Truth, Reference, and Content

In this book some of the many important issues on truth and meaning are discussed. A prominent one is the nature of truth, or lack thereof, in the views of the American philosophers Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, Hartry Field, and Paul Horwich. The much discussed connection between truth and meaning, which these philosophers accommodate, exploit, or try to refute in their views, is examined in several respects. By contrasting Quine¿s Disquotationalism, Davidson¿s Unified Theory, Field¿s Deflationism, and Horwich¿s Minimalism with a hypothesis, a kind of litmus test, suggested mainly by the ancient and pre-theoretical intuition that our true statements depend upon what we mean and how the world is, the argument is carried out. A conclusion is that it is far from clear that our intuition has been shown to be out of place in philosophical theory.