Abstract
Different species have different kinds of minds. Humans in particular have and use a concept of truth, which they apply to kinds of thoughts that they may be unique in thinking. These are propositional thoughts, which are most naturally expressed by sentences, since neither words nor other sub-sentential constituents (e.g. Noun Phrases, NPs) can express them, or be true or false. The project thus proposes to relate alethic competence to linguistic competence, and to investigate how the origins of truth relate to the origins of the human sentence, using methods and insights from generative/minimalist grammar, developmental psychology, and comparative evolutionary biology. Project A aims to develop a theory of the syntactic categories (Noun, Verb, etc.), clearly a crucial aspect of the sentence/NP distinction. Plausibly, they provide structural pre-conditions for truth and the dichotomy between truth (applying to sentences) and reference (applying to NPs). Project B is devoted to a novel explanatory theory of truth, based on a careful developmental, phenomenological, and anthropological analysis of the human concept of truth. Project C analyzes the representational dimensions of truth and language, aiming to economize on representations posited internal to the mind.