ABSTRACT
The various uses of “meaning” and “truth” can be explicated— the meaning of “Meaning” and “Truth” cannot. Only by attempting to sort out the meanings of “meaning” and “truth” that attend the various and varying uses of the terms can we begin to seriously understand interpersonal utterances. “Truth,” in turn, has entertained a similar multiplicity of meanings. The indisposition to search for and specify the public criteria for linguistic competence and attendant truth ascription is not therefore a defense of “creativity” or “freedom of expression”–but a conscious or unconscious abdication to caprice and obscurantism. One of the standard uses of the term “true” is that ascription made to “logical truths,” truths determined by the rules governing language use itself. In effect, the responsible scrutiny of truth warrants for single assertions or collections of assertions requires a technique for distinguishing between two classes of truth claims, each class occupying, for the sake of analysis, a distinct domain: the analytic and synthetic.
