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This chapter is about Tarski's semantic conception of truth, about disquotationalism, and about the relationship between the two. After a detailed exposition of the Tarskian project of defining a truth‐predicate for a given language, paying special attention to his Criterion of Material Adequacy, I focus upon three questions: (1) Does a natural language (if curtailed of its semantic vocabulary) yield to Tarski's technique or to Davidsonian variants thereof? (2) Which explanatory ambitions concerning the concept of truth did Tarski have, and, in particular, did he try to rehabilitate a fact‐based correspondence theory of truth? (Here it turns out to be helpful to take his background in Austro‐Polish philosophy into account.) (3) Did Tarski achieve the explanatory goals? In the second part of the chapter, I raise objections against the claim that the two sides of an instance of the Disquotation Schema, ‘“p” is true iff p’, express the same proposition, and against the way in which many disquotationalists try to account for the expressive utility of ‘true’. Finally, I explain and criticize Hartry Field's more circumspect contentions about idiolectic, and translational, disquotational truth.

This chapter reviews efforts to explain away the problems with Millian theories, and shows that they are unsuccessful. Soames’s solution to Russell’s problem (existence failures) either adopts a radical modal realism or uses an intentional sense of reference. Some attempts to rebut Frege’s problem (substitutivity failures) ignore opaque interpretations. Kripke took the argument against substitutivity to depend on strong disquotation principles, and presented a puzzle to show that they are problematic. But weaker disquotation principles are available, and substitutivity arguments can be presented without relying on disquotation principles. Gricean attempts to explain away substitutivity failures in terms of metalinguistic or mode implicatures do not help with Russell’s problem or Fine terms, and are unsatisfactory even for Frege’s problem.

Do we need a truth predicate to express logical generalizations? If, so, what sort of truth predicate do we need? One answer, due to Alfred Tarski and W. V. Quine, is that to express logical generalizations all we need is a disquotational truth predicate. Another answer, due to Gottlob Frege and Hilary Putnam, is that to express logical generalizations we need a truth predicate that applies not only to our own sentences as we now use them, as the first answer suggests, but also to other speakers' sentences and our own sentences as we used them in the past. This introductory chapter outlines how to reconcile these two answers by constructing a conception of words that fits with our non-deliberative practical identifications of words. It ends with a brief summary of the radical consequences of combining this non-deliberative practical conception of words with a disquotational definition of truth.

The aim of this chapter is to show that allowing languages to have ontologically neutral idioms, both quantificational and singular, poses no problems for semantic theories of such languages. The ontologically neutral idioms in the object language are just replicated (in their resources) in the metalanguage that provides the semantic theory for that object language. A traditional truth-conditional theory of a language is given that illustrates the point. That the same point holds for singular idioms is illustrated by describing various semantic approaches to demonstratives. There is a view, propounded by Lewis, Higginbotham, Ludlow, and others, that disquotation is crucial to semantic theories because such provide the needed language/world connections. This claim is shown to be wrong: even with disquotation, such language-world connections can be absent; and it’s also shown that semantic theories that aren’t disquotational can nevertheless provide language-world connections if such are wanted.

Having gone through the modal metaphysical background in the first two chapters, the third chapter turns to examining the question of whether nouns are necessarily about whatever they are about or whether they are only contingently so. The argument in favor of necessity here proceeds via the essentialist claims that, first, it is of the nature of a referring token of a noun to be produced by a particular referential intention, and second, that it is of the nature of a referential intention to specify that which it specifies. A suggestion about how to think of the truth conditions for instances of disquotation in light of the above is presented at the end of the chapter,

Taking disquotation to be the essence of truth, this chapter argues that truth is that unique property of a proposition from which one can deduce the fact stated by it. This position is called ‘thick disquotationalism’, for though disquotational in nature, truth is nevertheless a robust property. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the metaphysics of truth: truth is a primitive, non‐natural property that supervenes on the facts and is constitutive of reality.

Some discourse (e.g. involving vague or indeterminate terms, normative language, or conditionals) can seem ‘factually defective’: it generates issues about which there seems to be ‘no fact of the matter’. But there seems to be a difficulty in making sense of factually defective discourse, and in explaining the division between it and other discourse, if one holds that the basic notion of truth is a fairly minimal one. The chapter argues that we can overcome the difficulty: we can recognize and account for several different kinds of factual defectiveness while adhering to a very minimal notion of truth.

Discusses some issues about indeterminacy of reference and truth, from two points of view about reference and truth: that of a correspondence theory and that of a disquotational theory. It is argued that a correspondence theorist can continue to accept the usual disquotation schemas for reference and truth, despite the indeterminacy. And it is argued that the disquotationalist can accept indeterminacy even in his own conceptual scheme. Together, these claims mean that the two views on truth are much closer in their treatments of indeterminacy than one might have thought. Also discusses indeterminacy in our logical and mathematical vocabulary.

This chapter defines internal realism as a position which accepts the Independence Principle and the Correspondence Principle, but which rejects all forms of Cartesian angst. In order to reject all forms of Cartesian angst, the internal realist will look to Putnam’s celebrated brain-in-vat argument, which this chapter explores. The brain-in-vat argument uses semantic reasoning to refute the thought that everyone, everywhere and everywhen, might really be a brain in a vat. The argument depends upon disquotation in one’s home language, and on the rejection of all magical theories of reference. It transpires that the brain-in-vat sceptic can only defend her scepticism by appealing to the bare formal possibility of magic. Consequently, brain-in-vat scepticism cannot be presented as a form of ‘internal’ scepticism. It can, at last, be brushed aside.

Kripke argued that his ‘strengthened disquotation principle’ together with certain other principles governing our de dicto belief ascriptions lead us in the case of puzzling Pierre to a contradiction. Loar objects that the strengthened disquotation principle is incorrect as Kripke states it, and that the corrected principle doesn’t lead to contradiction. Loar acknowledges that the principles we use to ascribe beliefs can lead us to accept both ‘Pierre believes that London is pretty’ and ‘Pierre believes that London is not pretty,’ but, he argues, this is a problem only if one assumes that ‘the function of de dicto ascriptions [is] to capture how believers conceive things.’ Loar’s real interest in Pierre is as a platform for elaborating his, Loar’s, views about the difference between the way names function in thought and the way they function in the ‘that’-clauses of belief reports.

Disquotation gives us a satisfactory account of the reference relation for English words, but how can that account be extended to explain the reference relation for other languages? It has been suggested that we might say that a word W in a foreign language refers to x if the English translation of W refers to x, but this is unsatisfactory because the notion of translation presupposes the notion of shared reference. An alternative approach is proposed. This approach begins by noting that there are a number of folk psychological generalizations about English speakers that contain the concept of reference. It then points out that these generalizations are plausibly construed as containing the concept of reference that is defined disquotationally. Finally, it observes that the reference relation for a different language L can be picked out by saying that it is the relation for which corresponding laws hold.

This chapter argues for a form of partiality in semantics. In particular, it argues that semantics, narrowly construed as part of our linguistic competence, is only a partial determinant of truth‐conditional content. Likewise, truth‐conditional semantic theories in linguistics function as partial theories of content. It offers an account of where and how this partiality arises, which focuses on how lexical meaning combines elements of distinctively linguistic competence with elements from our broader cognitive resources. This account shows how we can accommodate some partiality in semantic theories without falling into skepticism about semantics or its place in linguistic theory. Along the way, the chapter reexamines the roles disquotation and model theory play in semantic theories. It argues that disquotation plays an ineliminable role, but that this shows us a way in which semantic theories are explanatorily partial

Chapter 5 deals with a “homemade” problem for contextualism: the knowability problem. This problem concerns the evaluation of the truth value of knowledge attributions made in other contexts than the subject’s. A contextualist could find herself in a context where she would have to deny that she knows a given proposition but at the same time, qua contextualist, would have to admit that some other subject does know that same proposition; a few argumentative steps lead to a contradiction. The inconsistency can be avoided if one chooses a view according to which knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a proposition, and a contextual parameter. Apart from a relational, ternary view of knowledge, the contextualist also needs a further modification of the epistemic closure principle.