Page 223 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

with a condition for being true. For example, our understanding of the sentence Snow is white would consist in our commitment to the proposition that 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. One frequently cited virtue of this so-called 'truth- conditional theory' is that it eliminates problematic notions such as 'means that' in favor of the relatively clear ideas, 'refers to' and 'is true.' Another alleged virtue is that it shows how the meanings of composite expressions depend on the meanings of their parts, and therefore how it is possible for us, with our finite minds, to understand a potential infinity of compound expressions. For example, if our knowledge of the meanings of sentences 'A ' and 'B' consists in knowing that:
'A ' is true if and only if snow is white, and that:
'B' is true if and only if dogs bark, then we can deduce that:
'A' is true and 'B' is true
if and only if snow is white and dogs bark.
But our understanding of 'and' tells us that:
'A and B' is true
if and only if 'A' is true and 'B' is true.
So we can conclude that:
'A and B' is true
if and only if snow is white and dogs bark.
thereby deriving the truth condition (i.e., the meaning) of the compound expression from our knowledge of the meanings of its parts.
Criticism of the truth-conditional theory of mean- ing comes from several directions. First, it can be argued that understanding an expression consists merely in associating it with a meaning and need not involve any knowledge of that association. Such knowledge—e.g., that 'A' means that snow is white, or that 'A' is true if and only if snow is white—would require possession of the concepts 'means that' or 'true'; yet it would seem that one might understand words like 'snow' without yet having acquired those sophisticated semantic concepts.
Second, the fact that a sentence, 'A,' is true if and only if snow is white does not entail that 'A ' expresses the proposition that snow is white. It entails merely that 'A ' and snow is white are either both true or both false. This difficulty may be mitigated by taking the words 'if and only if in the statement of truth con- ditions to convey a sufficiently strong relation of equivalence between A is true and Snow is white. How- ever, it is unclear that anything weaker than synonymy will do, in which case the initial promise to have dis- pensed with the obscure notion of 'meaning' will not be fulfilled.
A third criticism of the truth-conditional theory accuses it of being not so much false as unhelpful—of explaining facts that are easy to explain without it, yet having nothing to say about the features of meaning that are most in need of illumination (Dummett 1975, 1976). According to this critique, the compositionality of meaning follows trivially from the fact that the meaning of an expression is a compound entity whose constituents are the meanings of the constituents of the expression and whose structure is determined by the expression's syntactic form. This shows, without the need for a truth-conditional analysis, how we are able to figure out the meanings of complex expressions from the meanings of their parts. Moreover, the criti- cism continues, the most puzzling properties of mean- ing are not addressed at all by the truth-conditional approach. For example, in virtue of which facts about the mind or linguistic behavior does a sentence come to have the particular meaning it has? It is all very well to cite our committing ourselves to some prop- osition of the form 'A is true if and only if p'; but this is empty in the absence of some indication of what state of mind such a commitment consists in. Another important fact about meaning is that, if someone knows the meaning of a sentence, then he knows some- thing about what counts as evidence for and against its being true. Again, an interesting account of what it is to know the meaning of a sentence would shed light on this fact, but the truth-conditional analysis leaves it in the dark. Perhaps the analysis can be sup- plemented with further theory and thereby explain these matters (see Davidson 1990). However, ques- tions will remain as to whether the truth-conditional analysis is itself doing any explanatory work. Insofar as the supplementary theory does not deal separately with the elements of the analysans—notably, 'true,' and the above-mentioned, strong notion of 'if and only if—but rather concerns the analysans taken as a whole, then it would be more straightforward to take the theory as a direct account of meaning, bypass- ing the truth-conditional analysis.
4. Falsity
The simplest plausible account of falsity is that a prop- osition is false just in case it is not true. An alternative formulation of this idea—one that parallels the equiv- alence schema for truth—is given by (5) below:
The proposition that p is false if and only if —p. (5)
These two formulations are equivalent, because the logical expression,' —p,' is shorthand for 'It is not the case that p.' But there is no reason to distinguish the concepts 'being true' and 'being the case.' So ' —p' means nothing more or less than 'It is not true that p,' which is presumably synonymous with 'The prop- osition that pis not true.'
Truth
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