GARY KEMP

FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING *

In 'Der Gedanke', Frege argues that the supposition that truth is definable generates
a vicious regress; further, he takes the regress to cast doubt on whether the truth-
predicate can correctly be said to indicate a property at all (CP 353 IKS 344-5; cf.
PW 128-9, l3l, 142-6, 174 INS l39-40, 142-3, 154-8, 189-90).1 Clearly one can
generate a vicious regress under certain assumptions about the relation between p
and p is true. For example, we might equate true propositions with facts, and thereby
assume that the question 'What is truth?' is really the question 'What is it for an
arbitrary truth, fact or state of affairs to be realized?'; this would be as it were the
generalization of the question 'What is it for the cat to be on the mat?'. In that case,
if the realization of a state of affairs is actually analyzed as the possession, by a
proposition p, of the property truth, then we are saying, for example, that the cat's
being on the mat actually consists in a certain proposition p's having the property
truth; but then this latter proposition's being the case - that p has the property truth-
must consist in its having the property truth, and so on. This would be, as it were, the
general case of what Russell called a regress of analysis. Alternatively, though even
less cogently, we can generate what we might more loosely characterize as an
ontological or metaphysical regress. Someone might suppose that if p, then this fact
is not to be analyzed as the possession, by p, of the property truth, but that it depends
upon it. This would get the ontological dependence the wrong way: obviously in the
sequence p, p is true, p is true is true, and so on, the ontological dependence must
proceed from p to its successors, not the other way round. The cat's being on the mat
does not depend upon its being true that the cat is on the mat.
That much is clear; but it is doubtful that the question 'What is Truth?' has very
often been confused or distorted in either of these ways. For example, so long as we
do think that truth is a property of propositions, the fact that aRb is the fact that a
stands in a certain relation to b. The fact that the proposition aRb is true, however,
though implied by aRb, seems to be a different fact, which depends upon the first
fact: it is the fact that a certain proposition has a certain property, namely truth. The
reality or definability of the property truth does not seem to disturb these
observations in any way. It looks as if Frege has merely mistaken an infinite
sequence of logical implications for a vicious regress. This impression is confirmed
by Frege's also having suggested that if truth were, say, correspondence, then in
order to verify a proposition aRb one would have to check its correspondence to
reality - which would be to veritY another proposition aRb corresponds to reality,
and so on, making verification impossible. To this the obvious reply is that no reason

J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and Its Nature (ifany), 1-14.

© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 GARY KEMP

has been given why we cannot, at the first stage, simply check whether a stands in
the relation R to h.
Such is a frequent, and not unreasonable reaction to Frege's regress worries.
Nevertheless, I think that these worries do serve to locate a more forceful line of
argument. Its conclusion is the more radical one which tempts Frege in 'Der
Gedanke' but which he explicitly embraced only in unpublished notes written later:
that Truth is not a property? Its interest is certainly more general than Frege realized.
My concern, in any case, is not essentially to know Frege's mind but to articulate this
line of argument and its implications for Logic and the Theory of Meaning.

I. THE REGRESS REFORMED

Frege says that 'nothing is added' to one's judgement that p if one judges that p true;
likewise, he says, merely to utter 'p is true' is not sufficient to make an assertion (CP
354 /KS 345, PW 129, 251INS 140, 271). At one point these considerations incite
Frege to suppose that the thought that it is true that p simply collapses into the
thought that p (PW 252 INS 272). It is tempting to regard Frege here as giving an
argument which is independent of the regress argument, one which depends upon the
apparent semantic redundancy of ordinary uses of the truth-predicate. If we do so,
then it can aptly be pointed out that if the claim that 'nothing is added' to p by pis
true does not simply beg the question, then it is at most a point about ordinary usage
which does little in itself to establish either that truth is indefinable or that it is not a
genuine property of thoughts. However, I suspect that in these sorts of remarks we
should not regard Frege as attempting a separate redundancy argument, but rather as
seeking corroboration of a conceptually prior point about assertion or judgement.
Directly following the apparent redundancy argument in 'Thoughts', Frege wrote:

And yet is it not a great result when the scientist after much hesitation and
laborious researches can finally say 'My conjecture is true'? The meaning of
the word 'true' seems to be altogether sui generis. May we not be dealing
here with something which cannot be called a property in the ordinary sense
at all? (CP 354 / KS 345).

Here Frege appears to resist the conclusion that there is really no such idea as
that of truth-in-general; but despite having just denied that truth is definable, neither
is he prepared to characterize it as a simple property. He is at a loss how to
categorize it onto logically. What he does emphasize, rather, is its connection with
the idea of assertion or judgement. In coming at last to commit to a certain
judgement, the envisaged scientist acquires a certain attitude towards a certain
proposition (thought). He accepts its truth. So long as we are committed to the idea
that there are objects of judgement, then there is, indeed, no other way to
characterize what, in general, a person does in making a judgement. For if we ask,
'what do we mean by assertion or judgement?', then, given that commitment, the
question can just as well be asked as: what are we accepting about a proposition
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 3

when we accept it in that way which we designate as judgement? And the answer
seems inevitable: What we are accepting when we judge is the truth of the
proposition in question. Surely nothing else could rightly characterize what it is that
we accept about a proposition when we judge. To say that what we accept is simply
the proposition is clearly not sufficient, since surely a proposition can be accepted,
for example, merely as flattering or useful. Thus Frege maintains that to judge is
precisely to accept a thought 'as true'. Since to assert something is verbally to
manifest judgement, this means that assertoric force cannot be characterized except
by appeal to the notion of truth.
Whatever account there may be of truth must not only make this connection
explicit, it must respect its necessity. With this in mind, we can now fmd something
very different, and much more consequential, in Frege's regress argument. For
suppose we try to accommodate this connection by supposing that judgement
explicitly involves the ascription of the property truth to the thought affirmed. That
is, suppose we accept Frege's characterization of judgement as the acceptance of a
thought as true, yet we persist in the characterization of truth as a property of
thoughts. In that case, when we judge that p we ascribe truth to p. But to ascribe a
property $ to something is to judge that it is $. Hence, when we judge that p we
judge that p is true: to do the former just is to do the latter. And now a genuinely
troublesome regress really does arise. If, for variable p, to judge that p is to judge
that p is true, then to judge that p is true is to judge that fp is true] is true, and so on;
in which case, if truth is a genuine property, we should have the absurd consequence
that every judgement is really of infinite complexity. But such a regress is really only
a symptom ofthe fundamental difficulty, which is that we cannot retain both Frege's
truth-assertion connection, and the characterization of truth as a property, without
violating the distinction between sense and force. The act of grasping or entertaining
a proposition is a different act from the act of judging. Except possibly in the special
case of self-evident analytic propositions, that someone has entertained a given
proposition does not logically entail their having made a judgement whose content is
that proposition. Therefore it cannot in general be logically sufficient, in order to
make a judgement that p, that one entertain the proposition that p is true. One has to
do something else. But we have just got through saying that to do this further thing,
to judge, is to accept the proposition 'as true'. It follows that, however many
iterations of the predicate 'is true' are attached to a given proposition, one cannot
actually make a judgement without, at some point, accepting a proposition just as it
is, without adjoining the truth-predicate. That is, at some point, accepting a given
proposition 'as true' - even if the proposition does contain the truth-predicate - must
be something other than accepting that the proposition is true. If so, then there is no
reason why one cannot do this at the first stage, that is, judge that p outright. Indeed,
this must be so: One of the few certain things about the truth-predicate is what we
might call the principle of detachment, an analogue of disquotation: anyone who
fully understands the proposition 'p is true', and is in position to assert that p is true,
is also in a position to assert p. 3
Though it is doubtful that Frege ever conceived it quite so sharply, this line of
4 GARY KEMP

reasoning is surely what is responsible for one of his most pregnant aphorisms, that
the predicate 'is true' makes an 'abortive' effort to transform a notion of force into
one of content (PW 2521 NS 272). Indeed this now seems inescapable. It seems
inescapable, at any rate, if we accept Frege's characterization of judgement, and the
consequent necessity of the relation between truth and assertoric force. That is why
Frege writes that 'the thing that indicates most clearly the e~sence of logic is the
assertoric force with which a sentence is uttered'(PW 2521 NS 272). The truth-
assertion connection harmonizes this characterization with his famous
characterization oflogic as the' Laws of Truth' .4
Frege's inkling here of a confused effort embodied in a piece of grammar is one
of the many points at which we can see him as having anticipated Wittgenstein's
general diagnosis of grammar as a principal cause of metaphysical perplexity. In fact
I suspect that Wittgenstein was making, among others, precisely Frege's point about
truth and assertion in §§ 134-136 of the Philosophical Investigations. His thinking
here as ever is multiply ramified, but I think we can express his way of making this
particular point as follows. Whatever else they may be, propositions are what we
assert when we assert something. Equally, they are what the predicates of truth and
falsity can be applied to. But if truth were genuinely a property of propositions, then
this dual role of propositions would in some sense be a coincidence; it would be a
mere matter of fact that 'truth' and 'falsity' apply only to propositions, the very
things upon which we perform this all-important act of assertion. But this connection
is surely necessary, and not just in the sense of happening not to be false in any
possible world. It is, as Wittgenstein would put it, the very grammar of the notion of
a proposition that we can assert it and also say of it that it's true or that it's false.
Hence in §136:

And the use of the words 'true' and 'false' may be among the constituent
parts of this game; and if so it belongs to our concept 'proposition' but does
not 'fit' it. [Wittgenstein's emphasis]

Surely any illuminating account of truth, proposition and assertion must make this
coincidence inevitable, not just stipulate it or take it as given. To say that this
'fittingness' represents a necessary truth is merely to acknowledge this connection,
not to illuminate it or account for its necessity. Worse, it makes it look like a
remarkable metaphysical fact that either demands a substantive explanation or must
be regarded as sublimely ineffable. The implication of Frege's argument, as
Wittgenstein might have put it, is that the connection is too intimate to be a matter of
fact, of how things stand in reality - even if some things stand the way they do in
reality ofnecessity.5

2. TRUTH, PROPOSITION AND SENTENCE

How, then, can or should this intimate relationship be characterized? What sort of
positive account of Truth or the truth-predicate does it recommend? One theory
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 5

which might immediately come to mind is the perfonnative account proposed by

Strawson, whereby to say 'p is true' is to perfonn the act of asserting 'p'. But clearly
this cannot be the right way of implementing Frege's truth-assertion connection,
precisely because it violates the force/content distinction. Whereas under favourable
circumstances, a genuine perfonnative utterance such as 'I promise' is sufficient for
having promised - and thus can reasonably be regarded as making itself true - no
utterance of 'p is true', or 'I assert p', whatever the circumstances, constitutes an
assertion unless it expresses a judgement on the part of the uttering subject, a matter
which is entirely up to him 6. Furthennore, anyone who wishes to deny that the truth-
predicate denotes a property must show how we can nevertheless use the truth-
predicate in generalizations (as in metalogic or in 'Everything Socrates said is true'),
as well as use it in unasserted sentences - for example, in the unasserted antecedents
of conditionals (in fact 'p is true' can stand in wherever 'p' occurs extensionally).
Strawson's account does not itself help us to meet these requirements.
Nevertheless, Strawson's account drops a crucial hint, which we can put by
saying that the truth-predicate is best characterized by itsfunction, not by its content.
In order to substantiate this, we need to examine the interface between the Theory of
Truth with the Theory of Meaning; in tum, this will provide the motivation for the
fonnal approached endorsed in the following section. In particular, I want to explore
further the grammatical relationships that Wittgenstein alludes to at PI § 136 between
the notions of truth, proposition and assertion (though Wittgenstein does not speak
directly of assertion here). I want to try to elucidate how what Wittgenstein calls
'grammar' knits these things together.
Ramsey once made what is essentially the following point (1990, p. 39). We
know how to fill the blank of a sentence like this:

'Snow is white' is true iff ..... .

The problem of defining truth can thus be construed as the problem of filling the
blank, not for .a particular sentence like 'Snow is white' but for a (syntactical)
variable:

~ is true iff ..... .

But if the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions, then to fill this blank is to
give the meaning of ~ for variable ~. So an innocent person might be tempted to
regard the question 'What is truth?' as equivalent to the question of what it is for a
sentence to have a particular meaning.
Now that is precisely the starting point for Davidson's approach to the concept of
meaning. Tarski's discussion of Convention T shows him to be assuming that if we
understand the concept of translation or meaning, then we know what there is to
know about truth because we can explain how to construct eliminative truth-
defmitions for particular languages. Davidson inverts this, maintaining that if we
presuppose a grasp of truth, then we can explain the concept of meaning, by
6 GARY KEMP

explaining how to construct, for any particular language, a Tarskian truth-theory

which yields the truth-conditions for each of its sentences (the construction is now
called a 'theory' because truth is now being used, not defined). The reason we need
the concept of truth is not merely that it appears in the T-sentences, taken as
antecedently understandable consequences of the theory. The more fundamental
reason is that in explaining the approach, and in applying it, we need to speak of an
arbitrary assertion.? For familiar reasons, a Davidsonian T-theory for a language can
be justified only by making the subtantive assumption that the native noise-makers
genuinely make assertions, and typically assert or are disposed to assert only what is
true. More generally, the basic empirical corroboration ofa Davidsonian T-theory is
achieved by its predicting the assertions that would be made by means of particular
sentences in particular circumstances. The notion of assertion thus figures in any
general statement of the evidence for such a theory, hence of its empirical content.
Now for Davidson, to assert is to manifest or express the attitude of holding a
sentence true. Davidson's notion of holding-true performs the role in his work that
the notion of judgement performs in Frege's or Russell's. And what we have learned
from Frege is that this relation is as it were binary rather than tetradic: it isn't a
relation between a subject, propositional object and a property, but a relation
between the first two only (of course I am ignoring the need to factor in the context
of utterance). Thus, to hold something true cannot be to hold that it is true, just as,
for Frege, accepting p as true cannot amount to accepting that p is true; 'holding-
true' is not decomposable into 'holding' and 'true'. Thus assertion has to be accepted
outright. Yet we also learned from the regress problem that the idea of truth is
already imported, once we assume the concept of assertion. The suggestion, then, is
that what Davidson's program most fundamentally presupposes is not the property
truth, but the more inclusive and general notion of assertion.
Let us consider this suggestion in more detail. As he has long argued, Davidson's
theory of interpretation implies that, since only creatures who possess the concept of
truth can be interpreters of language, only such creatures can be understanders of
language. This implication is not an easy one to accept without a great deal of
theoretical motivation, especially if the required notion of truth is something
metaphysically substantive or technically involved. Small children, and on some
level dogs, understand bits of language - do they possess the concept of truth?8 But
that source of resistance aside, Davidson's assumption of the concept of truth has
struck many otherwise sympathetic readers as imperious. 'Truth' is a mighty word,
but if an understanding of truth is what must fundamentally be presupposed by the
theory of meaning, then we might reasonably feel entitled to ask why it is the right
concept for the job. That that presupposition will enable us to construct logically
transparent and empirically answerable meaning-theories for particular languages
might at least partially justify the move, but it does not explain it. Davidson's
position shows how the methodology of radical interpretation relates Tarski's
apparatus to the concepts of belief and meaning. Such an appropriation, Davidson
has argued, thereby answers those who worry that Tarski's programme for dealing
with truth-predicates fails to illuminate those empirical connections between thought
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 7

or language and the world in which truth, ultimately, consists9 • This is an important
point about the philosophical significance of Tarski, but it does not directly address
the question of why it is truth, and not something else, that must be invoked in
connection with meaning and belief (or judgement). Frege's truth-assertion
connection can assist us here. For what I suggested in the preceding paragraph was
that, since the notion of judgement necessarily involves the notion of truth, but
cannot be analyzed, for example, into 'holding' and 'true', the interpreter's need to
assume the concept of assertion is already in some sense the need to assume the
concept of truth. (It would be incredible if the interpreter had also to appeal to a
concept of truth which is graspable in some completely different way.) That is why
the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions: since to judge is to accept-as-true,
the truth-conditions of a judgement can straightforwardly be identified as its content.
From this perspective, it would be a sheer category-mistake to characterize meaning
in terms of conditions of warrant of suchlike; that would merely conflate the content
of what is said with its justification (this position does not, however, amount to an
assertion of realism; it weighs against Dummettian anti-realism, but, equally, casts
doubt upon the intelligibility of any recognisable doctrine which might be called
'Realism').
The point might be put more strongly by saying that no member of the triad
assertion, truth, and proposition can be understood independently of the others,
hence that it is ultimately unintelligible to try to explain the notion of proposition -
what Frege called a 'judgeable content' - as anything other than that which admits of
truth and falsity. (Analogously, you know what the king is in chess only if you
understand what it is for the king to be in check.) We need truth in order to convey
the general idea of a proposition, which the Tractarian Wittgenstein tried to
formulate as This is how things are. Many variants are available, such as That's true,
This is how it is, Such-and-such is the case, This is the situation, It is thus, etc., only
some of which involve the word 'true'. I suspect Frege glimpsed this at least
fleetingly:

All the same it is something worth thinking about that we cannot recognize a
property of a thing without at the same time finding the thought this thing has
this property to be true. So with every property of a thing there is tied up a
property of a thought, namely truth. (CP 3541 KS 345)

Yet this immediately precedes a denial that truth is really a property of thoughts.
Reading somewhat willfully perhaps, I think that Frege's hint in this last sentence is
that truth can be characterized as the general idea of what is common to the
judgement-forms this thing has this property, this stands in this relation to that, etc.
If we could only complete the list, then the truth-predicate really would be
dispensable. It is not completable, yet it seems we do understand how to go on with
it. What we grasp, then, is what Wittgenstein described as the general form of a
proposition or judgeable content - the idea of propositional unity, the general notion
of something thought or judged.
8 GARY KEMP

Now this notion is certainly intrinsic to the notion of assertion, even more
conspicuously than the notion of truth. Every assertion must have a particular
content. Indeed, it is precisely when we make the attempt to characterize the concept
of assertion or judgement in general that it seems to divide into two components -
the content, and the attitude that the content is true. If you had to explain the concept
of assertion to a child (without giving examples), you would say something like, 'It's
when you say that something is true', or 'It's when you say that something is so'.
The upshot of Frege's regress problem is that no such analysis really makes sense,
not in the literal way that the grammar of those explanations imply. It is equally
important to appreciate what happens when we try to isolate the notion of
proposition for individual treatment. Ifwe ask, What kind of thing is a proposition?,
then one kind of answer, suggestive as well as useful in its way, is to say that a
proposition is a kind of model or picture composed of such-and-such elements. But
this cannot literally be correct; these models or pictures are crucially different from
ordinary pictures or models. To speak of the fidelity of a representation such as a
picture or model is always relative to some chosen criterion, some chosen relation or
'rule of projection' between representation and subject such as subjective visual
similarity. The relation of the proposition to reality, however - the relation in virtue
of which it counts as matching or not matching - is a necessary one; given the
proposition, there cannot be a further question of which rule is to count as the truth-
determining rule of projection. Such is a way of specially applying Frege's regress
argument to a correspondence or picturing account of truth (it is also a reason why
the sentences of the Tractatus are by their own account meaningless: logical form
cannot be depicted). Now this is at once a way of saying that their determinability as
true or false - perhaps modulo certain provisos concerning vagueness and reference-
failure - are necessary or intrinsic features of propositions. We cannot literally speak
of a 'rule of projection' from proposition to reality, because if there were such a rule
it would have to be internal to the proposition itself, in which case the point of the
rule as a particular interface between proposition and reality would be lost. That a
proposition is the sort of thing that can be true is not the same sort of fact as the fact,
for example, that a given set of marks on paper is capable of depicting a tune.
Thus we have the notion of truth if we have the notion of proposition. To close
up the assertion-truth-proposition circle, then, we have only to accept that assertoric
force is uniquely essential to the notion of proposition. To characterize a proposition
as the content of a possible judgement (or assertion), as Frege does, must be given
pride of place because it is uniquely the notion of judgement - accepting-as-true -
that engages immediately with the notion of truth; hence an explanation of any other
sentential speech-act or variety of force must assume the notion of truth, and thereby
the notion of the correctness of a judgement. (There could not be 'models' or
'pictures' without the thought of their being correct or incorrect.) Thus if a
proposition is most fundamentally the content of a possible judgement, to judge is to
accept a proposition as true, and the role of 'That's true' is to stand proxy for an
arbitrary proposition, then we might begin to feel that the circle has been knitted up
tightly enough.
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 9

This is not to say that any other notion is positively to displace the concept of
truth; none is to be taken as primitive or as able to define truth. In Davidson's view
the balance clearly tips towards taking truth as primitive, even ifhe does not propose
precisely to define the notion of proposition or meaning in terms of it. What I
suggest, for the moment, is something more like mutual dependence,
interpenetration. If Davidson inverts Tarski's plan of relying on Meaning to explain
Truth, then the real, purpose-neutral order of things is so to speak horizontal; neither
strategy has absolute explanatory priority 10. What is more accurately described as
fundamental - and what Davidson's strategy fundamentally presupposes - is that
which encompasses the notions of Meaning and Truth, the notion of assertion or
judgement. Again, this is not to insist merely on necessary relations between certain
concepts, as if in principle they were separately conceivable and we had now to map
their connections; it is to say that the general notions of truth and propositional
content are already given by the notion of judgement, yet cannot be appealed to in
advance for the purpose of analysing it.

3. LOGICAL SYNTAX

What formal device, consistently with these reflections concerning truth, can perform
the roles for which a truth-predicate seems to be needed? For familiar reasons, I shall
assume that the relevant formal problem here is to shed light upon the non-deviant
ascription of truth within a given language: that, in particular, the
language/metalanguage distinction, though demonstrably forced upon us for some
purposes, is not a feature of our intuitive understanding of truth; it is not itself part of
the data which we set out to model. Whereas, for example, consistent but irreducible
truth-ascribing generalizations within a language do exist; we may thus assume that
an account of truth which fails to vindicate them thereby fails to capture a genuine
aspect of our understanding of truth (which is not to say, of course, that all such
aspects can consistently be reconciled).
One might thus look immediately to Kripke's well-known approach to truth
(Kripke 1975). For not only does Kripke's discussion show how to defme a truth-
predicate for a language L which operates within L itself; the intuition upon which
the approach is based can plausibly be explicated in terms of the functional
characterization of the truth-predicate described in the preceding section. The idea is
that the truth-values of sentences containing truth-predicates should not necessarily
be fixed except by those of sentences not containing them. If the truth-value of a
truth-predicate-containing sentence is not so fixed, then it needn't receive a truth-
value (hence for example 'x is true' gets a truth-value if x does, but needn't
otherwise). Accordingly, the truth-values of sentences in which the truth-predicate
occurs are fixed inductively, by setting up a cumulative hierarchy of interpretations
of the predicate: at level-D, sentences not containing the predicate are interpreted in
the normal way; this sets the stage for the truth-evaluation of sentences containing
one occurrence of the predicate; which sets the stage for the truth-evaluation of
sentences containing two occurrences of the predicate, and so on. A sentence whose
10 GARY KEMP

truth-value is not fixed at any level is said to be ungrounded (these include

paradoxical sentences). The reason this approach is congenial to the functional
characterization of truth is that if the truth-predicate is really a device for displaced
assertion and the like, then what we should require is precisely that a non-deviant use
of the truth-predicate always aims ultimately to acquire a truth-value from a sentence
not containing a truth-predicate. If for example an assertoric use fails to connect with
such a sentence, then no assertion is made, hence no truth-value should be
determined. By showing how the extension of the truth-predicate can be fixed by the
extralinguistic facts ll , Kripke's construction might seem to achieve this, so long as
we insist, in a Strawsonian spirit, that being grounded rather than ungrounded is a
presupposition of any attempt at assertion.
However, aside from its abandonment of bivalence, and consequent inability to
cope with the strengthened Liar Paradox, the appeal to Kripke's construction fails to
accord with our previous discussion in the right wayl2. One reason is that if Truth is
dealt with literally by means of a predicate, then the denial that Truth is a property
will require some metaphysical account of properties whereby not all logical
predicates denote properties (thus far we have employed the term 'property' in a
merely informal way). Another is that Kripke's construction counts as fully
grammatical the attribution of truth to non-propositional objects (nonsentences get
the value false in Kripke's scheme); our discussion should make us uneasy about
that. There is also a subtler reason, which is I think more fundamental. Kripke's
construction is compatible with the supposition that the notion of truth is something
superadded to language in general, as if the truth-predicate were simply a device
which, unfortunately for a pure redundancy theory of truth, is required for certain
special but legitimate purposes like model theory, epistemology, or promising not to
lie. Indeed Horwich's deflationism is precisely an attempt to maintain something of
the redundancy view while allowing for the generalizations required for such
purposes: the concept of truth, according to Horwich, is nothing but the role of the
truth-predicate in forming those generalizations. Aside from those generalizations it
has no essential role or significance. I think that Davidson, and Frege and
Wittgenstein in their less conspicuous ways, are right to insist that its role is far more
fundamental than that, that it cannot happily be thOUght of as entering into language
at any such later stage. The notion of truth is inseparable from the very idea of saying
something. An ideally satisfactory formal treatment would not only reflect this but
afford some kind of insight into it; it ought to afford insight into Truth, not merely
accommodate the word for it.
And in fact there is such a theory: it is the Prosentential Theory, due to Grover,
Belnap and Camp (Grover et al. 1975), and ably defended on numerous points of
detail by Grover. Its authors, indeed, explicitly claim inspiration from § 136 of the
Philosophical Investigations, though they do not, as I do, claim to have found there
an argument which supports it (perhaps because I am reading Frege's argument into
the passage). One aspect of the assertion-truth-proposition pyramid which emerged
from Wittgenstein and Frege's discussions was that a sentence like 'that's true'
stands proxy for an arbitrary proposition. The Prosentential Theory takes this point
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 11

quite straightforwardly. It is a syntactical proposal which explains the use of 'true' in

terms of propositional quantification. On this view, the open sentence 'that is true'
(or 'it is true', 'x is true', etc.), in its basic uses, should be viewed as semantically
unstructured. It serves as a genuine sentence-variable, just as 'it' and 'is thus and so'
can serve as object and predicate variables. It is not an objectual variable whose
substituends are names of propositions or sentences; it is not a mere schematic
sentence-letter as in standard propositional logic, and it need not be regarded merely
as a substitutional variable (in fact I think it would be wrong to do so) 13. If one
regards sentences as referring to truth-values, then they may be understood as
variables whose values are truth-values, but their most fundamental characterization
should be as a variable expression, not as a variable referring device. Used
anaphorically, then, a pro sentence imports the content of its antecedent, not merely
its reference (if any); this of course will be a proposition, the content of a sentence.
As a bound variable, it expresses an arbitrary proposition. Thus for example if we
write such a prosentence as 'thatt', then in a reformulated English we could, instead
of saying 'Every proposition is either true or false', say 'For all thatt, either thatt or
not-thatt'. The explanation for the grammatical appearance of the words 'is true' as a
predicate of ordinary language is twofold: First, without a subject and predicate,
prosentences won't look or feel like sentences, in the way that pronouns look and
feel like nouns; they won't exemplify the structure of what they go proxy for. It
doesn't feel like an assertion unless you have a subject and verb. But that is a mere
psychological fact, with no implications for logic (and even there we sometimes
relax our attitude, saying such things as, 'Well, if so, then ... ', and 'If the former,
then ... '). Second, the grammatical decomposability of 'It is true' and the like
facilitates tensed and otherwise contextually relativised attributions of truth - 'that
was true', etc.; it also facilitates the demarcation of the scopes of generalizations and
the indication of the intended anaphoric antecedents, as in 'He disagrees with
everything Kemp said today, but some of it was true'. (Again, this feature does not
require the assignment of a semantic value to the truth-predicate itself; its role is only
to form prosentences, whose function is characterized independently.) This view
seems to make for the closest possible alliance with the truth-proposition-assertion
connections discussed above, because the open sentence 'x is true' is now being
construed as a variable declarative sentence. It functions precisely by standing in for
an arbitrary judgeable content; it represents the general form of a proposition, if you
like, just as an objectual variable might be said to represent the general form of an
object.
The Prosentential Theory has been felt to be artificial. Graeme Forbes, for
example, describes it as hard to believe, and suggests that it cannot be explained in
the metalanguage without leaning upon the concept of truth, that is, without
presupposing truth as a genuine predicate (Forbes 1986). But we have an explanation
of why the theory should seem artificial. And if it is true that we cannot explain the
theory without employing a truth-predicate - cannot, in particular, interpret
quantifiers binding prosentences without using one - then that in itself is no
argument against the Prosentential Theory. For if the Prosentential Theory is true,
12 GARY KEMP

then 'it is true' and its relatives, in the metalanguage, already are prosentences.

4. CONCLUSION; HISTORICAL NOTE

My conclusion is that Frege was right to worry about truth in the way that he did, and
to have been tempted by the arguments and conclusions that he was. Although he did
not know what to make of it, he had in his hands, or stumbled upon, a line of thought
concerning truth whose cogency surely matches that of the more widely recognized
views. Probably it is not accidental that aspects of it appear not only in the sections
of the Philosophical Investigations discussed earlier but also at various places in the
Tractatus - composed in its final form during Wittgenstein's service in the Great
War and during its aftermath but, in many of its logical aspects, largely thought
through by the end of 1914 (the 'Notes to Moore'). Of course 'Der Gedanke' was
composed slightly later, but the crucial considerations are at least implicit in Frege's
philosophical discussions from the 1890s. From no later than 1891 he characterized
judgement as the inward acceptance of a thought as true (no wonder, then, Tractatus
4.442: 'it is quite impossible for a proposition to say of itself that it is true'). This is
all that is needed for the subsequent formulations that 'the idea of truth is bound up
with any predication whatsoever', and that 'true' seems to allow 'what corresponds
to the assertoric force to assume the form of a contribution to the thought [italics
added]'(PW 177,233,2521 NS 192,251,272). We will never know what Frege and
Wittgenstein said to each other during the young Wittgenstein's visits to Frege
during his pre-war intervals away from Cambridge (except what maybe inferred from
such remarks of Wittgenstein's as that Frege 'quite wiped the floor with me' on the
first of those visits) but I suspect that here is part of the deep common ground that
shows Wittgenstein to be the apostle of Frege rather than of Russell. For it is an
aspect of nothing less than the difference between a judgement-based and a thing-
based metaphysics - between a metaphysics which begins with objects and attempts
to explain thought and meaning on their basis, and one which, consistently with
Kant's dictum of the spontaneity of thought, regards the unity of judgement as
irrecoverable after analysis.

University ofWaikato

NOTES

• Ancestors of this paper were read at the Prague International Logic Colloquium, 19 September 1996,
The University of Glasgow, 10 February 1997, The University of Sheffield, 12 February 1997, and the
Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in Berkeley, 28 March 1997. For comments
and other instruction I especially thank David Bell, Dorothy Grover, Peter Hylton, Terry Parsons, Dave
Truncellito, and Nick Zangwill.
I CP is Frege 1984; PW is Frege 1979; KS is Frege 1967; NS is Frege 1969.

2 It is probably worth pointing out that it would be misleading at best to say, 'Of course Frege didn't
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 13

think that Truth is a property; he held it to be an object, namely the denotation of a true sentence'. That
true sentences denote the True does not itselftell us anything about the meaning of truth predicates. At
most this fact enables Frege to define a predicate of sentences which will have the expected properties, so
long as semantical concepts of some sort are available. We can write, for example, 's is true iff the
denotation of s = the True', or, substituting an arbitrary logical truth T for 'The True', 's is true iff the
denotation of s = T. This fact shows that Frege would have to swallow one of two things: (1) Though
formally adequate - ignoring inconsistency - no such truth-predicate could provide a genuine definition
or analysis of truth; (2) Neither the notion of denotation nor the analogous relation between items of
sense and items of denotation is any more real than Truth (see Ricketts 1986, Kemp 1995). It might also
be pointed out that Frege's horizontal is not a truth-predicate. Attached to sentences it is truth-
functionally identical to double-negation, and it yields the value False when attached to names which are
not sentences, such as names of propositions or names of sentences.

3 Of course I am assuming that one fully understands 'p is true' only if one fully understands p. See 'The
Thought' but also 'My Basic Logical Insights', PW 2511NS 271.

4 For more on this, especially on the role that Frege's outlook on truth plays in his philosophical
conception oflogic, see Kemp (1995).
5 This is, of course, precisely the sort criticism that Wittgenstein, early and late, made of both Frege's and
Russell's accounts of logic and mathematics: The idea that logical and mathematical truths are as they
are because of the properties and relations borne by logical and mathematical objects simply cannot do
justice to their necessity or a priori status.
6 For this reason I think the otherwise congenial and illuminating account given by David Bell of Frege's
assertion sign must be incorrect. See Bell (\ 979) p. 98.

7 It's worth noting that the concept of assertion would be required even if sentence-meaning were
explicated in terms of conditions of use or warranted assertion rather than truth-conditions.
8 Whereas it is not incredible to suppose that, in the most rudimentary way, dogs do appreciate the
peculiarity of assertion - what is happening when someone says something to them. It is important here
not to think of 'understanding' and the like as all-or-nothing.
9 See 'The Structure and Content of Truth' .
10 In 'The Structure and Content of Truth' - in my view Davidson's best and most profound statement of
his position - Davidson comes close to abandoning the priority thesis. The essay begins as an attempt to
add the empirical content needed to convert Tarski's formal apparatus into a general account of truth.
However, at a crucial point (p. 314) Davidson clearly reverts to his longstanding strategy of regarding
Truth as undefinable in order not to assume the concepts of belief, meaning, intention and the like in the
description of the evidence for a Truth-Theory. My suggestion is that, although it is theoretically
illuminating to discuss what can be done by assuming one priority of concepts rather than another, there
is no purpose-neutral priority here. It is equally legitimate to rely on meaning to illuminate truth (it
should go without saying that by 'illumination' we cannot mean 'definition' or 'reduction').

II Consistency doesn't require that it be fixed only in that way, but for our purposes no other
interpretation of the truth-predicate would be of any relevance.

12 Various attempts have been made to enable a groundedness-based truth-theory to cope with the
strengthened liar, but the price has been precisely the sort of burgeoning complexity which sceptics will
say lacks cogent motivation aside from the need to avoid paradox. See Grover (1980) §7.4 and Grover
(1976) for an argument that the strengthened liar actually shows that 'is true' is not a logical predicate.
13 See Grover, 'Propositional Quantifiers'. Note that propositional quantification in Grover's sense does
not assume the existence of propositions, if by 'existence' we mean being the value of a first-order
variable; that is precisely why it is propositional quantification, not simply objectual quantification over
14 GARY KEMP

a domain restricted to those objects which happen to be propositions.

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