| Truth is not only the goal of all scientific undertakings, but also the necessary condition for human's pursuit of good. For thousands of years, philosophers have been dealing with the problem of "what is truth" and have made a lot of achievements and among which the deflationary theories began to appear in the philosopher's thinking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From then on this kind of theories gained clearly statement and strongly support. In contemporary western philosophy,they received a lot of attention and have become an influential trend which cannot be ignored in not only the field of truth theories but also other philosophical fields."The deflationary theories of truth" refers to a class theories of truth,among which the redundancy theory, the performative theory and the minimalist theory of truth are seen as the most typical ones of it. The basic idea of these theories is that the truth predicate does not refer to a certain part or a property of reality, nor does it refer to a relationship between the language expressions and the reality, and thus does not have the so-called potential essence. In this context, the different explanations of the raison d' etre of the truth predicate, namely, the reason or justification for existence of truth predicate in our language constitute the difference between these theories. And theories with different opinions to this basic question are collectively referred to as"the robust theories of truth".The main subject matter of this paper is a famous version of the deflationary theories of truth, namely, the minimalist theory of truth. It is first advanced and developed by Paul Horwich,a professor in the Philosophy Department of New York University. Besides agreeing with its basic stance, Horwich argues that there are three reasons for the unpopularity of the deflationary theories,among which the first one is that traditional robust theories of truth still have a lot of advocates in contemporary philosophy; and another is that the old versions of the deflationary theories all met a lot of objections, and some of these objections did point out some defects that cannot be eliminated of them; and the third one is that no advocate has researched the implications of them clearly. He considers that the ability of dealing with the listed objections makes a difference between minimalism and other deflationary theories,and in this way the deflationary theories could regain their deserved treatment.The target of this paper is to introduce the minimalist theory of truth, so it first introduces two origins of the deflationary doctrine, namely Frege's theory of truth and Tarski's semantic conception of truth. Then it introduces two reasons for Horwich's choosing the deflationary theories of truth, including his analysis of the paradoxical situation of the truth problem and his critique of the traditional robust theories of truth.Concerning the basic contents of minimalism, this paper introduces them in two aspects: axioms and predicates, and it focuses on the reasons why Horwich chooses propositions to be truth bearers, why he retains the infinite list-like character of axioms and why he regards truth as a logical property. In the part of defenses for and implications of minimalism,this paper is confined to Horwich's clarification of the relationship between minimalism and the lawlike generalizations of the truth predicate.Finally, I will summarize the content of this article, and provide my own reflective evaluation to this paper's subject matter. |
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