Abstract

The influential truth-conditional theory of meaning faces formidable challengers in philosophers ranging from Peter Strawson to Hartry Field, who argue that truth is not capable of serving the demands of a theory of meaning. In this dissertation I develop a new conception of the truth-conditional theory and defend it against those challenges. My response to those challenges has important consequences for recent developments in the theory of truth. ;The truth-conditional theory has been most highly developed by Donald Davidson, but its roots are found in Frege and the early Wittgenstein, with the intuition that truth is intimately connected with meaning. Troubling critiques of the theory have emerged both from theorists of truth, such as Field and Paul Horwich, and theorists of meaning, such as Strawson. The challenges of these theorists proceed by trying to show that on closer analysis of the concept of truth, it turns out either that the truth-conditional theory is irremediably circular or that the theory deteriorates into a Gricean theory of meaning. I argue that these critiques share an important misapprehension of the nature of the connection between truth and meaning, and of the explanatory aims and function of the truth-conditional theory. In doing so, I present and defend a new picture of the explanatory goals of the truth-conditional theory. I show that the traditional arguments in favour of the truth-conditional theory are inadequate, and begin to remedy those inadequacies. I argue that truth is a fundamental explanatory notion in the theory of meaning, and that the truth-conditions of a sentence are a constituent of its meaning. I use my conception of the explanatory purposes of the truth-conditional theory to show that, despite the continuing popularity of deflationism about truth, truth is in fact a substantive notion