1. What is Truth?

This chapter begins by describing a traditional conception of truth whereby (a) it's a profound property; (b) we want our beliefs to possess it; and (c) a good theory of its underlying nature will enable us to explain why true beliefs are desirable and how best to obtain them. But there are well-known objections to each of the specific theories of that sort (which analyze truth in terms of correspondence with facts, or verifiability, or pragmatic utility, or consensus). A non-traditional perspective, known as ‘deflationism’, is then introduced, according to which no such analysis should ever have been expected. For our concept of truth is not that of a property with some hidden nature awaiting our discovery. Rather, it's a superficial expressive device whose utility and mode of deployment are fully captured by the trivial equivalence of ‘ is true’ and ‘p’. The chapter ends by deploying this idea in a critical discussion of the recently revived idea that our beliefs (at least within certain domains) are never absolutely true or false, but possess their truth-values only relative to a context of assessment.