ABSTRACT
When we claim something such as ‘The kettle has boiled’, we assert something; we express a belief. A belief is an attitude we take towards a proposition: to believe a proposition is to accept it as true. Assertion is a truth-claim, and belief is a truthattitude. Assertion, belief and truth are internally related in this way. From the outset we have been working with an intuitive understanding of truth such that to say that a claim is true is simply to say that things are as the claim says they are: to assert that a proposition is true is equivalent to asserting that very same proposition. What this means is that a pair of sentences such as the following:
• Andy Murray was the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Champion in 2013. • It is true that Andy Murray was the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Champion in
must have the same truth value; if one of them is true, then so is the other. This necessary equivalence is the fundamental fact about the ordinary meaning of the word ‘true’. Suppose, then, that Julie says that Andy Murray was the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Champion in 2013. To say that Julie’s claim is true, at bottom, is just to say that Andy Murray did win the Men’s Singles championship at Wimbledon in 2013. Thus, although truth is a feature of claims that people make (of some claims, of course, not of all of them), whether or not a claim is true has nothing at all to do with the person who makes it; nor with that person’s beliefs, culture or language (except when the proposition is explicitly about those things). Whether or not Julie’s claim about Andy Murray is true depends only on whether or not Andy Murray won the Men’s Singles championship at Wimbledon in 2013, and does not depend in any way on anything about Julie. In particular, the mere fact that Julie believes and has claimed that Andy Murray won Wimbledon has nothing to do with whether or not her belief or claim is true.
