According to Blackburn, deflationism is the view that there's nothing in general to say about what it means to be true in general.(1)
This means that what Blackburn calls Ramsey's Ladder (which goes from "p", to "it is true that p", to "it is a fact that it is true that p" ... all the way to "it corresponds to the eternal normative order governing the universe that p") is horizontal. Each rung says just the same as the bottom run, namely "p".(2)
In the same text Blackburn says that the correspondence theory of truth is trivially acceptable, namely "p is true because it corresponds with the facts", but this too is a horizontal claim "p corresponds with the facts" also just means "p".
Now, that's something I will agree with in the street man sense of "facts", but what of my own, neo-Kantian sense of "fact"? My stance is that we don't have any facts, because I relegate "fact" to the inaccessible objective reality, and we are all subjects here.(3)
So I am not going to accept that being true means corresponding to facts (although I definitely agree that saying "'p corresponds to the facts' only says 'p'".
In my neo-Kantian epistemology (4) I will not allow any reference to anything mind-independent in the epistemology, hence truth cannot be based on facts.
So, what is truth, if not a correspondence to facts?
My answer is that "truth", the very concept, is an inductive conclusion from the general tendency of the universe towards consistency.
The general tendency of the universe towards consistency also happens to be why induction works so well (no problem, seriously).
So how does that unpack in inductive terms?
I say it goes something like this: we see that some beliefs seem to correspond well with how the world seems to behave. (Seem is my indicator of an inductive conclusion, so the formation of truth would be "we seem to keep seeing some beliefs seeming to correspond well with how the world seems to behave").
This means that if we want to explain to ourselves why we think that p, we should look to the evidence, to the apparent reliability of the belief p. Because evidence is experience, and experience is nicely mind-dependent, and hence it is allowed in my epistemology.
So what does this mean with regards to the really deep questions (the 5Y of reality, if you wish)?
It means, as always when dealing with induction, that at some point we should expect to come up with "it just is". (5)
And that's kind a ground-breaking, or rather ground-establishing when it comes to truth.
[This is the most fleshed-out bit of mind-lint I have so far produced - there may be problems with it, there may be unanswered questions and gotchas, but by golly, looking for them will be fun]
(1) Truth, edited by Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons, Oxford readings in philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1999, page 3
(2) ibid, p.6
(3) if you are an object, you may continue reading, but be aware that the text will be puzzling.
(4) which Kant would no doubt be rather upset about, so perhaps it's not a good name, but here we are...
(5) As I read it, this is where Yudkowski suggests recursive justification hits rock bottom http://lesswrong.com/lw/s0/where_recursive_justification_hits_bottom/
