Abstract

The semantic paradoxes are shown to raise serious problems for naturalism, realism, and some kinds of anti-realism about truth, denotation, and propositional content. I argue that no existing solution to the paradoxes is adequate. In order to solve them, I develop a nominalist semantic theory, the "nominal correspondence theory of truth," that retains semantic discourse but denies that such discourse has propositional content. According to this theory, many contentless sentences, including the Liar sentence "This sentence is not true", are legitimately assertible even though they are neither true nor false. A formalized version of the theory is also developed