Showing papers on "Truth condition published in 1977"

The Nature of Laws

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the question of the truth conditions of nomological statements. My fundamental thesis is that it is possible to set out an acceptable, non Circular account of the truth conditions of laws and nomological statements if and only if relations among universals — that is, among properties and relations, construed realistically — are taken as the truth-makers for such statements. My discussion will be restricted to strictly universal, nonstatistical laws. The reason for this limitation is not that I feel there is anything dubious about the concept of a statistical law, nor that I feel that basic laws cannot be statistical. The reason is methodological. The case of strictly universal, nonstatistical laws would seem to be the simplest case. If the problem of the truth conditions of laws can be solved for this simple subcase, one can then investigate whether the solution can be extended to the more complex cases. I believe that the solution I propose here does have that property, though I shall not pursue that question here.

Truth and meaning : essays in semantics

Abstract: Introduction I: Meaning and Truth Theory II: Reply to Foster III: Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism IV: What is a Theory of Meaning? II V. Two Theories of Meaning VI: Truth Definitions and Actual Languages VII: On Understanding the Structure of One's Language VIII: Semantic Structure and Logical Form IX: Language-Mastery and the Sorites Paradox X. Existence and Tense XI: States of Affairs XII: The De Re Must: A Note on the Logical Form of Essentialist Claims An Appendix to David Wiggins's Note XIII: Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?