Direct Arguments for the Truth-Condition Theory of Meaning

1. Competition between philosophical theories of linguistic meaning is sometimes specious. For example, suppose Ned believes that an utterance's meaning is its truth-condition, while Ted insists that the utterance's meaning is constituted by the speaker's communicative intentions à la Grice. Here one wants to distinguish explananda: What Ned is after is really the utterance's (―timeless‖) sentence-meaning; Ted is focusing on speaker-meaning, which is not the same, and the two theories are perfectly compatible, indeed mutually complementary, accounts of distinct phenomena. Or the dispute may prove to be verbal. Jed and Red agree that a sentence-token has both a truth-condition and an illocutionary force, but they disagree over which of those two features constitutes the sentence's meaning (italics original): Jed says the meaning is the truth-condition, force being important but merely pragmatic, while Red says the meaning is the force, truth-condition being important but merely the feature that determines the speech act's locutionary content. It would be hard to show that that disagreement is more than a schoolyard scuffle over who gets to keep the term. In such a dispute, each combatant tries valiantly to reserve and protect the buzzword ―meaning‖ as attaching to what s/he feels is the more interesting and striking of the two features. Lycan (1984) offers the ―Double Indexical‖ theory of meaning as the term is used in altercations of this kind: 2 MEANING = def Whatever aspect of linguistic activity happens to interest me now. [p. 272] Or a compatibility may simply go unnoticed. The classic Verificationism of the Positivists is universally thought of as a rival of the Truth-Condition theory. Yet—though I have never seen this so much as noted in print—the Verification theory is not only compatible with the Truth-Condition theory but entails it. For a Verificationist, a sentence's verification condition, besides being its meaning, is its truth-condition. To see this, consider a sentence to which the Verificationist would assign a meaning other than its face-value or ostensible meaning, such as a sentence about electrons; e.g., the Verificationist says, ―An electron has just passed through the cloud chamber‖ means that having squeezed the bulb, one sees a trail of grey specks in the chamber, etc. Now, if a sentence means that P, then that sentence is true iff P. So on the Verificationist analysis, ―An electron has just passed through the cloud chamber‖ would be true iff having squeezed the bulb, one sees a …