It was the late 70's, when Donald Davidson's philosophy of language was ascendant, and truth conditional theories of meaning were constantly being discussed.
Several conditional theories of default reasoning have recently been proposed for the representation of statements about normal states of affairs or prototypical properties.
As soon as philosophy professor No. 3 wound up his lesson on, among other things, the appropriate application of the robust truth-conditional theory of meaning to Kripke's rule following paradox, Mr. Evans dove into his backpack and came up with two bananas: one for himself and one for the fading reporter.
It is typical of thoroughgoing deflationist theories to present a non-truth-conditional theory of the contents of sentences: a non-truth-conditional account of what makes truth-bearers meaningful.
What about the claim that deflationism is inconsistent with truth-conditional theories of meaning?
But does truth have only this role in truth-conditional theories of meaning?
The compatibility of deflationism about truth and truth-conditional theories of meaning seems to us an important and unanswered question.
If deflationism is inconsistent with truth-conditional theories of meaning, this is not obviously an objection to deflationism.
It seems clear, for example, that if the concept of truth is only employed in truth-conditional theories of meaning as a device of generalization, there is no inconsistency with deflationary theories of truth.
Other philosophers have also suggested that deflationism is incompatible with truth-conditional theories of meaning on the grounds that granting truth any kind of explanatory role is inconsistent with deflationism (Davidson 1990, Field 1986, 1994).
For example, some have argued that deflationism is incompatible with truth-conditional theories of meaning and so cannot accept that some declarative sentences do not have truth-conditions or express propositions (e.g. Field 1994a, Armour-Garb 2001).
