Minimalists about Truth can (and should) be Epistemicists, and it helps if they are revision theorists too

March 2005

“Minimalists about Truth can (and should) be Epistemicists, and it helps if they are revision theorists too,” pages 97–106 in JC Beall and Bradley Armour-Garb, Deflationism and Paradox, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Minimalists about truth say that the important properties of the truth predicate are revealed in the class of T-biconditionals. Most minimalists demur from taking all of the T-biconditionals of the form “<p> is true if and only if p”, to be true, because to do so leads to paradox. But exactly which biconditionals turn out to be true? I take a leaf out of the epistemic account of vagueness to show how the minimalist can avoid giving a comprehensive answer to that question. I also show that this response is entailed by taking minimalism seriously, and that objections to this position may be usefully aided and abetted by Gupta and Belnap’s revision theory of truth.

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I’m Greg Restall, and this is my personal website. ¶ I am the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology ¶ I like thinking about – and helping other people think about – logic and philosophy and the many different ways they can inform each other.

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