Bo Mou

In this paper, I suggest an approach to the alleged problem with the Tarskian formal definition of truth: its enumerative character seems to make it unable to capture our pretheoretic general understanding of truth. For this purpose, after spelling out two requirements for extending an enumerative definition to new cases, I examine to what extent Tarski's Convention T provides what are needed for extending the Tarski's enumerative definition. I conclude that, though not explicitly providing what are needed, Convention T does implicitly suggest something quite promising and provide necessary conceptual resources for its further modifications. Then I suggest a Tarskian explicitly general definition of what it is to be a truth-definition on the basis of some theoretical and conceptual resources within Tarski's semantic theory, and I explain how it would make the Tarskian seemingly enumerative formal definition have a general character in accord with our pretheoretic understanding of truth. Finally, I examine the current proposal in comparison with Davidson's approach and in the light of Hintikka's new perspective

This paper is concerned with the issue of how predication is possible, as a significant common concern in the philosophy of language, metaphysics and semantics. A ‘subject-comment’ account is suggested in view of its constructive engagement with two relevant competing approaches, i.e., the traditional ‘subject-categorization’ account and the ‘topic-comment’ account. The suggested account views predication as a unifying two-level predication: the primary level of predication is made through recognizing and commenting on some particular attribute(s) of the subject’s semantic referent as a thick object (resulting in a weaker version of Russellian proposition) and the secondary level of predication through categorizing the subject’s semantic referent into a certain group via the Fregean conceptual content of the predicate.