Truth and Warranted Assertibility

The article addresses the question whether the semantic realist should accept the principle (R) according to which every reason to think that a statement is true is a reason to think that the statement is warrantedly assertible, and vice versa. As against W. Alston’s suggestion, according to which the acceptance of (R) commits one to regarding “true” and “warrantedly assertible” as having the same extension, it is argued that (R) just follows from the neutral assumption, also shared by Alston, that the acceptance of all non-pathological instances of the Equivalence Schema (it is true that p iff p) provides a necessary condition for understanding the truth-predicate. So, it is argued, (R) is open both to the realist and to the antirealist. In addition, in the final part it is sketched a general argument against the anti-realistic identification of meaning with assertibility conditions, which is essentially premised on (R). With this it is shown that the realist has also good dialectical motivations to accept (R).