LING 2504 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Truth Condition, Sentence Clause Structure, Principle Of Compositionality
14 Dec 2015
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03/03/2015 (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) Formal and pragmatic philosophies of language: theories of meaning tend to be based on either truth or on use. Davidson"s program interprets meaning in terms of truth. Applying tarski"s model of meaning in formal logic: for davidson, meaning is equivalent to truth conditions, contrasts with verification principles. The difference is what is true versus what we need to know to make it true. Doesn"t need evidence, it either is true or it isn"t. Two sentences are synonymous if they have the same truth conditions. A sentence is ambiguous when it is both true and false in the same circumstances without contradiction. To explain how the meaning of even a long complex sentence can be determined, we need the concept of compositionality. Compositionality is the thesis that the meaning of sentences is derived from the meaning of more basic linguistic units.
