This continues my series of posts on truth. Up to now, my discussion has mainly been technical. But truth matters to us because we want to be able to say true things. We use natural language statements about the world (where “world” is understood broadly) in order to say those true things.
Linguistics is not my area, but I cannot avoid it completely. Chomsky’s linguistics is based on the idea that language is a syntactic structure. Presumably the semantics are an add-on to that underlying syntactic structure, although Chomsky doesn’t say much about how semantics makes it into language.
I very much disagree with Chomsky’s view of language. As I see it, language is primarily semantic. I see the rules of syntax as mostly an ad hoc protocol used for disambiguation. So today’s post will be mainly about semantics or meanings. This has to do with how words can refer to things in the world, or how words can be about something. This is related to the philosophical problem of intentionality (or aboutness) of language statements. Here I will be presenting only a broad overview. I expect to get into more details in future posts.
Carving up the world
I hinted at the idea when I presented my modest theory of truth. There, I said:
Similarly, if I were to say “the cat is on the mat”, you would see that as true provided that I had followed the standards of the linguistic community in the way that I used the words “cat”, “on” and “mat”.
According to my theory of truth, we need standards for the use of words such as “cat”, “on” and “mat”, and we judge the truth of a statement based on whether it conforms to those standards.
The Heretical Philosopher 