Blackwell Reference Online

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1. However close it may have lain beneath the surface of some earlier speculations about language, the idea that to understand a sentence is to have grasped its truth-condition was first made explicit by Frege, for whom it was simply an unemphasized consequence of his general approach to questions of meaning. In the transition from logical positivism to modern analytical philosophy, the idea came near to being mislaid entirely. It was brought back into a new prominence in the late 1960s by Donald Davidson. Having rediscovered the idea for himself and in his own way, Davidson pressed its claims as a principle in the philosophy of mind and meaning, and as the only proper basis on which to conduct serious semantic investigations.In advance of considering more recent claims about meaning, it will be useful to mark certain moments in the formulation and reformulation of the original insight of the truth-conditional theory. In a historical framework, even the bare skeleton of one furnished here, truth-conditional notions may be expected to transcend our more immediate sources of information about them as well as our more ephemeral disputations.2. What is it for a declarative sentence to mean something, or have a sense? For Frege, to answer such a question was not, as it was later for Carnap or his inheritors, an all-important end in itself. Nor was answering it part of a com prehensive ... log in or subscribe to read full text