Damnjanovic - DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT

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The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No.  January 
ISSN –
DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT
B N D
Deflationists about truth typically deny that truth is a causal–explanatory property. However, the
now familiar ‘success argument’ attempts to show that truth plays an important causal–explanatory
role in explanations of practical success. Deflationists have standardly responded that the truth
predicate appears in such explanations merely as a logical device, and that therefore truth has not
been shown to play a causal–explanatory role. I argue that if we accept Jackson and Pettit’s account
of causal explanations, the standard deflationist response is inconsistent, for on this account even
logical properties can be causally explanatory. Therefore the deflationist should remain neutral as to
whether truth is a causal–explanatory property, and focus instead on the claim that truth, if it is a
property, is a merely logical one.
Deflationists about truth often endorse the claim that truth is not a
causal–explanatory property and so never plays a causal–explanatory role.
For example, Paul Horwich (whose minimalism is a type of deflationism)
says
According to minimalism, we should ... beware of assimilating being true to such
properties as being turquoise, being a tree, or being made of tin. Otherwise we will find
ourselves looking for its constitutive structure, its causal behaviour, and its typical
manifestations – features peculiar to what I am calling ‘complex’ or ‘naturalistic
properties’.1
Similarly, Hartry Field has characterized the debate between inflationists
and deflationists as an argument over whether or not truth is a causal–
explanatory property.2
However, there is a simple and familiar argument against deflationism,
the success argument, which attempts to show that truth does play an
important causal–explanatory role. The success argument argues from the
role of truth in explanations of agents’ success to the conclusion that truth is
1P. Horwich, Truth, nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. .
2H. Field, Truth and the Absence of Fact (Oxford: Clarendon Press, , hereafter TAF ),
p. . What Field actually claims is that the deflationist about possessing truth-conditions is
committed to the claim that truth-conditions do not play a causal–explanatory role. However,
as he sees a theory of truth as a theory of truth-conditions, this also amounts to a claim about
truth: see pp. , .
© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, . Published by Blackwell Publishing,  Garsington Road, Oxford  , UK,
and  Main Street, Malden,  , USA.
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 NIC DAMNJANOVIC
a causal–explanatory property. Deflationists have typically responded to this

argument in two stages. First they attempt to explain the role of truth in
these explanations without treating the truth predicate as anything more
than a convenient logical device. They then claim that if the truth predicate
is only playing the role of a convenient logical device, truth is not playing a
causal–explanatory role.
Unfortunately, the deflationist’s standard response is inconsistent. As I
shall argue in §§II–III, the first stage of the response actually shows the way
in which truth is a causally explanatory property. The argument I examine,
though, relies on Jackson and Pettit’s account of causal–explanatory proper-
ties, and on this account even logical properties turn out to be causally
explanatory. This implies that the deflationist should remain neutral as to
whether truth is a causal–explanatory property, and focus instead on the
claim that truth, if it is a property, is a merely logical one.
I. THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT AND THE STANDARD RESPONSE
The version of the success argument on which I shall focus begins with the
observation that, in general, people with true beliefs about some domain of
practical activity are more likely to succeed in their goal-directed activities.3
The obvious conclusion to draw on the basis of this observation is that truth
is playing a causal–explanatory role. After all, the truth of an agent A’s
beliefs may explain why A succeeds on more occasions than a relevantly
similar agent with false beliefs. More formally, the argument can be repre-
sented as having the following structure:
. If A has true beliefs about how to get what A wants, A is more likely to
get what A wants [platitude]
. Therefore if A has beliefs about how to get what A wants which have the
property of being true, A is more likely to get what A wants [() and
pleonastic transformation]4
. Therefore the property of being true is appealed to in a causal–
explanatory generalization [() and the definition of causal–explanatory
generalization]
3 This version of the success argument seems to have originally been suggested in H. Put-
nam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), lectures I and
II, and was further developed in Field, ‘The Deflationary Conception of Truth’, in
G. MacDonald and C. Wright (eds), Fact, Science and Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, ),
pp. –. There are other versions of the success argument which focus on the success of
scientific theories, and still others that focus on the long-term success of a species.
4 For the pleonastic use of ‘property’, see S. Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning (MIT Press,
), p. .
© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT 
. Therefore truth is a causal–explanatory property [()]

. Therefore deflationism is false [() and the definition of deflationism].
Of course, a deflationist could object to this argument merely by denying
the alleged platitude with which it begins, or any of the inferences that take
us from () to (). I shall consider some of these strategies below. However,
there is something of a standard deflationist response to the success argu-
ment in the literature, which, at least to begin with, does not diagnose the
problem with the argument at all. Instead, this response attempts to show
that () and the denial of () are consistent.
The response is that in all our explanations of success the real causal work
is being performed by the beliefs in question together with the circum-
stances, and that truth enters the explanations merely because the truth
predicate is a useful expressive or logical device. For although deflationism
about truth is far from a single unified position, deflationists are typically
committed to the idea that all there could be to discovering the nature of
truth is discovering the logical properties of the truth predicate. Most defla-
tionists would agree, that is, that ‘the truth predicate exists solely for the sake
of a certain logical need’ (Horwich, p. ), and is ‘a “logical predicate” like
“exists” or “equals”’,5 and furthermore that to the extent to which truth is a
property it is a logical or quasi-logical property and not a naturalistic pro-
perty with a ‘characteristic causal behaviour’. In response to the success
argument, then, the deflationist may attempt to show that the property of
truth is appealed to in () only in order to satisfy some logical need.
Horwich has given a version of this line of response in his defence of the
version of deflationism which he calls minimalism. His minimal theory of
truth consists of all the axioms characterized by the following equivalence
schema
ES. The proposition that p is true iff p.
According to Horwich (pp. –, –), we can give a full explanation of
how it is that true beliefs contribute to practical success without appealing to
anything more about truth than these equivalence axioms. Suppose Brian
needs his car keys to get to work and believes they are in the trousers he
wore yesterday. It seems obvious in this case that if Brian’s belief is true he is
more likely to find his keys and get to work. According to Horwich, the
explanation of this mundane fact is simple. The relevant equivalence axiom
tells us that if Brian’s belief that his keys are in the trousers he wore
yesterday is true, then his keys are in the trousers he wore yesterday. So if
5 In his ‘Critical Notice: Paul Horwich’s Truth’, Philosophy of Science,  (), pp. –, at
p. , Field attributes this view to Horwich, but seems also to endorse it himself.

 NIC DAMNJANOVIC
Brian believes that his keys are in the trousers he wore yesterday, if his keys
are in the trousers he wore yesterday and Brian wants to get to work, then
the chances are that Brian will get what he wants. In fact, the appeal to
truth is redundant. We could have explained Brian’s success in getting
to work equally well merely by appealing to the fact that he believed his keys
were in the trousers he wore yesterday and that his keys were in the trousers
he wore yesterday.
In this way Horwich shows us how in each individual case a belief’s being
true can contribute to bringing it about that an agent succeeds. In effect, he
has explained the relation between belief and practical success by explaining
why the following long conjunction is true:
. If one believes that going to conference room F will get one what one
wants and going to conference room F will get one what one wants,
then one is more likely to get what one wants; and if one believes that
selling one’s BHP shares now will get one what one wants and selling
one’s BHP shares now will get one what one wants, then one is more
likely to get what one wants; and ...
If this conjunction could do justice to the platitude advanced in (), then it
might seem that Horwich has successfully accounted for what we think
about truth and practical success without treating truth as a causally explan-
atory property. However, his explanation seems to leave the most interesting
aspects of the relation between truth and success unaccounted for. In
particular, it does not seem to do justice to the original observation, namely,
that there is a well recognized pattern of true beliefs contributing to success.
What needed explanation, premise (), was a generalization which involved the
concept truth. Until we are told what role truth is playing in the general-
ization that agents with true beliefs are more likely to succeed, it still seems
that by virtue of having a role in a genuinely causal–explanatory gener-
alization, truth plays a causal–explanatory role.6
However, the deflationist has an obvious way of meeting these further
explanatory demands. It has become a familiar point through the work of
Quine and Leeds7 that by virtue of its disquotational properties the truth
6 M. Devitt, Realism and Truth, nd edn (Princeton UP, ), pp. –, clearly takes the
general pattern of success to be the crucial explanatory target. However, S. Leeds, ‘Truth,
Correspondence and Success’, Philosophical Studies,  (), pp. –, and Field, ‘The
Deflationary Conception of Truth’, and TAF, pp. –, focus on cases in which we are
ignorant of an agent’s specific beliefs and even the form of the correct explanation of the
agent’s success. But in such cases the truth predicate is clearly playing a role similar to its role
in the more familiar cases in which we assert something like ‘Everything Fred said was true’
when we cannot remember everything Fred said.
7 W.V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, ), pp. –; Leeds,
‘Theories of Reference and Truth’, Erkenntnis,  (), pp. –.

DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT 
predicate plays an important role in allowing us to express certain general-

izations. As Horwich’s response suggests, the equivalence axioms allow us to
move from () to
. If one believes that going to conference room F will get one what one
wants and the proposition that going to conference room F will get
one what one wants is true, then one is more likely to get what one
wants; and if one believes that selling one’s BHP shares now will get
one what one wants and the proposition that selling one’s BHP shares
now will get one what one wants is true, then one is more likely to get
what one wants; and ...
Once we have () we are able to move to
. If one has true beliefs about how to get what one wants, one is more
likely to get what one wants.
In () the conjunction is not in a form susceptible to objectual quanti-
fication. Although ‘that going to conference room F will get one what one
wants’ is the name of a proposition and so can be replaced by a bound
variable in the usual way, ‘going to conference room F will get one what
one wants’ in its second occurrence expresses a proposition rather than
naming it, and so cannot be replaced by a bound variable. However, the
disquotational feature of the truth predicate allows us to move from () to
(), so that instead of expressing the proposition that going to conference
room F will get one what one wants, we name the proposition and
predicate of it the property of being true. Once () is converted to () in
this way we can express the infinite conjunction as the generalization ex-
pressed in ().
So according to the standard response, truth is used in () merely as a
device for generalization. Pace the conclusion of the success argument, it
seems that deflationism is consistent with the role of truth in explanations of
practical success. For truth is used in () merely to satisfy a certain logical
need.8
II. THE PROBLEM WITH THE STANDARD RESPONSE
I can highlight the problem which the deflationist’s response encounters

by exploiting the difference between causally relevant and efficacious
8 A. Gupta, ‘Minimalism’, Philosophical Perspectives,  (), pp. –, has argued that
the deflationist cannot explain the use of truth as a device for expressing generalizations.
But for responses, see TAF, pp. –; and C. Hill, Thought and World (Cambridge UP, ),
pp. –.

 NIC DAMNJANOVIC
properties.9 Suppose Ann has been slipped a sleeping pill. It is because she
ingested a sleeping-pill that she is now face down in her bowl of soup. By
pleonastic transformation, we can also say that Ann is face down in her soup
because she ingested something that had the property of being a sleeping-
pill. However, it is a further question whether the property of being a
sleeping-pill is actually doing any causing. In fact, it seems that what is doing
the causing is that Ann ingested something which has the property of having
a certain chemical composition. If we suppose that the property of being a
sleeping-pill is also efficacious, then we would be forced to admit a case of
causal over-determination. For then the pill ingested would have two
properties both of which are sufficient to bring about Ann’s slumping into
her soup. But despite not being efficacious, being a sleeping-pill is obviously
a causally explanatory property which is appealed to in many legitimate
causal explanations. Following Jackson and Pettit, I shall call this way of
being causally explanatory ‘causal relevance’. The property of being a
sleeping-pill is said to be causally relevant because the efficacious property,
namely, a certain chemical composition, underlies it. So causal explanatory
properties, on this account, are properties that are either causally relevant
or efficacious.
The problem for deflationists is that it may seem that their response has
shown, at best, that truth is not efficacious in bringing about success. The
standard response attempts to show that in all our explanations of success
the real causal work is being performed by the agent’s beliefs and mundane
facts about the world. But for all the deflationist has shown, truth may
nevertheless be a causally relevant property. In particular, according to
Jackson and Pettit’s account of causal–explanatory properties, the fact that
explanations which appeal to some property P can be replaced by explan-
ations that make no appeal to P does not entail that P is not causally
explanatory. For example, we can give a perfectly good explanation of why
Ann has collapsed by appealing to the chemical composition of the
substance she has ingested, rather than to the fact that it has the property of
being a sleeping-pill. Thus there is a real worry that the standard response
leaves open the possibility that truth is a causally relevant but not efficacious
property. So to respond properly to the success argument, the deflationist
needs to point out where the argument has gone wrong. Until the deflation-
ist does this, the argument seems to have shown that truth is causally
explanatory, while the standard response seems only to have shown that
truth is not efficacious.
9 I take this distinction from Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit. See, e.g., their ‘Causation in
the Philosophy of Mind’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,  (), pp. –, and
‘Program Explanation: a General Perspective’, Analysis,  (), pp. –.

DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT 
One obvious way to block the argument would be to deny ().10 But even
if () is not platitudinous, it is overwhelmingly plausible. One could also
attempt to reject the move from () to (), by urging that ‘true’ is not a real
predicate. Prosententialists, for example, would make just this claim. Alter-
natively, one might worry about the move from () to () on the ground that
deflationists may claim that although ‘true’ is a predicate, it does not express
a property. However, I have attempted to state the success argument in a
way that would be acceptable both to nominalists about properties and to
those that think that some, but not all, predicates express properties. By
appealing only to a pleonastic conception of properties, the claim that truth is
a property is quite innocuous. On the basis of this innocuous claim, we can
discuss whether or not the property of being true has any of those features
that are often claimed as distinguishing features of more robust properties.
In this case the question, of course, is whether truth is a causal–explanatory
property. The discussion would proceed in an exactly parallel fashion if we
assumed that all properties must be causally explanatory, and so were to ask
instead whether the predicate ‘true’ is such that it expresses a property.
More importantly, however, what I am calling the ‘standard response’ to the
success argument allows the move from () to (). Horwich (pp. –), for
example, explicitly claims both that ‘true’ is a predicate and that it expresses
a property.
Perhaps, then, a deflationist could in a sense grant () and (), but claim
that an agent’s success in such cases is really being promoted not by the
beliefs’ truth, but by some other property they have which tracks truth, such
as the property of being justified. The problem with this response is that
beliefs can be true without being justified as well as justified without being
true. When the two properties come apart in either of these ways, however,
it is obvious that success tracks truth and not justification. For an agent with
true beliefs, whether they are justified or not, is more likely to succeed than
an agent with false but justified beliefs. Moreover, the response is not helped
by beefing up the notion of justification so that truth and justification can
never come apart. If this project succeeded, the obvious conclusion to draw
would be that truth supervenes on this new notion of justification, a con-
clusion which would not be welcomed by a deflationist, who is committed to
there being no true supervenience claim of this sort. As mentioned earlier,
deflationists claim that if truth can be said to have a nature, it is a merely
logical one: there is no non-logical property on which truth supervenes.
Regardless of their plausibility, neither of these two moves, nor any
attempt to deny the move from () to () for that matter, seems compatible
10 For an attempt to deny (), see S. Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (MIT Press, ),
ch. .

 NIC DAMNJANOVIC
with the standard response. This response agrees that truth plays a role in
explanations of success, but attempts to show that the role played is a merely
logical one. So the standard response is willing to accept (), and so must
deny the move either from () to () or from () to (). The problem I started
with, though, was that deflationists seem to accept that if truth is a
causal–explanatory property, then deflationism is false. This only leaves the
move from () to (); and indeed it is on this step that deflationists have
focused.
It is clear from Field’s comments in this context, for example, that the
standard response is undertaken as an attempt to show that truth is not
playing a real causal–explanatory role in generalizations about success.
According to Field, there is a ‘special kind of causal–explanatory role’ such
that properties that play these roles stand in need of a sort of physicalistic
reduction which, in the case of truth, would be anathema to a deflationist.
While Field does not elaborate on what this role is, he makes it clear that as
long as truth is only playing the role of a logical device, it does not have this
‘special kind of causal–explanatory role’ (TAF, p. ). But although deflation-
ists sometimes gesture at the move from () to () as the object of their
dissatisfaction, they do not say why it is that () does not imply that truth is a
causally relevant property.
One reason why deflationists might doubt that () is entailed by () is that
the standard response shows that appeals to truth are eliminable from
explanations of an agent’s success. As I suggested above, though, the
Jackson and Pettit account of causal–explanatory properties rejects the idea
that this sort of eliminability on its own undermines the claim that truth is
playing a causal–explanatory role in such cases. This is made clear by the
fact that we can still give an explanation of why Ann has collapsed without
appealing to the fact that the substance she ingested has the property of
being a sleeping-pill. Nevertheless, a deflationist may complain that though
this may be so for the sleeping-pill example, the standard response involves
replacing an explanation which appeals to truth by an intensionally equivalent
explanation which makes no use of truth. So the standard response might be
taken as showing that in a very strong sense of ‘eliminate’, we can eliminate
appeals to truth from explanations of an agent’s success. Given that appeals
to the property of being true are so strongly eliminable, we should conclude
that truth is not playing a causal–explanatory role in these explanations.11
But even if the explanations are intensionally equivalent, it is still unclear
whether the eliminability mentioned undermines the success argument. As
O’Leary-Hawthorne and Oppy suggest, the fact that explanations which do
11 The helpful comments of two anonymous referees have prompted me to emphasize this
point and to insert this paragraph and the next.
DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT 
not appeal to truth are equivalent to explanations which do could equally be

seen as showing that truth is causally explanatory.12 For if one succeeds
because one believes that p, and p, and believing truly is nothing more than
believing that p where p (for some p), then it looks as if it is because of the
truth of one’s belief that one succeeds. The question remains as to what, if
anything, the eliminability of appeals to truth shows about whether truth is a
causal–explanatory property.
I have shown, then, that the standard response comes in two stages. First
it attempts to show that the first premise of the success argument and
the denial of the conclusion are consistent. Having made this claim, the
response goes on to diagnose the problem with the success argument as lying
in the move from () to (). The problem with this tactic is that it has not
been shown what is in fact wrong with the move from () to (). In
particular, the Jackson and Pettit account of causal–explanatory properties
denies that the first step in the standard response contains the resources to
secure the second. This is all the more worrying because the Jackson and
Pettit account seems to suggest that truth is causally relevant to explanations
of agents’ success. Thus the important question for the deflationist is
whether truth is really a causally relevant property. In the next section I
shall consider a number of reasons deflationists might offer for answering
this question negatively. However, far from finding any reason to block the
move from () to (), I hope to show that, if we accept the Jackson and Pettit
account, the first stage of the standard response is inconsistent with the
second. In other words, the deflationist’s own description of the role of truth
in causal–explanatory generalizations about success highlights the way in
which truth plays a causal–explanatory role.
III. OBJECTIONS
An obvious way for the deflationist to reject the claim that truth is a
causal–explanatory property would be to reject the idea that the sort of
properties I have called causally relevant but not efficacious are causally
explanatory. Instead, the deflationist could follow Kim13 and claim that the
only genuinely causal–explanatory properties are (in Jackson and Pettit’s
terminology) the efficacious ones. However, this objection does not help
deflationists out of their difficulty. Denying that causal relevance is a form
of causal–explanatoriness entails that the only real causal–explanatory
12 J. O’Leary-Hawthorne and G. Oppy, ‘Minimalism and Truth’, Noûs,  (), pp. –
, at p. .
13 J. Kim, ‘Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 
(), pp. –.
 NIC DAMNJANOVIC
properties are those properties that make up some ultimate bottom-level of

explanation. For any property that supervenes on lower-level properties is
automatically refused the honour of being labelled causal–explanatory. If all
but a few fundamental properties fail to be causal–explanatory, the alleged
fact that truth does not play a causal–explanatory role is not very exciting. For
the divide between those properties that are causally explanatory and those
that are not does nothing to help to distinguish truth from ‘naturalistic’
properties like being a tree. On this view, being a tree is not a causally
explanatory property either. Nevertheless, a deflationary account of trees
would obviously be inadequate, and it is surely crucial to the deflationist’s
project to distinguish truth from such properties.
A far better objection would be to claim that the sketch I have given of
causal relevance makes it too easy for a property to be causally relevant. For
although the standard response has not shown what is wrong with the
success argument, the form of the response does suggest a reason for
blocking the move from () to (). That is, a proponent of the standard
response may suggest that properties need to do more than merely appear in
causal–explanatory generalizations if they are to be causally relevant. The
standard response suggests such an objection because it has argued that the
only role for truth in the generalization about success is as a logical device.
Thus, for one thing, being a sleeping-pill and being true appear in causal–
explanatory generalizations in fundamentally different ways, and so merely
showing that being a sleeping-pill can be a causally relevant property is not
enough to show that being true can be. Moreover, it might seem obvious
that logical properties just cannot play causal–explanatory roles.
To evaluate this objection I first need to say more about what makes a
property causally relevant. In particular I need to compare the roles the pro-
perties of being a sleeping-pill and being true play in causal explanations.
Having done that, I shall sketch a less controversial case in which a logical
property does play a causal–explanatory role.
One important feature of causally relevant properties like being a
sleeping-pill or being a pain is that these properties supervene on efficacious
properties in a multiply realizable way. There are a number of different
chemical structures that we have discovered can make a sleeping-pill, and
the property of being in pain can be instantiated by John having his C-fibres
fire or Dave having his D-fibres fire or .... In both the pain and the sleeping-
pill examples it is clear that the properties are causally relevant, in part
because they supervene in this multiply realizable way on properties (like
John having his C-fibres fire) that are, if not efficacious, at least closer to
being efficacious. In particular, the property of being in pain requires a
certain combination of agent and neural event. If pain is instantiated, then
DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT 
either John has his C-fibres firing or Dave has his D-fibres firing or .... But in
just the same way, the property of truth requires a combination of truth-
bearer and state of the world. If truth is instantiated in an agent’s set of
beliefs, for example, then either he believes that p, and p; or he believes that
q, and q; or .... In fact, the standard deflationist method for explaining the
generalization linking truth and practical success relies heavily on this point.
What is more, truth’s subvenient disjuncts (like believing that p when p) are,
at least relatively, efficacious.
However, if being multiply realizable in this way were all there is to being
causally relevant, we could invent causally relevant properties at will. Sup-
pose the explanation of why John fell over is that he stepped on a slippery
object. We could introduce the multiply realizable property of being
slippery-or-blue and call it ‘blipperiness’. Both blueness and slipperiness are,
at least relative to blipperiness, efficacious. However, the object’s being blip-
pery is clearly not causally relevant to John’s falling over, even though the
object was in fact blippery, and what makes it blippery, namely its slipperi-
ness, is causally relevant. To avoid classifying such properties as causally
explanatory, Jackson and Pettit emphasize that to be causally relevant a
property must have a distinctive explanatory role to play. A property is only
causally relevant if appealing to it in explaining the phenomenon in question
provides us with more true information than the information we would
capture by appealing to the lower-level properties. In particular, explana-
tions that appeal to multiply realizable causally relevant properties carry the
counterfactual information that any one of the disjuncts might have been
efficacious and the same effect would still have been produced. When we
explain why Ann has her face in her soup by appealing to the fact that she
ingested something with the property of being a sleeping-pill, our explana-
tion carries the counterfactual information that any of the different chemical
structures usable to make a sleeping-pill would have had the same effect. If
we had appealed to just the particular chemical structure that actually
caused Ann to collapse, we would not have conveyed this information.
So the appeal to truth in our explanations only implies that truth is a
causally relevant property if talk of truth provides further information than
we would convey by citing only the efficacious properties. But the deflation-
ist’s own standard response to the success argument shows why appeal to
truth does provide us with the further information. The explanation of how
deflationism can account for the generalization linking truth and prac-
tical success shows that each possible instance of true belief would facilitate
success. And in the explanation of the generalization that true beliefs
facilitate success, the deflationist makes use of the idea that the concept of
truth allows us to express such generalizations merely by exploiting its
 NIC DAMNJANOVIC
disquotational role. So explaining how A succeeded not just by pointing out

some belief A had and the state of affairs, but rather by appealing to the truth
of this belief, carries the counterfactual information that other true beliefs
(perhaps of a similar kind, but perhaps not if we have no idea what the right
sort of explanation would be) would also have brought about success. For
example, we could explain why Brian found his keys by appealing not to the
fact that he believed that the keys were in yesterday’s trousers and the keys
were in yesterday’s trousers, but rather to the fact that he had a true belief
about the location of his keys. This explanation carries the information not
only that if he had believed the keys were in his trousers and his keys were in
his trousers he would have succeeded, but also that if he had believed that
the keys were in his desk drawer and his keys were in his desk drawer he
would have found his keys. Appealing to truth allows us to express the same
sort of counterfactual supporting generalizations as appeals to being in pain
or being a sleeping-pill can.
However, even if proponents of the standard response accept that the
property of being true and the property of being a sleeping-pill function
similarly in causal explanations, they may simply hold firm to the conviction
that logical properties cannot play causal–explanatory roles. I can show why
this conviction is misguided with a less controversial case.14 If we are asked
to explain why an object with the same mass as another is accelerating at
the same rate, we may show that the magnitude of the force applied to each
was the same. In such a case the appeal to the identity of the magnitude of
the forces is of the same sort as the appeal to the property of being in pain
or the property of being a sleeping-pill. Having the property of identity of
magnitude in this context is obviously a multiply realizable property, as
there are an infinite number of pairs of forces that would make it true
that the same force had been applied to both objects. And although we con-
sider the real causal work as done by the actual forces applied to the objects,
we can nevertheless explain their relative accelerations in terms of the
magnitude of the force applied to the one having the multiply realizable
property of being identical to the magnitude of the force applied to the
other. It is because the sizes of the two forces stand in the relation of identity
that the two objects are accelerating at the same rate. Here is a case where a
logical property, identity, is doing some real causal explaining.
Of course, this still sounds very strange. If an argument leads to the
conclusion that a logical property can nevertheless be causal–explanatory, it
is tempting to conclude that one of its premises must be false. In particular,
it is tempting to suggest that in the case I have just described it is not the
14 This case is discussed in Jackson and Pettit, ‘Causation in the Philosophy of Mind’,
pp. –.

DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT 
property of identity that does any causal explaining, but rather the property
of identity of applied force. Similarly, in the success case, perhaps it is not
the property of truth that does any causal explaining but just the property of
having a true belief. Obviously I agree that the complex property in these
cases is causal–explanatory. The question is whether the properties of truth
and identity are also causally relevant. I think it is clear that according to
Jackson and Pettit’s account, they are. If the beliefs in question were not true
or the applied forces not identical, the result would have been different. In
other words, there is nothing wrong with saying that the objects are accel-
erating at the same rate because they have the property of having had an
identical force applied to them. But there is also nothing wrong with saying
that the forces applied to the objects brought about the identity of their rates
of acceleration because the forces had the property of being identical.
Nevertheless, there is still a more fundamental objection to the claim that
the example of the two accelerating objects shows that a logical property
could also be a causal–explanatory property. The objection I have in mind
would refuse even to accept that the complex property – the property of
having the same force applied – was causally relevant in this case. The
worry is that such a property is a mere ‘Cambridge’ property, and is being
used to explain how the object came to possess another ‘Cambridge’
property – that of having an identical rate of acceleration.15 One of the
characteristic features of Cambridge properties, however, is that it seems
absurd to suppose that they could be called on as part of a genuine causal
explanation. One case that clearly does involve these sorts of changes is this.
Suppose the explanation of why I am no longer the tallest player on my
basketball team is that a new player has just joined the team. This does not
show that the property of being in a team which a new player has just joined
is a causally relevant property. For although I have undergone a change in
my relative height as a result of the addition of a new member of my team, it
seems wrong to say that the addition of the new member has caused this
change in my relative height or that the addition of the new member some-
how causally explains the change in my relative height.
There are a number of important differences between this sort of case
and the accelerated-objects example, however. Most importantly, in con-
trast with the explanation offered for my change in relative height, both the
physical and social sciences frequently use properties like identity of force, or
the fact that one climate is more severe than another, in their causal ex-
planations. Part of the reason for this disparity is surely that in these cases
there is an underlying process involving efficacious properties that ensures
that we can map relations between inputs onto relations between outputs.
15 I thank an anonymous referee for showing me that this point needed elaboration.

 NIC DAMNJANOVIC
When we change my relative height by adding a new player to the team,

however, there is no efficacious process linking the height of the new player
with my new relative height (although, of course, there is a simple way of
calculating my new relative height on the basis of the height of the new
player). These differences clearly distinguish the relation that holds between
the application of identical forces and the consequent identity of accelera-
tions from the relations that hold between mere Cambridge properties and
relations.
Thus at least according to the Jackson and Pettit model of causal explana-
tion, in the example of the accelerated objects, both the complex property of
having an identically sized force applied and identity itself are causal–
explanatory properties. So if we accept this account, we should also accept
that truth is playing a causal–explanatory role in explanations of success.
Moreover, it is the deflationists’ own standard response to the success argu-
ment that helps to explain why this is the case.
IV. DEFLATIONISM DEFEATED?
The standard response to the success argument attempts to show that the
generalization in () that links truth and practical success does not grant
truth a causal–explanatory role. To this end, the deflationist convincingly
argues that no more than the disquotational role of the truth predicate is
appealed to in this generalization. However, Jackson and Pettit’s account of
causal relevance implies that if we accept the deflationist’s account of the
role of truth in these explanations, then truth is a causally relevant property.
Thus the standard response fails to show that truth is not a causally
explanatory property.
This leaves the deflationist with a choice. On the one hand, my attack on
the standard response is predicated on an account of causal–explanatory
properties which some will claim makes it too easy for properties to be
causally explanatory. In fact, my discussion of this account brought out a
rather surprising consequence of it, namely, that even logical properties can
be causally explanatory. If such accounts of the causal–explanatory are
intolerable, or can be shown to fail for other reasons, then deflationists can
hold onto their standard response and deny the move from () to () in the
success argument. On this approach, however, we still need a plausible
alternative theory of causal–explanatory properties that explains what is
wrong with the move from () to ().
On the other hand, a deflationist could accept the Jackson and Pettit
account and also accept that truth is a causal–explanatory property. The
DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT 
core deflationary claims of Horwich, Field and Soames, for example, are
concerned with the idea that a full account of truth will only need to men-
tion the logical properties of the concept truth.16 But the standard response,
together with Jackson and Pettit’s account of the causal–explanatory,
suggests that these core claims can be upheld while also accepting that truth
plays a causal–explanatory role. If this is right, I see no obstacle to prevent
the deflationist from accepting that truth is both a causally relevant property
and a logical one. For the standard response makes clear the way in which
truth can be a causally relevant property merely by playing a rather simple
logical role. So instead of following the standard response and attempting to
reject the move from () to (), the deflationist should instead respond to the
success argument by denying the step from () to ().
Further, allowing truth to play a causal–explanatory role does not im-
mediately imply that deflationists like Horwich are wrong to insist that the
distinction between truth and turquoise is important to the deflationist. For
there is one obvious way in which properties like truth and identity, while
capable of being causally relevant, are different from properties like being a
tree, being in pain or being turquoise. For the latter sort of property, it
requires substantial investigation to discover the lower-level properties that
underlie them. For logical properties like truth and identity, on the other
hand, it is immediately apparent what lower-level states or properties under-
lie them when we use them in an explanation. Although this distinction
probably cannot be made much more precise, it provides enough precision
to bring out the point of the deflationists’ insistence that we should not
assimilate the two sorts of properties.
Ultimately then, deflationism is not much troubled by the success argu-
ment. On either branch of the decision tree I have just described, the core
claims of deflationism can be upheld. Given this, though, it is far better for
deflationists to refrain from committing themselves to any particular claims
about whether truth is or is not a causal–explanatory property. Instead, they
should focus on the claim that truth, if it is a property, is a merely logical
one. Whether or not truth is also a causal–explanatory property depends on
matters external to the theory of truth.17
Australian National University
16S. Soames, Understanding Truth (Oxford UP, ), ch. .

17Special thanks are due to Daniel Stoljar for many discussions about this paper, and for
originally suggesting that the Jackson–Pettit account of causal explanations might prove a
problem for deflationism. Thanks also to Martin Davies, Frank Jackson, Philippe Chuard and
Karen Bennett for helpful comments and advice on earlier versions.

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14679213, 2005, 218, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00384.x by University Of Southampton, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2023].

DEFLATIONISM AND THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT

a causal–explanatory property. Deflationists have typically responded to this

I. THE SUCCESS ARGUMENT AND THE STANDARD RESPONSE

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

. Therefore truth is a causal–explanatory property [()]

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

predicate plays an important role in allowing us to express certain general-

II. THE PROBLEM WITH THE STANDARD RESPONSE

I can highlight the problem which the deflationist’s response encounters

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

not appeal to truth are equivalent to explanations which do could equally be

properties are those properties that make up some ultimate bottom-level of

disquotational role. So explaining how A succeeded not just by pointing out

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

When we change my relative height by adding a new player to the team,

IV. DEFLATIONISM DEFEATED?

Australian National University

16S. Soames, Understanding Truth (Oxford UP, ), ch. .

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

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