Abstract

The most popular approach in the twentieth century to the philosophical problems surrounding the notion of meaning has been to claim that the meaning of a declarative sentence is its truth conditions. There are, however, large problems with such an approach; specifically, there seems to be no way to explain satisfactorily our understanding of many types of declarative sentences if the meaning of a sentence is its truth conditions. In particular, our understanding of past-tense statements cannot be accounted for by their truth conditions. I urge, therefore, that justification be used as the central notion in a theory of meaning instead of truth. ;My main contribution is to respond to some purported problems and thereby make justification-based theories of meaning coherent and explanatory. Perhaps the largest difficulty confronting theories of meaning which do not take the notion of truth as fundamental is that it is hard to see how a systematic account of the sentential connectives can be given. I suggest that a compositional theory of meaning, one which generates a set of theorems "giving the meaning" of every one of the infinity of sentences of language from a finite stock of axioms and rules, can be provided if it is based on the notions of justification and falsification, and also incorporates the technique of supervaluation to explain certain types of complex sentences. ;Another problem that anti-realist theories of meaning encounter, one which deals specifically with past-tense statements, is the apparent inability of such theories to account for the systematic "truth value link" which holds between present-tense statements made now, and corresponding past-tense statements made in the future. I offer an explanation of how anti-realist theories of meaning can account for such a link despite the possibility that there will be no justification for asserting certain past-tense statements in the future. ;By responding to these purported problems with anti-realist theories of meaning, I show how such theories give an adequate explanation of our understanding of language. Furthermore, I accept the consequence that there is no guarantee that every sentence, particularly every past-tense sentence, is either true or false