ABSTRACT
Criticisms of the pragmatic theory of truth (and, indeed, of their philosophy in general) have focused upon three assertions which have been credited to the pragmatists. For according to many interpreters of the 'semantic conception' of truth, the pragmatic theory, along with all other philosophic theories of truth, is left in the humiliating position of a theory without a subject-matter. Some version of the verifiability view is frequently expressed by James. Thus as early as Pragmatism James writes: The quality of truth, obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and actual verification. For A. J. Ayer and Professor Black this is tantamount to saying that there is no longer any subject-matter for a theory of truth. If to predicate truth of a sentence is simply to assert the same sentence then there is no problem left for philosophical analysis.
