Truth and What Is Said

A notion of truth as applicable to events of fact-stating use (utterances) of a sentence type is arguably presupposed and required by our evaluative practices of the use of language. The truth of an utterance clearly depends on what the utterance says. This fundamental dependence seems to be captured by the schema that if an utterance u says that P , then u is true iff P . Such a schema may thus be thought to constitute a suitable basis for an adequate theory of utterance truth, so much so that it seems straightforwardly to avoid the problems arising from context dependence and the semantic paradoxes which notoriously beset theories of utterance truth based on a simple disquotational schema. The paper argues that appearances are deceptive in both cases. On the one hand, the schema cannot allow for non-indexical forms of context-dependence, arising from the fact that what an utterance says can be the case or not as evaluated with respect to different situations and that the truth of an utterance u of a sentence φ arguably depends on the truth of φ at the situation “associated” with u’s context of utterance. On the other hand, a quantified utterance-truth variation on the liar paradox shows that the schema entails some consequence φ and at the same time the untruth of any utterance of φ; moreover, a resilient quantified propositional variation on the contingent liar paradox is offered, which only relies on resources usually employed by theories of utterance truth based on the schema.