Comments on: Saka Challenges Truth-Conditional Semantics http://semantics-online.org/2005/02/saka-challenges-truth-conditional-semantics A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:06:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Tony Marmo http://semantics-online.org/2005/02/saka-challenges-truth-conditional-semantics#comment-186 Tony Marmo Sun, 20 Feb 2005 11:19:19 +0000 http://www.semantics-online.org/wp/uncategorized/2005/02/saka-challenges-truth-conditional-semantics#comment-186 <p>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:</p> <blockquote>(S) In the future starvation will not exist.</blockquote> <p>This seems to contravene the following principle of truth-value semantics:</p> <blockquote><b>Verification Principle</b> The meaning of a statement is its method of verification.</blockquote> <p>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 <i>meaning</i>, e.g.:</p> <blockquote><b>[1]. (Compositionality Principle)</b> The meaning of a statement is a function of the meaning of its parts and of the syntactic operations by which they are combined.</blockquote> <blockquote><b>[2]. (Context Change)</b> The meaning of a statement is the change it produces in the context wherein it has been enunciated.</blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <i>neutral</i>: 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.</p> 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:

(S) In the future starvation will not exist.

This seems to contravene the following principle of truth-value semantics:

Verification Principle

The meaning of a statement is its method of verification.

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.:

[1]. (Compositionality Principle)

The meaning of a statement is a function of the meaning of its parts and of the syntactic operations by which they are combined.

[2]. (Context Change)

The meaning of a statement is the change it produces in the context wherein it has been enunciated.

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.

]]>