SECTION 3: PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE A Dilemma for Künne's Account of Truth

essentially a form of deflationism. In the heart of his account is the following schema, meant to be a general definition of propositional truth: (MOD) ∀x (x is true → ∃p (x = [p] & p)).1 How should it be understood? Especially, what does the propositional quantification mean? (I am ignoring the possible formal difficulties with such non-standard quantification and concentrating on the question whether it can be made sense in natural language.) A semi-formal rendering of (MOD), relatively close to the natural language, is the following, according to Künne: (mod) ∀x (x is true → For some ways things may be said to be, x is the proposition that things are that way, and things are that way). My claim in the paper is that Künne's account faces a dilemma: either it is not modest after all or it is incomprehensible. First horn of the dilemma: (mod) invokes quantification over ways things may be said to be – entities that are quite similar to states of affairs (or facts) postulated in fact-based correspondence theories, and no deflationist should be happy to live with this (see David 2005)