Truth as a Pretense

Abstract Truth is a pretense. This bald statement might inspire “incredulous stares”, but my aim here is to deflect this initial incredulity. To begin, then, my claim that truth is a pretense is really part of an analysis of truth-talk-the fragment of our talk (and thought) that employs the notion of truth. Just this clarification probably deflects little skepticism, since it merely marks my view as some sort of fictionalism with respect to truth-talk. On a common understanding of fictionalist analyses, certain statements from a “way of talking” understood fictionally may be “true in the fiction’’, but really all statements from this fragment of discourse are false. Some of the abiding skepticism toward my initial claim likely comes from the recognition that this error-theoretic conception of fictionalism undermines itself when applied to truth-talk. The problem here is by now familiar: an account of truth-talk based on the thesis that all truth-talk is false (or, more broadly, never true) seems to presuppose a non-error-theoretic notion of truth-conditions, and so of truth.4 And even if it did not, the claim that all instances of truth-talk are false is itself an instance of truth-talk, and so it would turn out to be false on this view. In fact, matters are even worse; this position would be paradoxical since it would say of itself that it was false.5 Understood this way, a fictionalist interpretation of truth-talk is a non-starter.