Page 224 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
From this natural account of falsity, it follows that every proposition has a truth value; for to say of some proposition that it is neither true nor false would be to imply that it is both not true and not not true, which is a contradiction. This result has important ramifications in semantics, where it has often been found tempting to mark out certain 'odd' propositions as having no truth value.
One of the areas in which it has been popular to invoke truth-value gaps is in the treatment of vague- ness. It is often said, for example, that if John is a borderline case of baldness, then the proposition that John is bald is neither true nor false. But this approach leads to the contradiction just mentioned. An alter- native strategy is to draw a distinction between truth and determinate truth (in terms of the idea that the latter, but not the former, implies the possibility of conclusive verification). One can then characterize what is special about vague propositions, without run- ning afoul of the above theory of falsity, by saying that, although true or false, they lack determinate truth values.
A second type of proposition to which the 'no- truth-value' strategy has been applied are those, such as Santa drives a sledge, which contain nonreferring constituents. Again, there is an alternative policy; namely, to regard such propositions as false. This can be sustained by converting names into predicates as proposed by Quine, giving, in this example:
The unique possessor of the property of 'being Santa' drives a sledge.
and then employing Russell's theory of definite descriptions to obtain:
There is exactly one thing possessing the property of 'being Santa,' and it drives a sledge.
which is uncontroversially false.
Finally, there is a famous 'emotivist' account of
ethics according to which, appearances to the contrary, moral pronouncements purport not to assert facts but, rather, to express the feelings of the speaker, and therefore should not be regarded as true or false. However, there is no need to link the two components of this view. One might well agree that the peculiarity of ethical claims is that they are justified when the speaker has certain feelings. But this does not require the statement that they are neither true nor false— which, as shown above, is a position best avoided. Therefore, once again, no theoretical reason has been found to depart from the simple account of falsity as absence of truth.
See also: Deviant Logics; Paradoxes, Semantic; Ref-
erence: Philosophical Issues; Truth and Paradox; Truth Conditions; Vagueness.
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