ABSTRACT
Kripkean possible worlds (as presented in chapter 4) afford an alternative notion of a truth condition: We saw that a contingent sentence is true in some worlds but not in others. So a sentence’s truth condition can be taken to be the set of possible worlds in which the sentence is true. Moreover, 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. For example, a predicate has different extensions in different worlds, and its intension can be taken to be the function that associates any given world with the predicate’s particular extension in that world. Then a grammar can show how those subsentential intensions combine to make a truth condition, hence a meaning, for a complete sentence of which they are components.
