Abstract

By providing a theory of truth for a language, the truth of certain sentences follows on the basis of that theory alone. In the first chapter, I develop and defend a notion of analyticity suggested by Noam Chomsky in his Language and Problems of Knowledge against skeptical worries due to Quine and Burge. I argue that the acceptance of quantum theory does not bring about the revision, but rather the clarification, of the meaning of "and" and "or". Natural language analyticities diverge from those of first order logics because the fixed semantic elements of natural languages and first-order logics differ. Part of the project of natural language semantics, then, is an account of logical form sufficient to expose the analyticity of a sentence. Chomskian analyticities are not coextensive with the sort of "folk analyticities" Quine targeted. "All bachelors are unmarried" isn't analytic in this Chomskian sense. ;In the next chapter, I consider Stephen Schiffer and Jerry Fodor's arguments for the conclusion that representing and employing a truth theory is not necessary for understanding language. Schiffer's argument consists in outlining the inner workings of a creature, Harvey, who comes to believe T-sentences appropriately but without employing truth axioms for the elements of the sentences he hears. I argue that Harvey cannot serve as a model for our capacities if Harvey doesn't learn to understand his language. I argue on the basis of the semantics of vague terms, tense, uninstantiated properties and other considerations that Fodor is not justified in supposing that the intentional content of thoughts and, thus, the semantic properties of expressions can be naturalized along the lines he envisions. ;In the final chapter of my thesis, I explore the truth-conditional semantics of verbs in relation to the metaphysics of events. Terence Parsons' proposal goes beyond Davidson's original analysis of the logical form of action sentences in taking the logical form of, say, "Brutus stabbed Caesar" to include not only an event argument but also "thematic relations" borne by the sentence's arguments to the event. ;I criticize Parsons' argument for such analyses, propose alternative arguments, and consider special problems arising for such accounts in treating apparent event identities