Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of

natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languag ...

that sees meaning (or at least the meaning of assertions) as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions. This approach to semantics is principally associated with Donald Davidson, and attempts to carry out for the semantics of natural language what Tarski's semantic theory of truth achieves for the semantics of logic. Truth-conditional theories of semantics attempt to define the meaning of a given proposition by explaining when the sentence is true. So, for example, because 'snow is white' is true

if and only if In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (shortened as "iff") is a biconditional logical connective between statements, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is bi ...

snow is white, the meaning of 'snow is white' is snow is white.

History

The first truth-conditional semantics was developed by Donald Davidson in '' Truth and Meaning'' (1967). It applied Tarski's semantic theory of truth to a problem it was not intended to solve, that of giving the meaning of a sentence.

Criticism

Refutation from necessary truths

Scott Soames has harshly criticized truth-conditional semantics on the grounds that it is either wrong or uselessly circular. Under its traditional formulation, truth-conditional semantics gives every necessary truth precisely the same meaning, for all of them are true under precisely the same conditions (namely, all of them). And since the truth conditions of any unnecessarily true sentence are equivalent to the conjunction of those truth conditions and any necessary truth, any sentence means the same as its meaning plus a necessary truth. For example, if ''"snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white'', then it is trivially the case that ''"snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white and 2+2=4'', therefore under truth-conditional semantics "snow is white" means both that snow is white and that 2+2=4. Soames argues further that reformulations that attempt to account for this problem must beg the question. In specifying precisely ''which'' of the infinite number of truth-conditions for a sentence will count towards its meaning, one must take the meaning of the sentence as a guide. However, we wanted to specify meaning with truth-conditions, whereas now we are specifying truth-conditions with meaning, rendering the entire process fruitless.

Refutation from deficiency

Michael Dummett Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011) was an English academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He ...

(1975) has objected to Davidson's program on the grounds that such a theory of meaning will not explain what it is a speaker has to know in order for them to understand a sentence. Dummett believes a speaker must know three components of a sentence to understand its meaning: a theory of

sense A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the central nervous system rec ...

, indicating the part of the meaning that the speaker grasps; a theory of

reference Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a '' name'' ...

, which indicates what claims about the world are made by the sentence, and a theory of force, which indicates what kind of

speech act In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me? ...

the expression performs. Dummett further argues that a theory based on inference, such as proof-theoretic semantics, provides a better foundation for this model than truth-conditional semantics does.

Pragmatic intrusion

Some authors working within the field of

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the in ...

have argued that linguistic meaning, understood as the output of a purely formal analysis of a sentence-type, underdetermines truth-conditions. These authors, sometimes labeled 'contextualists', argue that the role of pragmatic processes is not just pre-semantic (disambiguation or reference assignment) or post-semantic (drawing implicatures, determining

speech acts Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are th ...

), but is also key to determining the truth-conditions of an utterance. That is why some contextualists prefer to talk about 'truth-conditional pragmatics' instead of semantics.

Notes

References

* M. A. E. Dummett (1975). ‘What is a Theory of Meaning’. In S. Guttenplan (ed.), ''Mind and Language'', CUP. Reprinted in Dummett, ''The Seas of Language'', OUP, 1993. {{DEFAULTSORT:Truth-Conditional Semantics Semantics Philosophy of language Formal semantics (natural language)