A Semantic Vacuity Theory of Truth

Abstract The redundancy theory says that truth predicates make no descriptive contribution to sentences that contain them. The theory has strong initial plausibility, and it—or its close relatives—has been defended by the likes of Frege, Ramsey, Ayer and Strawson. Despite this illustrious history, the redundancy theory is often cited today for its problems. Most notably, the theory allegedly cannot account for the full range of constructions involving truth predicates. These charges are used to motivate purportedly more sophisticated accounts of truth that are compatible with contemporary approaches to semantics. This paper positively develops the redundancy theory as the view that truth predicates are ‘semantically vacuous’, as the expression is used in formal semantics. It is then shown that this semantic vacuity theory of truth can overcome the standard objections while retaining the core insights of the original.