Truth or understanding
This chapter and the next argue against the idea that children acquire languages whose sentences have compositionally determined truth conditions. The chapter begins by discussing Davidson’s bold conjecture: the languages that children naturally acquire support Tarski-style theories of truth, which can serve as the core components of meaning theories for the languages in question. The argument is that even if there are plausible theories of truth for these languages, formulating them as plausible theories of meaning requires assumptions about truth that are extremely implausible. Sentences like ‘My favorite sentence is not true’, which happens to be my favorite sentence, illustrate this point. But the point is not merely that “Liar Sentences” are troublesome, it is that theories of truth and theories of meaning have different subject matters.