Deflationism, Inflationism, Substantiveness, Sparseness

One way that 'deflationary' views of truth are typically taken to differ from'inflationary' views is that deflationary views deny, and inflationary views assert, that truth is a 'substantive' property. In this paper I consider how useful this notion of substantiveness is as a method to distinguish deflationism from inflationism. In particular, I argue that the two main conceptions of what it is for properties to be 'substantive' or 'insubstantive' (those of Wright 2001 and Horwich 1998) fail to map onto the more general metaphysical distinction between abundant and sparse properties. Given that it seems as though considering truth as a sparse property best fits the inflationists' motivations for inflating, this suggests that the debate shoulfffd be refocused on the issue of whether or not truth is a sparse property, as opposed to whether or not truth is a 'substantive' property.