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Intentional Sematics

The document discusses issues with understanding meaning as simply knowing truth conditions. It presents arguments from Dummett and Putnam that understanding is a psychological state that affects behavior, while truth conditions alone may not. The document considers replies that understanding does not need to be a narrow concept, and that wide concepts can still causally influence behavior.

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Nur Ain Hasma
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8 views3 pages

Intentional Sematics

The document discusses issues with understanding meaning as simply knowing truth conditions. It presents arguments from Dummett and Putnam that understanding is a psychological state that affects behavior, while truth conditions alone may not. The document considers replies that understanding does not need to be a narrow concept, and that wide concepts can still causally influence behavior.

Uploaded by

Nur Ain Hasma
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Intentional Sematics and Truth Conditions Reconceived

Intentional Sematics

Intension theorists think of the kind of semantically charged syntax I have been describing as
a machine program for computing large meanings from smaller ones, a program that is in
some sense being run in the brains of speakers and hearers. But that idea is problematic. Here
is a more specific worry about the “dynamic feature,” pointed out by Michael Dummett
(1975) and by Hilary Putnam (1978). Dummett’s and Putnam’s own writings are dense and
somewhat obscure, but here is a simple way of putting one of their concerns: A sentence
meaning is what one knows when one knows what a sentence means. But to know what a
sentence means is just to understand that sentence. And understanding is a psychological
state, one that inheres in a flesh-and-blood human organism and affects that organism’s
behavior. Now, if what a sentence means is just its truth condition, how can knowledge of a
truth condition per se affect anyone’s behavior, when (as is easily shown by Twin-Earth
examples) truth conditions are often “wide” properties of sentences in the sense that they
“ain’t in the head” and knowledge of truth conditions is a conspicuously wide property of
people? The truth condition of “Dogs drink water,” here, differs from that of “Dogs drink
water” on Twin Earth, but the difference is irrelevant to behavior and cannot affect it. But
understanding (= knowing meaning) must and does affect behavior. Therefore understanding
is not simply knowledge of truth conditions.

FIRST REPLY

Put in this way, the argument assumes that “understanding” must itself be a “narrow” or “in
the head” concept. That is, to say the least, not obvious. (I leave to you the exercise of
constructing a Twin-Earth counterexample.) Realizing that the argument needs a narrow
concept of understanding also should make us reconsider the simple equating of “knowing
meaning” with understanding and vice versa, truistic as that equating may have sounded at
first.

SECOND REPLY

Further, the argument assumes that wide concepts cannot per se figure in the aetiology of
behaviour. As is made clear by the “intentional causation” literature of some years ago, 3
“figuring in” can be done in many ways. There is no doubt that behaviour depends
counterfactually on wide states of people: Had I wanted water (H 2 O), I would have gone
into the kitchen to get some. And I think that is the strongest etiological notion guaranteed by
common sense. If anyone thinks that understanding affects behavior in a stronger sense of
“affect” than just that the behavior depends counterfactually on the under- standing, we
would have to hear some defense.

Truth conditions reconceived

The Truth-Condition Theory understands meaning as representation, as mirroring or


correspondence between sentences and actual or possible states of affairs. But we can take
the notion of a hypothetical state of affairs more seriously than Davidson is willing to, and
consider “possible states of affairs/circumstances/conditions.

For the truth-condition theorist, of course, that set of worlds will also be the
sentence’s meaning. It would follow that synonymous sentence are true in just the same
worlds, whereas for any two nonsynonymous sentences there will be at least one world in
which one of the sentences is true but the other false. This idea generalizes to the meanings of
sub sentential expressions. But, to show how that works, I must backtrack for a paragraph or
two.

In semantics a truth condition is the condition under which a sentence is true. For example,
"It is snowing in Nebraska" is true precisely when it is snowing in Nebraska. Truth conditions
of a sentence do not necessarily reflect current reality. They are merely the conditions under
which the statement would be true.

More formally, a truth condition makes for the truth of a sentence in an inductive definition
of truth (for details, see the semantic theory of truth). Understood this way, truth conditions
are theoretical entities. To illustrate with an example: suppose that, in a particular truth
theory[2] which is a theory of truth where truth is somehow made acceptable despite semantic
terms as close as possible, the word "Nixon" refers to Richard M. Nixon, and "is alive" is
associated with the set of currently living things. Then one way of representing the truth
condition of "Nixon is alive" is as the ordered pair <Nixon, {x: x is alive}>. And we say that
"Nixon is alive" is true if and only if the referent (or referent of) "Nixon" belongs to the set
associated with "is alive", that is, if and only if Nixon is alive. In semantics, the truth
condition of a sentence is almost universally considered distinct from its meaning. The
meaning of a sentence is conveyed if the truth conditions for the sentence are understood.
Additionally, there are many sentences that are understood although their truth condition is
uncertain. One popular argument for this view is that some sentences are necessarily true that
is, they are true whatever happens to obtain. All such sentences have the same truth
conditions, but arguably do not thereby have the same meaning

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