ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates about the nature of sense and the relationship of issues in the theory of meaning to metaphysical issues in philosophy in general. The debate between the theorists of communication-intention and the truth-conditional theorists is of such fundamental interest because it promises an answer to the question about the relationship between language and thought. If the theorists of communication-intention are right, sentence-meaning, or linguistic-meaning, can be explained in terms of the contents of speakers' mental states: in this sense, the content of mental states will be explanatorily prior to linguistic meaning. The notion of sentence-meaning is explained in terms of the notion of speaker's-meaning and the notion of convention, where the notion of speaker's-meaning is explained in terms of utterers' intentions. Needless to say, many counterexamples to Paul Grice's analysis have been suggested, both by philosophers opposed to his analysis and by philosophers wishing to refine it.
