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This essay explores Quine’s concept of truth. Quine substitutes radical translation for translation which aims to preserve ‘meaning’. Although radical translation does not always preserve truth value, much less meaning, truth is nevertheless very much in view in the practice of radical translation. Meaning, as preserved by radical interpretation, is needed to apply our truth predicate to any speech but our own, and we need truth to understand meaning. Such basic relations between truth and meaning are incompatible with a deflationary attitude toward the concept of truth.

This chapter examines relativism about reasons and relativism about concepts of reasons and truth. Purposive normative reasons, according to this chapter, are noteworthy. It explains how purposive normative reasons can contribute to solving a problem of normative relevance, the problem that non-motivating, purpose-independent normative, “reasons” and “requirements” seem too easy to come by. Purpose-independent “reasons” and “requirements” evidently can be introduced ad arbitrium. This chapter also looks at the internalist–externalist debate with conceptual instrumentalism: the view that one's aims, or purposes, in adopting and using a notion of rationality, reasons, or obligations can cogently recommend, at least to oneself, an internalist or an externalist notion of rationality, reasons, or obligations. Conceptual instrumentalism is one straightforward way to answer questions about what notion of rationality, reasons, or obligations one should adopt and use.

This chapter examines Tarski's Convention T and argues that as an adequacy condition for a definition of truth it is in some ways peculiarly specific to a given language and metalanguage, while also being treated by Tarski as somehow general. It is suggested that Tarski operates with a kind of contextualist understanding of the term ‘true’, on which though its extension differs for different languages, it always expresses the same concept. This interpretation is compared to more standard readings of Tarski on which he defines a range of language-specific concepts.

This essay argues that the concept of truth as well as related subjects of philosophical inquiry such as knowledge, belief, intention, and memory cannot be reduced to more elementary concepts, since these are the most elementary ones available. Tarski’s truth theory is examined, and a radical alternative to the truth theories considered in the preceding essay is proposed to identify the empirical connections between the concept of truth and observable human behaviour. A methodological model for this project is Frank Ramsey’s decision theory for constructing subjective probability.

Reviews a number of interconnected arguments concerned with the question whether the third person stance of the radical interpreter is conceptually basic in understanding language. These include Davidson’s argument for the necessity of possessing the concepts of belief, truth, and error for possessing propositional attitudes, the argument from the necessity of language for possessing the concept of error, and the argument from triangulation for the necessity of communication with others to fix what thoughts are about. Argues that the crucial arguments for the necessity of communication for the concept of error and the argument from triangulation fail, and that this undercuts the last hope for an a priori grounding for the assumption that radical interpretation is possible.

This essay examines the scepticism about the concept of truth in the past century. It argues that although correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, and epistemic theories of truth are all failures, this does not mean that the concept of truth can be dismissed as a useless concept. In fact, the concept of truth plays a key role in understanding the world and the minds of agents.

Davidson replies to critics (in particular Hartry Field and Gilbert Harman) who have objected that truth theories cannot do the duty of meaning theories if they fail to elucidate the concept of reference on which they rely (Hartry Field, Gilbert Harman). In response, Davidson explains precisely why truth theories do not and need not explain or analyse the concepts of satisfaction and denotation (cf Essay 14) once these are characterized recursively (which requires that the basic vocabulary is finite, as Essay 1 had demanded on grounds of the language's learnability). He further shows how taking the relation of reference as being central when explaining the relation of language to world collapses into a discredited ‘building‐block theory’ of language (see Essay 1) and neglects the semantic primacy of the sentence. This primacy, argues Davidson, can only be acknowledged by making truth and sentential structure one's central semantic concepts; further, truth theories are testable only at the sentential level, not at that of subsentential reference.

This essay explores the shift in Quine’s thinking about the relation between meaning and truth. Quine has long been a deflationist about truth. A deflationist is one who holds that to say of a sentence in one’s own language that it is true, is to say no more than one says by uttering that sentence. In Pursuit of Truth (1990), Quine takes shared external circumstances as the key to the correct interpretation of observation sentences rather than shared patterns of stimulation; this shift has saved the natural relation between meaning and truth.

In this essay, Davidson sets out to demonstrate that successful communication or mutual interpretability indicates the presence of a shared, and largely true, view of the world. Beliefs must be shared for the attribution of error or disagreement can only occur against a widely shared background: error and disagreement can only be local and never massive or total (Essay 13). Truth is no longer relative to conceptual schemes but only to languages that can be shown to be largely correct about the world. Consequently, by studying one's language one can derive ontological conclusions: a truth theory (such as that developed in Essay 2) will reveal the overall ontology required by a particular language, and while quotations and intensions can be dispensed with as distinct entities (on a proper analysis of them, given in Essays 1, 6, and 7), an ontology of events cannot, provided the language contains causal statements (Essays 6 and 8 of Essays on Actions and Events). By eliminating the concepts of satisfaction and denotation from our truth theories (cf Essay 15), Davidson can eliminate their concomitant ontology (cf Essay 3) as well as avoid extending the ideology of the interpreter's language too much beyond that of the language to be interpreted (Essay 4).

In comparing very different cultural, theoretical, or methodological standpoints, the nature of truth itself becomes a problem. If the standpoints have different conceptions of truth, a comparative approach that respects both involves the contradiction of resulting conflicting legitimate claims to truth. But if we reject this contradiction, we eliminate the possibility that standpoints can have legitimately different conceptions of truth. And with that we reject the sense of a genuine comparison in this respect. Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty have mounted especially powerful arguments against the very sense of this kind of contradiction between frameworks, and so against the sense of this kind of pluralist comparison. Through a detailed discussion of their work, this chapter argues that the contradictory conception of truth is the right one, in part because, as their own work helps to show, the contradiction has the self-canceling character that I have outlined in this Introduction and as a result resolves itself. The chapter also argues that because the contradiction is self-canceling in this way it is manageable. Further, this chapter argues that this conception legitimates ideas of truth as both absolute and relative, and also (contradictorily but properly pluralistically) legitimates noncontradictory conceptions of truth.