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Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler, Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna

—According to Aristotle’s Categories (14b, 14-22), there is an explanatory asymmetry between truth and the world: the truth of a proposition depends on how things described by the proposition are, but how these things are doesn’t depend on the truth of the proposition. Call this "truth dependence." In this talk, I will look at the problem that truth dependence causes for deflationism, and in particular, Field’s (e.g., 1994, 2008) transparency theory of truth. The main problem is that we don’t get the explanatory asymmetry, since, according to Field’s transparency theory, a sentence and its truth ascription are cognitively equivalent, and cognitive equivalence seems to imply a symmetry. In response, I will argue that we can provide a transparency theorist account of truth dependence if we embrace the Fieldian notions of extended disquotational truth and disquotational truth conditions.