Vann McGee

Tarski showed how to give satisfactory theories of truth for a wide variety of languages, but he required that the theory of truth for a language be formulated in an essentially richer metalanguage. Since there is no human language essentially richer than a natural language and since we would like to develop consistent theories of truth for natural languages, we would like to learn how to formulate a theory of truth for a language within that very language. ;Toward this end, I consider a class of formalized languages called partially interpreted languages, derived from the work of Carnap, in which sentences are classified as definitely true, definitely false, and intermediate. I give a condition of adequacy, analogus to Tarski's Convension T, requiring that is true be definitely true iff is definitely true , and show that it is possible to give, effectively and explicity, a theory of truth that meets the condition. Theories of truth that meet the condition are shown to have various pleasant properties. The construction depends heavily upon the work of Saul Kripke. ;In addition to the work of Tarski and Kripke, the "naive semantics" of Gupta and Herzberger is discussed. Of the paradoxes other than the liar, only Montague's paradox about necessity is discussed in any detail. To solve this paradox, I recommend a provability interpretation of modal logic of the type studied by Solovay. Prospects for extending Solovay's results into quantified modal logic are discussed. ;The work is entirely concerned with formal languages, although it is hoped that the tools developed can be usefully applied to natural languages.

That reference is inscrutable is demonstrated, it is argued, not only by W. V. Quine's arguments but by Peter Unger's "Problem of the Many." Applied to our own language, this is a paradoxical result, since nothing could be more obvious to speakers of English than that, when they use the word "rabbit," they are talking about rabbits. The solution to this paradox is to take a disquotational view of reference for one's own language, so that "When I use 'rabbit,' I refer to rabbits" is made true by the meaning of the word "refer." The reference relation is extended to other languages by translation. The explanation for this peculiarly egocentric conception of semantics-questions of others' meanings are settled by asking what I mean by words of my language-is to be found in our practice of predicting and explaining other people's behavior by empathetic identification. I understand other people's behavior by asking what I would do in their place

This is not an overly ambitious paper. What I would like to do is to take a thesis that most people would regard as wildly implausible, and convince you that it is, in fact, false. What's worse, the argument I shall give is by no means airtight, though I hope it's reasonably convincing. The thesis has to do with the fuzzy boundaries of terms that refer to familiar middle-sized objects, terms like ‘Kilimanjaro’ and ‘the tallest mountain in Africa.’ It is intuitively clear that Kilimanjaro has a fuzzy boundary, so that there are some clods of earth at the base of the mountain for which there isn't anything, either in our practices in using the word ‘Kilimanjaro’ or in the facts of geography, that determines an answer to the question whether the clod is a part of Kilimanjaro.