Abstract

The paper develops an argument in favour of a version of inflationism about thruth. I claim that in order to explain the conversational validity of T-equivalences one should assume that there is a constitutive connection between the concept of truth for statements and the concept of speaker meaning. The justification of my claim proceeds in two steps. Firstly, I formulate an inflationary account of the conversational validity of T-equivalences in terms of conversational implicatures generated by the use of the truth predicate as well as by the act of making a statement. Secondly, I argue that the inflationary account provides a better explanation of the truth talk – namely a better account of the totality of utterances into which the truth predicate is deployed – than the redundancy theory on the one hand, and the minimal conception on the other. The main idea behind my account is that that-clauses can be used referentially to single out the state of affairs the speaker denotes rather than the thought he or she expresses.