I have been thinking about the philosophical issue of truth for more
than two decades. It is one of several fascinating philosophical issues
that motivated me to change my primary re ective interest to philosophy
after receiving BS in mathem- ics in 1982. Some serious academic work in
this connection started around the late eighties when I translated into
Chinese a dozen of Donald Davidson's representative essays on truth and
meaning and when I assumed translator for Adam Morton who gave a series
of lectures on the issue in Beijing (1988), which was co-sponsored by my
then institution (Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social
Science). I have loved the issue both for its own sake (as one speci c
major issue in the phil- ophy of language and metaphysics) and for the
sake of its signi cant involvement in many philosophical issues in
different subjects of philosophy. Having been attracted to the analytic
approach, I was then interested in looking at the issue both from the
points of view of classical Chinese philosophy and Marxist philosophy,
two major styles or frameworks of doing philosophy during that time in
China, and from the point of view of contemporary analytic philosophy,
which was then less recognized in the Chinese philosophical circle.