Once the subject of a sentence is made clear with a proper name, we can unambiguously refer to that subject with 'he', 'she', and 'it'. For the prosentential approach, 'is true' functions analogously to pronouns. According to redundancy theories, to assert 'Queen Anne is dead is true' is just a repetitive way of stating the simpler 'Queen Anne is dead.' Under the performative theory, 'Playa Cancun has the best tacos in town is true' is like saying 'Honestly, Playa Cancun has the best tacos in town.' 'Is true,' like 'honestly,' is an intensifier that adds no semantic content. The ultradeflationists all think that 'is true' is really up to something else besides predicating a truth property. 'Is true' sure looks like the piece of language that we call a predicate, but - naturally - there has been some disagreement. The linguistic case is that predicates refer to properties and that 'is true' is a predicate. There are two main arguments for this: linguistic and metaphysical. And that doesn't touch the various theories of properties and existence that he discusses.Įdwards begins by laying out the case for truth's being a property. Correspondence, coherence, semantic, superassertability, primitivism, pluralism, redundancy, performative, and prosentential theories, and new-wave deflationism all get a look. If there is a theory of truth, then Edwards takes a look at it.

One thing about the book: it is comprehensive. The book is titled The Metaphysics of Truth, but its arguments extend more broadly than one might guess from that alone. More than that, Edwards is concerned with developing a broadly-unified metaphysics that includes a pluralist ontology - not just that there are different fundamental categories of entity, but that there are distinct modes of existence itself. The book makes the argument not only for a substantive theory of truth, but for a pluralist theory of truth, grounded in a metaphysics of properties. Unlike Marx, who wanted to defend the spectre of communism, Edwards wishes to dismiss that of deflationism.

It looms over Douglas Edwards's entire discussion, and is the central foil of his book. A spectre is haunting truth - the spectre of deflationism.

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