In and out of Quotation Marks

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.