Abstract

To understand language, philosophers have related sentences and/or their uses to the concept of truth. I study an aspect of this relation by studying the actual structures that sentences expressing truth judgements have, an issue that I consider empirical. So I propose to switch from studying ‘truth conditions’ for sentences (determined metaphysically, or normatively) to studying the structures of expressions of the form This sentence is true/has (some) truth to it. I argue that the status of the ‘truth predicate’ must be understood in terms of the syntax (in Chomsky's naturalistic sense of syntax) of possessive constructions, rather than in terms of metaphysical, epistemic, or action–theoretic factors.