Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The predicate of truth used in the recursive truth-clauses in semantics is a many-place predicate: a sentence is true at a model, for an assignment, at a world of evaluation, with respect to a context, and so on. The recent debate between contextualists and relativists, when it comes e.g. to predicates of personal taste or to epistemic modals, largely turns upon the question of how to reduce the adicity of the truth predicate. In this talk, I would like to take a closer look at the "postsemantic" principles proposed by both sides. I shall challenge the need for such principles. I shall also discuss the role that the notion of semantic content plays in the debate.