I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to be unambiguous. Ch. 2 is a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier.

Vít Punčochář Dissertation: Hypothetical Judgements, Truth and Assertibility Abstract: The main topic of this thesis is the logic of indicative conditionals, i.e. sentences of the form If A then B. In classical logic, these sentences are analysed with the help of the so- called material implication. However, the analysis is problematic in many respects. Some chapters of the thesis are devoted to the explanation of the problems, which one necessarily faces when analysing conditionals with the apparatus of standard classical logic. The stress is laid upon the fact that here we are led to a paradoxical situation: some general principles of classical logic (e.g. the principle according to which one can infer If not-A then B from A or B) seem to be unquestionable, but they have very controversial consequences. In the thesis, attempts are presented to defend classical logic as well as to revise it. The approaches to the logical analysis of conditionals are classified into two basic kinds: the first one might be called ontic and the second one epistemic. The ontic approach defines all crucial semantic notions in terms of the concept of truth that is modelled in logic as a relation between sentences of a given language and states of affairs. In contrast, the epistemic approach is not based on the concept of truth...