On the Fundamental Role of ‘Means That’ in Semantic Theorizing

Date

2023-01-01

Author

Grünberg, Teo
Grünberg, David
Akçelik, Oğuz

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Our aim is to illuminate the interconnected notions of meaning and truth. For this purpose, we investigate the relationship between meaning theories based on commonsensical ‘means that’ and interpretive truth theories. The latter are Tarski–Davidson-style truth theories serving as meaning theories. We consider analytically true semantic principles containing ‘means’ and ‘means that’ side to side with ‘denotes’, ‘satisfies’, and ‘true’, which constitute the extensional semantic constants of interpretive truth theories. We show that these semantic constants are definable in terms of ‘means’ and ‘means that’ operators. The definitions themselves are semantic principles in the role of meaning postulates. We extend a meaning theory based on ‘means that’ by adjoining semantic principles to the axioms of the theory. Then, all axioms, hence all theorems, of a corresponding interpretive truth theory are provable in the extension of the meaning theory. Furthermore, every interpretive truth theory can be included in the extension of a corresponding meaning theory. Therefore, the extension of a meaning theory resulting from the adjunction of semantic principles constitutes a unified meaning-and-truth theory since it includes both a meaning theory and an interpretive truth theory.

Subject Keywords

Analyticity, Interpretive truth theory, Meaning postulates, Meaning theory, Semantic constants, ‘means that’

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https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85164200128&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104701

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Article