ABSTRACT

According to Donald Davidson, we will obtain a better theory of meaning if we replace the notion of a sentence’s verification condition with that of the sentence’s truth condition: the condition under which the sentence actually is or would be true, rather than a state of affairs that would merely serve as evidence of truth. Davidson offers several arguments, chief among which is that compositionality is needed to account for our understanding of long, novel sentences and a sentence’s truth condition is its most obviously compositional feature. As a model of the way in which truth conditions can be assigned to sentences of natural languages such as English, Davidson takes the way in which truth is defined for an artificial system of formal logic. But, since English sentences’ surface grammar diverges from their logical forms, a theory of grammar and its relation to logic has to be brought to bear; such a theory exists and is supported independently.