ABSTRACT
The first part of this chapter deals with two concepts, among others: meaning and truth. By “meaning” I will always intend “linguistic meaning”; sometimes, for emphasis or variety, I will spell this out, but mostly not. All I want to bring out now is that I will not be concerned, in what follows, with meaning in any nonlinguistic sense-with such things as the meaning of life, smoke meaning fire, or the meaning of the French Revolution. These are all perfectly good senses of a word with an impressively broad range of application, but they are not senses that concern this discussion. A comparably big, vague term, “truth,” has been a frequent target of critique in our postmodern era. In the course of my remarks, I will attempt to deflate the notion somewhat, and to discriminate a fairly unobjectionable sense for it, relating to the modest if ineliminable role it plays in connection, precisely, with linguistic meaning.
