In the last post I said that mathematical fictionalism has consequences that sound terrible, but really aren't worrisome at all, when you think about what they actually entail. Something similar could be said about alethic fictionalism, or fictionalism about truth. Consider the truth predicate. It’s a widely held view that the purpose of having a truth predicate is to allow people to undertake commitments to certain claims without having to explicitly state those claims. So, if a theory $\Gamma$ entails infinitely many claims that you want to endorse, you can say ‘Everything entailed by $\Gamma$ is true', rather than explicitly state every claim entailed by $\Gamma$, which would be impossible. So the job of the truth predicate isn’t to ascribe a special property, TRUTH, to things, but to allow us to undertake commitments without having to articulate those commitments explicitly.
Nevertheless, you could consistently hold that, even though what explains why we have a truth predicate has nothing to do with ascribing the property TRUTH to things, the meaning of a predicate is always to ascribe a property to something. And if, in addition, you held that there is no such property as TRUTH, then you would end up being a fictionalist about truth discourse. Any claim of the form ' $\phi$ is true’ would be false, since nothing has the property of truth. But this wouldn’t really matter, since the truth predicate would still allow us to do what it was designed to do. (It would, however, sound like a really bad result.)
