Abstract

ARMOUR-GARB, Bradley  and  WOODBRIDGE, James A. Sellars and pretense on "truth & 'correspondence'": with a detour through meaning attribution. discus.filos [online]. 2012, vol.13, n.21, pp.33-63. ISSN 0124-6127.

The account of truth that Wilfrid Sellars offers in his paper, "Truth and 'Correspondence'", presents us with an apparent internal tension between two seemingly incompatible aspects of his views on truth. To fully resolve this tension, it is necessary to factor in an account of meaning attribution. We think that the account Sellars offers, most centrally in "Meaning as Functional Classification", includes the basic elements required for resolving the internal tension in his account of truth, but here his views suffer from an apparent external tension, regarding an apparent conflict between his account and our actual linguistic and inferential practices with the expression 'means'. In this paper, we show how the internal tension in Sellars's understanding of truth, as well as the external tension in his account of meaning attribution, can be resolved while adhering to a Sellarsian spirit, by appealing to the particular fictionalist accounts of truth-talk and proposition-talk (including meaning-attribution) that we have developed elsewhere.

Keywords : deflationism; fictionalism; meaning attribution; pretense; proposition-talk; truth-talk.

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