ABSTRACT
Mr Austin offers us a purified version of the correspondence theory of truth.1 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. His own theory is, roughly, that to say that a statement is true
is to say that a certain speech-episode is related in a certain conventional way to
something in the world exclusive of itself. But neither Mr Austin’s account of the
two terms of the truth-conferring relation, nor his account of the relation itself,
seems to me satisfactory. The correspondence theory requires, not purification, but
elimination.
