 In light of the two central ideas discussed so far – the idea that the equivalence schema is exhaustive of the notion of truth and the idea that there is no substantive truth property – you might wonder why we have a concept of truth in the first place. After all, contrast this question with the explanation of why we have the concept of mammals. A natural suggestion is that it allows us to think and talk about mammals and to develop theories of them. For deflationism, however, as we have just seen, being true is completely different from being a mammal; why then do we have a concept of truth? (An analogous question might be asked about the word ‘true’, i.e., why we have the word ‘true’ and related words in our language at all. In the following discussion we will not discriminate between questions about the concept of truth and questions about the word ‘true’ and will move back and forth between them.)