Wright’s Argument from Neutrality

In the first chapter of his book Truth and Objectivity (1992), Crispin Wright puts forward what he regards as ‘a fundamental and decisive objection ’ to deflationism about truth (p. 21). His objection proceeds by an argument to the conclusion that truth and warranted assertibility coincide in normative force and potentially diverge in extension (I call this the ‘argu-ment from neutrality’). This argument has already received some atten-tion.1 However, I do not believe that it has been fully understood yet. In this short paper, I shall assess the cogency of Wright’s objection in some detail. My agenda is as follows. First, I give what I believe to be an adequate rendering of the objection. Secondly, I reveal the real force of the neutrality argument and say thirdly why it does not, as Wright thinks, refute deflationism. Finally, I argue that Wright’s insistence that truth is a ‘substantial property ’ is uncongenial to the overall project of his book. I In Wright’s terminology, a deflationist holds that, subject perhaps to certain provisos of context, the Disquotational Schema (DS) ‘P ’ is T if and only if P is (all but) a complete explanation of the truth predicate—a contention from which he infers, dubiously, that truth is not a ‘substantial property’, whatever that means, of sentences, thoughts, and so on, but merely a device for accomplishing at the metalinguistic level what can be accomplished by an asser-toric use of the mentioned sentence. (pp. 14–5) The dubious inference that truth is not a substantial property is what Wright dislikes about this view. He set out to prove that holding the (DS) to be wholly explanatory of the truth predicate is incompatible with denying that truth is a property. The proof comes in three stages. The first stage. Wright introduces notions of normativity fo