Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Dropping the T-schema

It would be a pity to have to drop the T-schema. But if I had to do that, I'd justify myself as follows. Sometimes sentences of the form "It is true that p" are just an emphatic way of affirming p. (Observe: "It is true that banks lend money" is a statement about banks, not about a proposition or a linguistic item. Yet if there were a real predication of truth, the sentence would be about a proposition or a linguistic item.) In those cases, the T-schema obviously holds. However, these cases are not really cases of talking about truth—they are just a stylistic device, akin to the way that an atheist might say "God knows that p" instead of "p". Unless one is prepared to affirm with deflationists that all uses of "is true" are like that, one cannot generalize from these uses to the more substantial uses, since the two are different uses.

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