The Epistemic Lightness of Truth Deflationism and its Logic

This book analyses and defends the deflationist claim that there is nothing deep about our notion of truth. According to this view, truth is a 'light' and innocent concept, devoid of any essence which could be revealed by scientific inquiry. Cezary Cieslinski considers this claim in light of recent formal results on axiomatic truth theories, which are crucial for understanding and evaluating the philosophical thesis of the innocence of truth. Providing an up-to-date discussion and original perspectives on this central and controversial issue, his book will be important for those with a background in logic who are interested in formal truth theories and in current philosophical debates about the deflationary conception of truth.

Introduction; 1. Preliminaries; 2. Approaches to truth; Part I. Disquotation: 3. Disquotational theories; 4. Why do we need disquotational truth?; 5. The generalisation problem; Part II. Conservativity: 6. (Non)conservativity of disquotation; 7. CT- and CT: conservativity properties; 8. Other compositional truth theories; 9. Conservativity: philosophical motivations; 10. Maximal conservative theories; 11. The conservativeness argument; Part III. Reflection Principles: 12. The strength of reflection principles; 13. Deflationism and truth-theoretical strength.

Cezary Cieslinski is a member of the Institute of Philosophy at Uniwersytet Warszawski, Poland. His research, which focuses on truth theories, logic and philosophy of language, has been published in journals including Mind and the Journal of Philosophical Logic.