Jeremy Kelly

I examine the difficulties that several philosophers of language are liable to encounter in their attempts to provide an account of the connection between truth and assertion. I then attempt to provide an account of this connection. The analysis is concerned chiefly with difficulties which consist in elucidating the conceptual connection between truth and assertion in a way that respects certain linguistic intuitions while at the same time rendering the concept of truth amenable to a semantic interpretation. The proposed view suggests one way in which we might go about meeting the theoretical demands implicit in addressing this concern, among others, demonstrating the extent to which a theory of truth should be regarded as belonging to the province of epistemology. Insofar as semantical considerations figure into such a theory, a more systematic investigation of the interface between epistemology and natural language semantics is recommended. The solution to many problems at this interface, I argue, lay in an analysis of judgment.

I argue that Austin's early view on truth is deficient in a way that Strawson's redundancy view is not and that the semantic categories traditionally used to treat the truth-predicate are inadequate for a theory of truth. A philosophically viable theory of truth must also provide an analysis of the concept of truth. To support this claim I show that the defects in Austin's view are a consequence of failing to make a distinction between two concepts of truth. Austin claims that though we often refer to a given state of affairs in predicating "is true" to a given sentence, this act of referring yields yet another sentence, which as asserted receives a truth-value on grounds distinct from those by which the initial assertion is judged true. While Austin's view may be seen to be partially correct given these remarks, it can only be correct if we first observe the above distinction with respect to the concept of truth. Having argued for the plausibility of the needed distinction, I finally propose an amendment to Austin's view that will incorporate Strawson's deflationary insights