ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the various current versions of truth-conditional semantics as applied to natural languages differ from one another in ways which do not affect the argument. A translational semantic theory of a natural language gives translations of the expressions of the language into expressions of a chosen metalanguage. Evans and McDowell offers that if no restriction at all were placed on the choice of a metalanguage, there would be nothing to prevent using the language under description as the metalanguage. The truth-determinacy principle appears, in a very large range of cases, at least not to conflict with the assumptions we make in appraising what people say in everyday conversation. The notion that it was indeterminate whether or not it was raining in Birmingham would be one which flouted our basic conception of what it was to make such an assertion, and hence what it was to use a sentence like It is raining in Birmingham for purposes of communication.
