Redundancy Theory of Truth - Variants

Variants

A variant of redundancy theory is the disquotational theory, which uses a modified form of Tarski's schema: To say that "'P' is true" is to say that P. Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that sentences like "That's true", when said in response to "It's raining", are prosentences (see pro-form), expressions that merely repeat the content of other expressions. In the same way that it means the same as my dog in the sentence My dog was hungry, so I fed it, That's true is supposed to mean the same as It's raining — if you say the latter and I then say the former. These variations do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is not a property, but rather can be understood to say that, for instance, the assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth, and the theorists in this case are minimalizing only the redundancy or prosentence involved in the statement such as "that's true."

Proponents of pragmatic, constructivist and consensus theories would differ with all of these conclusions, however, and instead assert that the second person making the statement "that's true" is actually participating in further verifying, constructing and/or achieving consensus on the proposed truth of the matter — e.g., the proposition that "it's raining".

Redundancy theory does not apply to representations that are not analogous to sentences and they do not apply to many other things that are commonly judged to be true or otherwise. Consider the analogy between the sentence "Snow is white" and the person Snow White, both of which can be true in a sense. To say "Snow is white" is true is to say "Snow is white", but to say Snow White is true is not to say Snow White.