Truth: explanation, success, and coincidence.

Area of Science:

• Philosophy of Language
• Epistemology

Background:

• Inflationist theories posit truth as a causal-explanatory property, essential for explaining rational agents' practical success.
• Deflationist theories, while acknowledging true belief's role in success, view truth primarily as a tool for generalization via the T-schema.

Purpose of the Study:

• To critically examine the deflationist strategy of explaining practical success through generalized T-schema references.
• To challenge the deflationist account by demonstrating its inadequacy in distinguishing between genuine and coincidental practical success.

Main Methods:

• Analyzing the explanatory power of deflationary accounts when applied to cases of practical success achieved with false beliefs.
• Comparing the deflationist's individualised explanations with the inflationist's ability to provide a substantive distinction between coincidental and non-coincidental success.

Main Results:

• Deflationary explanations fail to differentiate between practical success stemming from true beliefs and that arising from coincidentally correct false beliefs.
• The deflationist's framework lacks the resources to establish a meaningful explanatory contrast between these two types of success.

Conclusions:

• The deflationary construal of 'true belief facilitates practical success' is inadequate due to its inability to explain the distinction between genuine and coincidental success.
• Inflationist theories provide a more robust framework for understanding the explanatory role of truth in practical success, necessitating a rejection of deflationary conceptions of truth.