 Before describing the problems with deflationary-truth nominalism, it’s important to note that the central claim behind that view is an empirical hypothesis about ordinary discourse. In particular, it’s a claim about the meaning of the term ‘true’, or about the concept of truth. When deflationary-truth nominalists say that, e.g., ‘3 is prime’ could be true even if there were no such thing as the number 3, they are making a claim about the ordinary concept of truth. They are saying that that concept applies in certain situations that most of us—platonists and fictionalists and just about everyone else—think it doesn’t apply in. If deflationary-truth nominalists try to deny that they are making a claim about the ordinary concept of truth, then their view will collapse into a version of fictionalism. For since they agree with fictionalists that ‘3 is prime’ purports to be about a certain abstract object, and since they also agree that there are no such things as abstract objects, it follows that if they endorsed a standard view of truth—i.e., a platonist-fictionalist view according to which a sentence of the form ‘Fa’ could not be true unless ‘a’ referred to an actually existing object—then they would have to admit that ‘3 is prime’ is untrue. Now, they might go on to argue that these sentences are true*—where this is defined in such a way that sentences of the form ‘Fa’ can be true* even if there is no such thing as a—but, of course, fictionalists would agree with this. So if deflationary-truth nominalism is to be genuinely distinct from fictionalism, it has to involve a thesis about the meaning of the ordinary word ‘true’; in particular, the claim has to be that sentences of the form ‘Fa’ can be true, in the ordinary sense of the term, even if the singular term ‘a’ doesn’t refer to any actually existing object.