Deflationary Theory of Truth - Horwich's Minimalism

Horwich's Minimalism

Paul Horwich's theory of truth, known as the Minimalist Theory, takes the primary truth-bearing entities to be propositions, rather than sentences. According to the minimalist view then, truth is indeed a property of propositions (or sentences, as the case may be) but it is so minimal and anomalous a property that it cannot be said to provide us with any useful information about or insight into the nature of truth. It is fundamentally nothing more than a sort of metalinguistic property.

Another way of formulating the minimalist thesis is to assert that the conjunction of all of the instances of the following schema:

The proposition that P is true if and only if P.

provides an implicit definition of the property of truth. Each such instance is an axiom of the theory and there are an infinite number of such instances (one for every actual or possible proposition in the universe). Our concept of truth consists of nothing more than a disposition to assent to all of the instances of the above schema when we encounter them.