ABSTRACT
Donald Davidson endorses none of these deflationary theses. As far as the first is concerned, he thinks that truth is much more than a mere device of generalisation; he regards it as a basic conceptual building block-so fundamental that, in order to possess any concepts at all, one must possess the concept of truth. On the second point he holds that no simple formula can capture the meaning of ‘true’; in particular, my proposal won’t do because the equivalence schema and its instances are incomprehensible: ‘I do not understand [them]’. For that reason he must also reject my third thesis. As far as I know he makes no explicit claim about the constitution of truth, but he says nothing to preclude the possibility that truth has an underlying nature-at least, roughly speaking. On the contrary, his view of truth as a causal, explanatorily potent property would suggest that it is as good a candidate for reduction as any other such property.
