ABSTRACT
We claimed in the last chapter that the Buddhist antirealist doctrine of emptiness is best seen as a kind of deflationism about truth. This rules out several other possible interpretations. To say that all things are empty is not to say that the nature of reality is grasped only through nondiscursive intuition. Nor is it to say that things exist only in thoroughgoing interdependence. The doctrine of emptiness makes no claim whatsoever about how things, strictly speaking, are – not even the claim that they cannot be spoken of. Instead, it deflates truth, stripping it of its pretensions to point to superlative states of affairs. The idea is that by demonstrating the hopelessness of the quest for things with intrinsic natures, the Buddhist antirealist aims to liberate us from the view that our assertoric practices require us to take up a stance of ontological seriousness with respect to the truthmakers for our assertions. Nothing is thereby revealed about how things are.a Instead, something is taken away from our understanding of what it means to say that things are thusand-so: we cease superimposing ultimately real natures on the world that is said to be thus-and-so.
