TRUTH AND WHAT IS SAID*

Abstract

AbstractA notion oftruthas applicable to events of assertoric use (utterances) of a sentence token is arguably presupposed and required by our evaluative practices of the use of language. The truth of an utterance seems clearly to depend on what the utterancesays. This fundamental dependence seems in turn to be captured by the schema that, if an utteranceusays thatP, thenuis true iffP. Such a schema may thus be thought to constitute a suitable basis for an adequate theory of utterance truth, so much so that it seems straightforwardly to avoid the problems arising fromcontext dependenceand thesemantic paradoxeswhich notoriously beset theories of utterance truth based on a simpledisquotationalschema. The paper argues that appearances are deceptive in both cases. On the one hand, the schema cannot allow for plausible if not uncontroversialnon‐indexicalforms of context dependence, arising from the possibility that what an utterance says can be the case or not relative to different situations and that the truth of an utteranceuof a sentence ϕ arguably depends on the truth of ϕ at the situation “associated” withu. On the other hand, aquantified utterance‐truthvariation on the liar paradox shows that the schema entails some consequence ϕ and at the same time the untruth of any utterance of ϕ; moreover, a resilientquantified propositionalvariation on the contingent liar paradox is offered, which only relies on resources usually employed by theories of utterance truth based on the schema.