A Review and a Criticism of the Minimal Theory of Truth

The Minimal Theory (abbreviation: MT) has been developed and defended by Paul Horwich. This theory can be classified as a deflationist theory of truth and it is the most recent one among them. It is claimed by Horwich that MT can satisfy the “adequacy condition” of theories of truth, that is, it can explain all facts about truth. In this paper the main themes of MT and its adequacy condition are introduced.Some critics have tried to refute Horwich’s adequacy claim by referring to the facts which appear to be about truth but, supposedly, cannot be explained by MT. This is the general strategy of Gupta and Soames in their criticism of MT. In particular, they aimed to show that MT does not have the required adequacy to explain general fact and, in other word, that it is faced with the so-called ‘generalization problem’. I will review the criticism which is made by Gupta and Soames, examine Horwich’s response to these criticisms, and argue that his answer to the criticism is not satisfying. In the end, Then, I will propose an answer to the criticism and will show that my answer does not have any deficiencies of Horwich’s answer.