ABSTRACT
In An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth 1 Russell attempts, to some extent at least, to come to terms with the semantic conception of truth. Straight away he accepts the Tarskian hierarchy of language, metalanguage, and so on. ‘The arguments for the necessity of a hierarchy of languages are overwhelming’, he writes (p. 62), ‘and I shall henceforth assume their validity’. Thus, as he notes, ‘the words “true” and “false”, as applied to the sentences of a given language, always require another language, of higher order, for their adequate definition’. If the semantic definitions of ‘true’ and ‘false’ are to be henceforth accepted as fundamental, some of Russell’s incisive earlier contentions, in ‘On the Nature of Truth’ (1910), must be somewhat reconstrued. 2 There, it will be recalled, he wrote that
broadly speaking, the things that are true or false, in the sense with which we are concerned, are statements, and beliefs or [synonymously] judgments. … The truth or falsehood of statements can be defined in terms of the truth or falsehood of beliefs. A statement is true when a person who believes it believes truly, and false when a person who believes it believes falsely.
