ABSTRACT
Mr Austin offers us a purified version of the correspondence theory of truth. On the one hand he disclaims the semanticists' error of supposing that 'true' is a predicate of sentences; on the other, the error of supposing that the relation of correspondence is other than purely conventional, the error which models the word on the world or the world on the word. The words assertion and statement have a parallel and convenient duplicity of sense. A symptom of Mr Austin's uneasiness about facts is his preference for the expressions 'situation' and 'state of affairs'; expressions of which the character and function are a little less transparent than those of 'fact'. A point which it is important to notice in view of Mr Austin's use of these expressions is that when we do 'talk about' situations the situation we talk about is not, as he seems to think it is, correctly identified with the fact we state.
