ABSTRACT

Possible worlds can be used to construct "intensions" or meanings for subsentential phrases and particularly for individual words or meaning atoms that are like Frege's "senses" in being independent of actual referents. Then a grammar can show how those sub-sentential intensions combine to make a truth condition, hence a meaning, for a complete sentence of which they are components. This affords a new version of the idea of a sentence's truth condition. When two sentences have the same truth condition, they will be true in just the same circumstances, in just the same worlds. This, in the vernacular of possible worlds, is to say that the sentence is true in some worlds and not in others. For the truth-condition theorist, of course, that set of worlds will also be the sentence's meaning. The possible-worlds view has some important advantages over Donald Davidson's version of the Truth-Condition Theory.