Semantics And Truth

The book provides a historical (with an outline of the history of the concept of truth from antiquity to our time) and systematic exposition of the semantic theory of truth formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1930s. This theory became famous very soon and inspired logicians and philosophers. It has two different, but interconnected aspects: formal-logical and philosophical. The book deals with both, but it is intended mostly as a philosophical monograph. It explains Tarski’s motivation and presents discussions about his ideas (pro and contra) as well as points out various applications of the semantic theory of truth to philosophical problems (truth-criteria, realism and anti-realism, future contingents or the concept of correspondence between language and reality).

This work explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, and examines how truth-theoretic semantics can account for expressions of this type. It provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar paired with semantic analysis and pragmatic theory.

Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig examine the foundations and applications of Davidson's influential program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages. The program uses an axiomatic truth theory for a language, which meets certain constraints, to serve the goals of a compositional meaning theory. Lepore and Ludwig explain and clarify the motivations for the approach, and then consider how to apply the framework to a range of important natural language constructions, including quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, the simple and perfect tenses, temporal adverbials and temporal quantifiers, tense in sentential complement clauses, attitude and indirect discourse reports, and the problem of interrogative and imperative sentences. They not only discuss Davidson's own contributions to these subjects but consider criticisms, developments, and alternatives as well. They conclude with a discussion of logical form in natural language in light of the approach, the role of the concept of truth in the program, and Davidson's view of it. Anyone working on meaning will find this book invaluable.

Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, Martin Luther University (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Hauptseminar 'Semantics', language: English, abstract: According to Galileo Galilei "all truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." Proving the truth values of sentences has been of peculiar interest for thousands of years and philosophers as well as mathematicians worldwide have tried to grasp this enormously complex matter. The intricacy of truth even begins with the definition of the object. Even Alfred Tarski, a Polish-American mathematician and one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century, stated that the main problem is a satisfactory definition of truth. Obviously, discovering the truth of statements is a rather difficult task to undertake. Howsoever, in this paper we illustrate various semantic relations and theories as well as logical tools which help to establish the truth.

Most of the papers in this volume bear upon the general question "What is the nature of an acceptable theory of meaning?" taking as their starting point an answer proposed by Donald Davidson. The remaining papers are attempts to work outthe implications of suggested answers to this question, or to solve semantical problems in accordance with them.