I would like to thank professor Taylor for the minor but real achievement of this book -- helping me come to an understanding of what a dead end the philosophy of language has become since Tarski's day.

A century ago, the "meaning of truth" was a hot subject of debate, and the disputants were such titans as William James, Bertrand Russell, and Josiah Royce. The question was not one of "philosophical semantics" for them, it was about the precondition of knowledge.

The problem is not the trivial one about which philosophers now obsess. We can all agree that if snow is white, then the statement "snow is white" is true. The question for the old-style philosopher was what kind of connection between my mind and snow is presumed in the very possibility that I may truly call it white.