Abstract

Semantical realism claims that truth is a semantical relation between language and reality. The view that representation is one of the functions of language can be combined with the thesis that languages as systems of symbolic signs are human‐made social conventions. This chapter defends, against Quine, the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Tarski's model‐theoretic approach is argued to be the best explication of the correspondence theory of factual truth. By combining the notions of truth and similarity, a comparative and quantitative concept of truthlikeness is defined for a large variety of statements.