¹ ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), pp. 279, 300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² See e.g., Dummett, M., Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), p. 444;Google ScholarTarski, A., ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics’, in Feigl, H. and Sellars, W. (eds), Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York: Apple Century Crofts, 1949), p. 53 & fn5;Google ScholarDavidson, D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 43–45.Google Scholar

³ I ignore the complication that Tarski regarded sentences as ‘classes of inscriptions of a similar form’. A type-sentence is not the same as the class of its tokens, since (i) the existence of tokens of that type is not guaranteed, (ii) there are properties of the tokens which the type must also possess, while the class cannot possess them: just like particular Union-Jacks, the Union-Jack type must be striped, which cannot be said of the class of Union Jacks.

⁴ Ironically, in ‘The Second Person’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1992), pp. 255–6,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Davidson seems to suggest that the existence of a language does not depend on anybody speaking it, because it is an abstract object, unobservable and changeless. It is difficult to see how this can be squared with his claim in ‘The Structure and Content of Truth of speakers, since nothing would count as a sentence. If languages do not depend on speakers, how could sentences? In my view, the Platonism of Davidson's Tarskian heritage and the anthropocentrism of his pragmatist inclinations are pulling him into opposite directions here. But what counts for our purposes is this. To maintain that languages can exist without speakers is even more problematic than holding that concepts do. It implies, for example, that languages cannot die out, and that, as regards existence, there is no difference between Spanish and Mohican.

⁵ Logico-Linguistic Papers (London: Methuen, 1971), ch. 1;Google Scholar also Wolfram, S., Philosophical Logic: an Introduction (London: Routledge, 1989), ch. 2.4.Google Scholar

⁶ Quine, W. V., Philosophy of Logic (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 13;Google Scholarsee Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2. edn. 1992), pp. 78–9;Google Scholar see also Davidson, D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 33–4, 43–5, 58, 118. Davidson does not strictly speaking ascribe truths to speech acts, but his suggestion of relativizing the truth of a sentence to speakers, and times amounts to the same thing, since he treats speech acts as equivalent to ordered triples of sentences, speakers and times. To hold that a sentence is true ‘as (potentially) spoken’ by a person at a time is tantamount to saying that it is the utterance of the sentence by a person at a time which is true.Google Scholar

⁷ Word and Object (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), p. 191; Pursuit of Truth, p. 79.Google Scholar

⁸ The following points are derived from Alan, White'sTruth (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 7–18. But White does not distinguish between the claims that the bearers of truth are token-, type- and eternal sentences.Google Scholar

⁹ E.g. Platts, M., The Ways of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 38–9.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Cf. White, A, Truth (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 24–7.Google Scholar

¹¹ Strawson, , Logico-Linguistic Papers, p. 74.Google Scholar

¹² See White, A., ‘What we Believe’, in Rescher, N. (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972);Google ScholarHacker, P.M.S., ‘Malcolm and Searle on Intentional States’, Philosophical Investigations 15 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar This distinction cannot be dismissed by invoking examples from fictional discourse, since in these cases A and B must both exist in the fictional world for ‘A believes B’ to be true. In the spirit of the Tractatus, it might be replied, however, that even in the case of ‘A believes that p’ there must exist a possible fact. But this boils down to saying that ‘p’ is a meaningful declarative sentence which is either true or false, depending on how things are. It does not affirm the existence of an object which is isomorphic with an actual fact, only less tangible. The postulation of such an intermediary between A's belief and the world implies that what A believes is one thing—a fact—if it is true that p, but another—a possible fact—if it is false that p; but what A believes must be the same in both cases. See my A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), ‘intentionality’.Google Scholar

¹³ ‘Just one more Species doing its Best’, London Review of Books 25.07.91, p. 3;Google Scholarsee also his ‘Representation, Social Practice, and Truth’, Philosophical Studies 30 (1988).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Philosophical Investigations, §108; a similar view seems implicit in Davidson, Inquiries, pp. 43-5.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Objects of Thought (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971), ch. 2.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The argument is the reverse of, but compatible with, Davidson's idea that one cannot have the concept of a language without the concept of truth.

¹⁵ This paper arose out of a presentation at the St. John's College Discussion Group; a more polished version was delivered to the Work in Progress forum at Reading and at Keele. I am grateful for the feedback provided by these groups, and for comments by John Cottingham, Peter Hacker, Brad Hooker and John Hyman.