A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation 论文

摘要

Abstract Two conceptions of meaning have dominated formal semantics of natural language. The first of these sees meaning principally as that which determines conditions of truth. This notion, whose advocates are found mostly among philosophers and logicians, has inspired the disciplines of truth-theoretic and model-theoretic semantics. According to the second conception meaning is, first and foremost, that which a language user grasps when he understands the words he hears or reads. This second conception is implicit in many studies by computer scientists (especially those involved with artificial intelligence), psychologists and linguists—studies which have been concerned to articulate the structure of the representations which speakers construct in response to verbal inputs.