to an understanding of truth lies in an appreciation of the grammatical advantages of a predicate satisfying DS. As Paul Horwich puts it, " our truth predicate is merely a logical device enabling simple formulations of certain sorts of generalization. Deflationism has been criticised by Crispin Wright, who claims in Truth and Objectivity (1992) that such an account of truth cannot make sense of the fact that truth is a normative notion. Wright argues that deflationism is an inherently unstable position: It follows from premises that deflationism accepts that truth is a normative property, but this is incompatible with the deflationist's " thin " , grammatical conception of the role of the truth predicate. has responded to this charge in two reviews of Truth and Objectivity. He claims that on the contrary, the disquotational property of truth makes perfectly good sense of the various considerations to which Wright appeals, so that these considerations do not require that truth be a normative property, in any sense not already entailed by the deflationary view.