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The Successive Alleys Test of Anxiety in Mice and Rats

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Published on: June 17, 2013

Truth: explanation, success, and coincidence.

Will Gamester¹

¹School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9JT England, UK.

Philosophical Studies

|July 2, 2019

Summary

True belief facilitates practical success, but deflationists struggle to explain this. This study argues that inflationist theories of truth offer a better explanation for this phenomenon.

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.

Keywords:

Coincidence Deflationism Explanation Inflationism Success Truth

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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.