Truth as a Pretense (Woodbridge, 2005)
Looks interesting at a first glance. Has anyone explored this?
Truth as a Pretense
JAMES A. WOODBRIDGE
Yale University
Truth-talk exhibits certain features that render it philosophically suspect and motivate a deflationary account. I offer a new formulation of deflationism that explains truth-talk in terms of semantic pretense. This amounts to a fictionalist account of truth-talk but avoids an error-theoretic interpretation and its resulting incoherence. The pretense analysis fits especially well with deflationism’s central commitment, and it handles truth-talk’s unusual features effectively. In particular, this approach suggests an interesting strategy for dealing with the Liar paradox. This version of deflationism has advantages over the formulations currently available in the literature, mainly because it offers a more satisfying account of the generalizing role deflationary views take as truth-talk’s central function. Explaining the notion of truth in terms of pretense generates some special concerns, but none we cannot address through careful consideration of how pretense operates in truth-talk and of the attitudes instances of pretending involve.
M. Kalderon, Fictionalism in Metaphysics, pp. 134-177, (Oxford: OUP, 2005)
Online: https://faculty.unlv.edu/jwood/papers/Truth%20as%20a%20PretenseMS.pdf
Truth as a Pretense
JAMES A. WOODBRIDGE
Yale University
Truth-talk exhibits certain features that render it philosophically suspect and motivate a deflationary account. I offer a new formulation of deflationism that explains truth-talk in terms of semantic pretense. This amounts to a fictionalist account of truth-talk but avoids an error-theoretic interpretation and its resulting incoherence. The pretense analysis fits especially well with deflationism’s central commitment, and it handles truth-talk’s unusual features effectively. In particular, this approach suggests an interesting strategy for dealing with the Liar paradox. This version of deflationism has advantages over the formulations currently available in the literature, mainly because it offers a more satisfying account of the generalizing role deflationary views take as truth-talk’s central function. Explaining the notion of truth in terms of pretense generates some special concerns, but none we cannot address through careful consideration of how pretense operates in truth-talk and of the attitudes instances of pretending involve.
M. Kalderon, Fictionalism in Metaphysics, pp. 134-177, (Oxford: OUP, 2005)
Online: https://faculty.unlv.edu/jwood/papers/Truth%20as%20a%20PretenseMS.pdf
Comments (1)
The guy has a web page here : https://faculty.unlv.edu/jwood/
And there is a book published last year: https://www.amazon.com/Pretense-Pathology-Philosophical-Fictionalism-Applications/dp/1107028272