Abstract
Frege held that an adequate account of language requires us to attend to three features of sentences: reference, sense, and force. Elsewhere I have argued that a theory of truth patterned after a Tarski-type truth definition tells us all we need to know about sense.1 Counting truth in the domain of reference, as Frege did, the study of sense thus comes down to the study of reference.
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Notes
For a recent statement of my position, see “Radical Interpretation,” Dialectica 27 (1973): 313-328. For its defense, see “Reply to Foster,” in: Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds. ), Oxford, 1976.
Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, London, 1973, pp. 315, 316.
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Mass., 1962, p. 22.
I am indebted to Michael Dummett for making me appreciate this point.
David Lewis, “General Semantics,” in: Semantics of Natural Language, D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Dordrecht, 1972, p. 208.
Herbert Bohnert, “The Semiotic Status of Commands,” Philosophy of Science 12 (1945).
Yes-no interrogatives would then be treated, perhaps, as having the same semantics as the corresponding affirmative indicative; or, on another option, as having the same semantics as the alternation of the affirmative, with the negation of the affirmative, indicative. WH-questions might be assigned the same semantics as the corresponding open sentences in the indicative. Here as elsewhere in this article my remarks about the inter- rogative mood are sketchy. As Jaakko Hintikka has pointed out to me, my general program for the moods may run into trouble when a serious attempt is made to apply it to interrogatives.
P.T. Geach, “Assertion,” The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 458.
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 32.
For a fuller discussion of this proposal, see my “On Saying That,” Synthese 19 (1968 — 1969): 130-146.
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Davidson, D. (1979). Moods and Performances. In: Margalit, A. (eds) Meaning and Use. Synthese Language Library, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4104-4_2
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