But what about the past tense statements? How could you learn their meaning comparatively? Since the truth conditions of the present tense statements are exclusive, there's a clear path for comparison. But truth conditions for the past tense statements overlap with each other and with the present tense statements. It's just not clear to me how comparison takes hold here. — Srap Tasmaner
The past tense thing was just meant as a proxy for all the stuff we learn to talk about where we cannot directly check that the relevant truth conditions obtain. I think you hit a wall pretty quickly if all you have to go on is the truth and falsehood of statements. — Srap Tasmaner
Even the natural next step is blocked, which is recursively generating complex statements from simple ones using the logical constants. (And similarly for understanding such statements by analysing then into simple statements so coupled.) I don't see how you get the logical constants going at all. — Srap Tasmaner
If forced to choose, I'm saying the word is the basic semantic unit, not the sentence, so long as it's understood that the meaning of a word is the semantic contribution it makes to a sentence in which it is used. The statement is the unit of judgment, though, so "semantic" up there is really the wrong word. The word is the smallest unit of meaning. — Srap Tasmaner
So what's the meaning of a statement? — Srap Tasmaner
What do you know when you know what the meaning of a statement is?
One widely discussed view is that when you know the meaning of a statement, you know what conditions must obtain for the statement to be true, so that should do for now.
Let's take two statements, "It is raining," and "It was raining." One can be true when the other is false, so they must not have the same meaning. The proposal is that we grasp the meaning of a statement by comparing it to other statements that we already know the meaning of.
But what about the past tense statements? How could you learn their meaning comparatively? Since the truth conditions of the present tense statements are exclusive, there's a clear path for comparison. But truth conditions for the past tense statements overlap with each other and with the present tense statements. It's just not clear to me how comparison takes hold here.
Sorry I don't get your point. On my account you don't have to know the truth or falsehood of this or that particular sentence, only understand the truth conditions of some sentences (which is of course not the same as knowing whether they actually obtain). — Fafner
Again, I don't see your point here... If as you say logical constants recursively generate sentences by combining other sentences, then how is the question about the meaning of single words supposed to arise here? I think that on the contrary, truth functional logic seems to be very congenial to the contextualist. — Fafner
You either analyse sentences into components or you don't. If only sentences have meaning, then their components are meaningless. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Your contextualist who notices "structural similarities" among sentences would be like the guy who reasons that "ball" and "balk" and "balm" must have similar meanings. If you don't get to use components, all you have is truth conditions. — Srap Tasmaner
It can't be right that if something is composed of meaningless parts, then it itself must be meaningless (if this is what you meant). Surely, the letters of the alphabet from which words are composed are semantically meaningless, and yet the compositionalist claims that words are meaningful (and the same applies to sentences, they are also composed of meaningless letters). So if you are right, then even on the compositionalist view all words (and therefore sentences) are meaningless - and that can't be right.
The same applies to what you said about logical connectives. — Fafner
Letters are not meaningless; their meaningfulness consists in their relationships to sounds that can be made by the human voice and the diverse but phonetically constrained ways in which they can combine to form words. Words are not meaningless; their meaning consists in both their individual references and the relationships of similarity and difference between their various references as well as the diverse but constrained ways in which they can combine to form phrases and sentences.
I would say it's semantics all the way down. — John
You could also look to pragmatics, maybe speech-acts; whatever you call it, this would be the point at which you're looking not just for what a sentence means, but what is meant by its utterance. There is one more next step up from sentence that I think deserves special treatment, and that's inference. — Srap Tasmaner
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