ABSTRACT
When the authors of the American Declaration of Independence wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they did not realize that a future generation of philosophers would lay down rules of usage in accordance with which self-evident truths can have no truth value. By these later rules, a statement can have truth value only if one can judge its truth or falsity on the basis of empirical evidence; and the statement itself must be of an order that lends itself to either verdict. A declaration of human rights is not subject to the verdict of empirical evidence and, by the rules, cannot meaningfully be said to be true.
