ABSTRACT
My thesis is that the theory of language understanding and the theory of reference and truth have much less to do with one another than many philosophers have assumed. I want to explain why this is so. I believe that if I am right, this will shed light on a number of things in philosophy – for example, why Wittgenstein had both a picture theory of meaning and a ‘use’ theory of meaning (at different times, of course!), and what was going on in nineteenth-century objections to a correspondence theory of truth.
