Global Expressivism and the Puzzle of Truth-apt Sentences

Any good theory of truth and meaning should provide an account of truth-apt sentences, that is, the class of sentences that are apt for evaluation as true or false. The classical view, which embraces the force-content distinction (FCD), proposes that truth-apt sentences are force-less propositional representations. I argue that the classical view is untenable. I outline two alternative views: (a) truth-apt sentences are asserted sentences and (b) they are utterances defined by certain inferential practices. I argue these conceptions fail. I then develop an adequate theory using global expressivism (GE). In GE, FCD is repudiated and we formulate a theory of truth-apt sentences using an expressivist treatment of truth and the concept of proto-assertion, that is, sentence utterances conceptually dependent on assertion but not assertions.