ABSTRACT
The notion of word meaning has been specified as a theoretical one. Words have meaning only in the context of a sentence, and the sentence is the fundamental unit of linguistic understanding. The relation between items of language, on the one hand, and meanings, on the other, is adduced by the semanticist to model linguistic understanding. Making this move then enables us to fit the idea of meaning into the Davidsonian project of constructing a systematic theory of meaning, that is, a theory that derives meaning specifications for whole sentences by breaking those input sentences down into component parts (words), specifying meanings for those parts, and then applying compositional axioms to deduce the meanings of the input sentences. This chapter discusses relevant aspects of the idea of a systematic theory, including radical interpretation and the propositional attitude constraint (PAC), the use of truth-theories to illuminate meaning, as well as problems of indexicality, vagueness, and paradox. The chapter introduces the idea of a split-level approach to semantics, which will be important later, and it rebuts a number of criticisms that have been directed at the Davidsonian programme, in particular the charge of triviality that is sometimes aimed at its theorems.
