Truth without truths? "propositional attitudes" without propositions? meaning without meanings?
pp. 160-204
in: Kevin Mulligan, Tomasz Placek (eds), The history and philosophy of Polish logic, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
I am proud of being able to say that Jan Woleński was my first friend in Poland and that he still is my best Polish friend. So I am glad that I can contribute a paper to his Festschrift. "Künne likes to remain very close to natural language and its parlance', Jan wrote in his contribution to a symposium on a book on truth in Dialectica 62 (2008). Since I want to elucidate our workaday concept of truth, I do indeed like to stay close to natural language: after all, that's where this concept gets expressed in the first place. "Sooner or later', Jan wrote in the same article, "we encounter problems which require a clear decision concerning the metalogical properties of "is true." Is it a predicate or a modality? […]' This is the main question that I want to clarify and to answer in this paper. Tackling this problem requires close attention to the syntactical and semantical status of that-clauses. The questions such clauses evoke when we brood on truth ascriptions ("It is true that p') reappear when we consider reports of propositional attitudes ("A φs that p') and ascriptions of sentential meaning ("S means that p'), That's why I shall also discuss the second and the third issue which the verbose title of this paper alludes to. Arthur N. Prior saw the connection, and in each of these fields he opted for the same treatment of that-clauses. I shall argue that it is a mistreatment.
