Among the A-philosophical theses which 1 considered in Essay 1 was the original version of a "speech-act" account of truth, proposed by Strawson many years ago' though extensively modified by him since then. He was influenced, I think, by four main considerations:

(1) that the word true is properly, or at least primarily, to be applied to statements (what is stated), in view of the difficulties which he thought he saw in the thesis that it should be understood as applying to utterances; (2) that given the correctness of the previous supposi-tion, no theory which treats truth as consisting in a relation (or cor-relation) between statements and facts is satisfactory, since statements and facts cannot be allowed to be distinct items in the real world; (3) that Ramsey's account of truth —namely, that to assert that a proposition is true is to assert that proposition—is correct so far as it goes; and (4) that it does not go far enough, since it omits to take seriously the fact that we should not always be willing to tolerate the substitution of, for example, It is true that it is raining for It is raining. So he propounded the thesis that to say of a statement that it is true is (1) insofar as it is to assert anything, to assert that statement and (2) not merely to assert it but to endorse, confirm, concede, or reassert it (the list is not, of course, intended to be complete).

Such a theory seems to me to have at least two unattractive fea-tures, on the assumption that it was intended to give an account of the meaning (conventional significance) of the word true. (1) (A familiar type of objection) it gives no account, or no satisfactory ac-count, of the meaning of the word true when it occurs in unasserted subsentences (e.g. He thinks that it is true that... or If it is true that ... ). (2) It is open to an objection which I am inclined to think holds against Ramsey's view (of which the speech-act theory is an offshoot).

A theory of truth has (as Tarski noted) to provide not only for occurrences of true in sentences in which what is being spoken of as true is specified, but also for occurrences in sentences in which no specification is given (eg. The policeman's statement was true). According both to the speech-act theory, I presume, and to Ramsey's theory, at least part of what the utterer of such a sentence is doing is to assert whatever it was that the policeman stated. But the utterer may not

1. P. F. Strawson, "Trutb," Analysis 9, no. 6 (1949).
2. Foundations of Mathematics, pp. 142-143.

know what that statement was; he may think that the policeman's statement was true because policemen always speak the truth, or that that policeman always speaks the truth, or that policeman in those circumstances could not but have spoken the truth. Now assertion presumably involves committing oneself, and while it is possible to commit oneself to a statement which one has not identified (I could commit myself to the contents of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, without knowing what they say), I do not think I should be properly regarded as having committed myself to the content of the policeman's statement, merely in virtue of having said that it was true. When to my surprise I learn that the policeman actually said, Monkeys can talk, I say (perhaps), Well, I was wrong, not I withdraw that, or I withdraw my commitment to that. I never was committed to it.