Meaning and truth-conditions

Abstract

Donald Davidson (1984g) famously proposed that what we want from a theory of meaning we may get from a theory of truth. What we want from a theory of meaning for a natural language, that being the case at issue, includes at least an account of the phenomena that give rise to the principle of compositionality: We want an explanation of how the meaning of a complex expression, such as a sentence, depends upon and is determined by the meanings of its syntactic parts. One central advantage of Davidson’s proposal, as he saw it, is that we know from the work of Tarski (1958) how to construct theories of truth for languages with certain sorts of structures, and such a theory does help us to understand how at least some of the semantic properties of complex expressions are determined by those of their parts. Davidson’s practice suggests he may have hoped that all sentences of natural language could be assigned logical forms of the variety familiar from mathematical logic. If so, then semantics would all but reduce to syntax: The only outstanding problem would be to uncover the ‘logical forms’ of the sentences of, say, English. This hope does not now seem reasonable. But the methods available for investigating logical form—that is, for investigating syntax—have become so powerful that it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that the syntactic part of the problem is solvable, at least in principle, and Tarski’s work can be adapted to many of the resulting structures. The work that is left for the semanticist proper then becomes to solve the problems syntax and Tarski do not solve: These include, for example, discovering what sorts of semantic values need to be assigned to novel semantic primitives, such as mass terms, and explaining the semantic significance of novel modes of composition, such as [V PV [CPS]]. It is unfortunate that a proposal with such great advantages faces such grave difficulties. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that most philosophers of language, and perhaps even most working semanticists, regard truththeoretic semantics as a non-starter, for the simple reason that it seems to have the wrong subject-matter. We will not get what we want from a theory of meaning from any theory that does not specify meanings: No theory that does not specify what the sentence ‘snow is white’ means, for example, can possibly explain how this sentence’s meaning what it does is determined by its parts’ meaning what they do. But a theory of truth for English does not specify what even one sentence of English means, since any such theory is consistent with infinitely many different suppositions concerning what any sentence of English means. For example, a theory of truth that proves this T-sentence2 for ‘snow is white’: