Abstract

It is widely held, following Kripke, that no theory of ‘meaning as dispositions of use’ could accommodate the relationship between meaning and truth, e.g., that if a word means DOG then it is true of all dogs and only of dogs. This chapter makes explicit and criticizes the assumptions on which Kripke’s position is founded. First, that in order for the meaning of a given word to be constituted by its having a given use, we would have to be able to read off the word’s extension on the basis of that use. Second, for this to be possible, there would have to be some way of weeding out those uses that are errors. It is argued that these assumptions are incorrect, since they are affiliated with an anti-deflationary conception of truth.