Guiding Questions for Field's "The Deflationary Conception of Truth"

1. What are the primary truth bearers?

2. What is the goal of a theory of truth?

3. Why do we need a notion of truth? Is truth the only way to achieve that?

4. What does disquotational truth consist in? What is the difference between disquotational and correspondence truth?

5. What is the deflationary conception of truth?

6. Why is Ramsey a correspondentist? What’s the difference with Ayer?

7. How could deflationists deal with ascriptions of truth to sentences we don’t understand? Would this be a problem for Quine?

8. Does the modified or extended disquotational principle serve an interesting role? How is it different form a correspondence theory?

9. What’s Field’s understanding of Tarskian truth definitions? How does it compare to that in Field (1972)?

10. What do correspondentists have to establish to debunk deflationism?

11. Is deflationism a form of anti-realism?

12. Are deflationary and correspondentist truth different in extension?

13. What is purely disquotational truth? Can modified disquotational truth have a role in explaining why are sentences have the truth conditions they have?

14. What’s the problem disquotationalists encounter when ascribing truth to thoughts?

15. What is the most promising strategy for arguing against deflationism? What is Field’s response?