Abstract

It has been widely assumed, arguably under the influence of Tarski's Convention T, that in giving a truth-theoretic semantics for a language one has to employ a metalanguage that can express whatever is expressible in the object language. In this note I will present some cases against this assumption. The requirement that every expression in the object lan-guage be translatable into the metalanguage should not be considered compulsory, it will be argued, when the object language contains expressions like indexicals, empty singular terms, and vague words. An attempt will be made to draw some philosophical morals from this contention.