College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016.09.11 Author Mark Richard Truth and Truth Bearers: Meaning in Context, Volume II Published: September 12, 2016 Mark Richard, Truth and Truth Bearers: Meaning in Context, Volume II, Oxford University Press, 2015, 287pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198747765. Reviewed by Manuel GarcíaCarpintero, University of Barcelona This is the second compilation of Mark Richard's papers, after Context and the Attitudes . It has three parts with, respectively, papers on time and tense, on relativism and truth-bearers, and on quotation and opacity. Like the previous volume, this one includes both important papers that deservedly had a great impact on contemporary philosophy and some new material; hence it is very welcome. Researchers working on the philosophy of language (broadly conceived), the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics will want to have both compilations at hand. I'll describe the contents of each part, making small critical observations in passing. Part I contains two papers from Richard's dissertation, "Temporalism and Eternalism" (1981) and "Tense, Propositions, and Meaning" (1982), and a previously unpublished one, "Temporalism and Eternalism Revisited", written between 2003 and 2009. The earliest of these is frequently cited, but, as Richard acknowledges in the introduction, there have been serious objections to it. His new paper addresses those objections. Propositions are usually understood in terms of their role: they provide the contents of attitudes like belief and of speech acts like assertion and they are bearers of truth-values. As David Kaplan (1989, 503-4) put it, propositions are supposed to be "modally neutral", in that an assertion made by uttering 'snow is white' (or the belief expressed by it) is supposed to be the same whether it is made with respect to a world like the actual one of which it is true, or to one with relevantly different facts of which it would be false. Temporalism, which Kaplan endorses, is the view that some propositions are also temporally neutral, or temporal for short: the same proposition is asserted and the same belief is expressed by, say, utterances of 'Obama is president' both at times at which it is true and at times at which it is not. "Temporalism and Eternalism" advances a simple prima facie compelling argument against this view. The objection is that, against what seems intuitively right, the view appears to validate inferences like the following on plausible assumptions -- including the one that the second past tense in the first premise is semantically vacuous: Mary believed that Obama was president. Mary still believes everything she once believed. Therefore, Mary believes that Obama is president. The problem with this argument becomes clear once we appreciate a point that some have made following Lewis (1980), [1] and that Richard made independently in his 1982 paper in reply to Kaplan's (1989, 503) infamous "operator argument" for temporalism. [2] Kaplan argues that we need to ascribe temporal semantic contents to sentences, so that operators like the past tense have something to properly operate on, by shifting time indexes -- the way modally neutral contents allow modal operators like 'possibly' to shift world indexes. The Lewisian point in reply, using a terminology that has become standard today, is that we should distinguish the compositional semantic value of a declarative sentence from its assertoric content. The former is the value that a semantic theory should ascribe to it in order to fulfill its explanatory tasks -- in particular, by making semantic content adequately compositional. The latter is something like the proposition that would be asserted by an utterance of the sentence in a "default" or "typical" context. The semantic value of a sentence might relativize its truth-value to parameters of all kinds, in particular temporal parameters, a point that respects that made by Kaplan about tense operators. The assertoric content might still end up being temporally specific (by the assertoric context supplying a time), as eternalism claims.Mary believes that Obama is president. Semantic and assertoric content must be related, because the intuitive evidence for theories of natural language, including evidence for compositionality, is directly about assertoric contents, but only indirectly about semantic values. However, Lewis (1980) and the other researchers convincingly argue that the relation doesn't need to be identity. Writers like Jeffrey King and Jason Stanley assume instead that we do need a closer identification between semantic value and assertoric content. They provide an alternate