 The other very important debate that Strawson was involved in the early 1950s was that with Austin about truth. Viewed in terms of the politics of Oxford philosophy at that time, the debate perhaps represents a power struggle between Austin, the hitherto acknowledged leader, and Strawson, the younger challenger. Philosophically, Strawson took exception to Austin’s attempt (in Austin 1950) to formulate a reconstructed version of the correspondence theory of truth. Austin’s account of truth is complex, but, roughly, he held that in saying that a statement is true one is saying that the state of affairs which a particular kind of linguistic convention, which he called the referential conventions, ensure are picked out by the use of the original sentence in the given circumstances, satisfy the conditions which another sort of convention — called the descriptive conventions — target the rest of the sentence onto. Austin’s idea can be illustrated with an example. The sentence ‘The television is broken’ is governed by certain referential conventions which target it onto some state of affairs in the world involving a particular television set; there are also certain descriptive conventions built into the sentence linking it to a type of state of affairs (the containing-a-broken-television type); the former state of affairs conforms to, or falls under, the descriptively correlated type. Strawson’s criticism principally alleges that Austin has no clear conception of what the supposed referential conventions link sentences with. Is it objects — say, the television? If so, then that is not a state of affairs, and certainly not a fact.