Abstract
Assertoric1 sentences are sentences which admit of truth or falsity. Non-assertoric sentences, imperatives and interrogatives (as well as molecular sentences combining sentences in different moods), have long been a source of difficulty for the view that a theory of truth for a natural language can serve as the core of a theory of meaning. The trouble for truth-theoretic semantics posed by non-assertoric sentences is that, prima facie, it does not make sense to say that imperatives, such as ‘Cut your hair’ or ‘Do not multiply entities beyond necessity’, or interrogatives such as ‘What time is it?’ or ‘Who will be the next President?’ are true or false. Thus, the vehicle for giving the meaning of a sentence by using an interpretive truth theory, the T-sentence, is apparently unavailable for non-assertoric sentences. My aim in this paper is to show how to incorporate non-assertoric sentences into a theory of meaning that gives central place to an interpretive truth theory for the language, without, however, reducing the non-assertorics to assertorics or treating their utterances as semantically equivalent to one or more utterances of assertoric sentences.
If music be the food of love, play on.
— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
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Ludwig, K. (2003). The Truth about Moods. In: Preyer, G., Peter, G., Ulkan, M. (eds) Concepts of Meaning. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0197-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0197-6_7
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