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My central concern across the main body of this work will be with a range of products which, for want of a better name, I call 'statements". Statements may be likened to and therefore also contrasted with such other items as promises and civil enactments. Promises are products of promising and civil enactments products of legislative activity, where promises may be brought under the general heading of undertakings and civil enactments under the general heading of laws. Statements are comprised among the products of acts of subjects' both saying and meaning what they think they know to be so, and may be described as flat formulations of putative fact. Promises, we know, may be kept or broken or sometimes neither, and civil enactments may be enforced or ignored or sometimes neither; statements, as I conceive them, may or may not be "true to the facts", and accordingly, in themselves, be true or false or perhaps sometimes neither. My interest in statements arises from their susceptibility to these "truth-value" determinations. While statements are not the most "primitive" bearers of "truth-value"—what philosophers curiously call "beliefs' may perhaps fill that role—they are, as I believe, for systematic purposes, the most "fundamental" vehicles of truth and falsity.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3066-2_1

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