Arguing for Semantic Under-Determinacy

Abstract

The idea that sentence meaning is semantically under-determined has been introduced by its proponents in order to counter a general approach to the semantics of natural language, that traces back to Frege, Russell, Carnap and the Formal Semantics initiated by Montague and Davidson. The picture promulgated by these authors is one where words are endowed with a stable meaning, and the meaning of a sentence is determined compositionally by the meanings of its constituents and by the way they are syntactically arranged. Sentence meaning is conceived in terms of truth-conditions, so the theory commits to the idea that, given a sentence S, it is possible to derive its truth-condition, for example in the form of a T-sentence (‘S is true if and only if p’) by applying the rules of compositionality to the meanings of the components of the sentence.