The word "true" is redundant in "Everything X says is true" propositions
Related to the "The word "true" is redundant".
Related to the "The word "true" is redundant".
Given the sentence (M) "Everything Moses says is true", one solution to this would be to translate the sentence into a more formal language that has logical quantifiers[1]:
∀P(Moses says that P → P is true) ↔ For all propositions P, if Moses says that P then P is true
And this is equivalent to:
∀P(Moses says that P → P) ↔ For all propositions P, if Moses says that P then P
Deflationary Theories of Truth. Retrieved November 1, 2024. ↩︎
Consider:
(M) Everything Moses says is true.
How to eliminate the truth predicate here? On the redundancy theory, in saying "P is true", I say nothing more than P itself. However, in the case of (M) we don't know what P is, because we don't know exactly what Moses has said. Obviously, Moses have said P and Q and R and so on. Thus there would be a conjunction of things that Moses have said. The problem is that one can't know what that conjunction is. Surely, this conjunction is not equivalent to (M). At the same time, one can understand the "everything Moses says is true" without knowing anything about what that conjunction even is [1].
Deflationary Theories of Truth. Retrieved November 1, 2024. ↩︎
Whilst the word "true" might be eliminated by translating the proposition into a logical sentence, it seems that it is being eliminated in quite a different way then simply dropping "is true".
The proposed solution seem to appeal to a different kind of theory of truth[1].
Deflationary Theories of Truth. Retrieved November 1, 2024. ↩︎