When Truth Gives Out

Abstract

This chapter develops the idea that there are more ways to ‘get things right’ than simply by asserting something — that is, by committing to its truth. One can, for example, deny the claim that the liar is true, where denial is understood as sui generis and not reducible to assertion of a negation. If we see the connectives like ‘not’ as sometimes contributing to the sense of what one says with a sentence, sometimes acting as force indicators — encoding information about the act being performed — we can make sense of the idea that someone could ‘get it right’ without speaking the truth. It is argued that the simplest sentences of our language are vehicles for expressing various sorts of commitments. Sometimes these are commitments to the truth of a claim; sometimes they are other sorts of commitments.

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