Paul Saka, University of Houston: “The Argument From Ignorance Against Truth-Conditional Semantics”
According to epistemic versions of truth-conditional semantics, to know the meaning of a sentence is to know its truth - conditions. Against such views I argue that we typically do not know the truth - conditions of the sentences we understand. We do not know the truth - conditions for vacuous-reference definite descriptions, non-declaratives, subjunctive conditionals, causal ascriptions, belief ascriptions, probability statements, figurative language, category mistakes, normative judgments, or vague statements. Appealing to tacit knowledge does not help, for we are not merely unable to articulate complete truth - conditions; even given full knowledge of a single world condition, we are often unable to tell whether a given sentence would be true or false. This makes it hard to say that knowledge of meaning is even tacit knowledge of truth - conditions.
[via Online Papers in Philosophy — thanks Brian!]
What is claimed in essence is that the user of a human language can understand a sentence of that language even if he cannot say whether a sentence is true or not. For instance, I can understand (S) below, although I do not know whether it is true or false:
This seems to contravene the following principle of truth-value semantics:
The problem with such line of argumentation is that there is not one single and unique concept of meaning. There are many other possible ways to define meaning, e.g.:
None of these definitions necessarily excludes the other. It is not possible to say that one of them in principle is more correct than the other.
The discussion proposed by Saka is old and interesting though, it seems mainly to consist of a confrontation of options to be made. No study of semantics is completely neutral: it has to depart from some initial assumptions. So it is all a matter of whether one departs from the verification principle and chooses to consider the phenomenon that can be treated within the scope of a truth-values approach.
February 20th, 2005, at 3:19 am #