Truth and meaning is conceded by philosophers of language and recently by linguists that a satisfactory theory of meaning must give an account of how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words. There would be no explaining the fact that we can learn the language: no explaining the fact that on mastering a finite vocabulary and a finitely stated set of rules, we are prepared to produce and to understand any of potential infinitude of sentences.
The point will emerge if we think for a moment of complex singular terms, to which Frege’s theory applies along with sentences. Consider the expression “the father of Annette” how does the meaning of the whole depend on the meaning of the parts? The answer would be that the meaning of “the father of” is such that when this expression is prefixed to a singular term the result refers to the father of the person to whom the singular term refers. All we can think to say is the entity yields or gives the father of x as value when the argument is x or perhaps the entity maps people on their fathers.
On the other hand, it is now evident that a satisfactory theory of the meanings of complex expressions may not require entities as meanings of all the parts. It behoves to rephrase our demand on a satisfactory theory of meaning so as not to suggest that individual words must have meanings at all, in any sense that transcends the fact that they have a semantic effect on the meanings of the sentences they occur. The theory clearly suggests an effective procedure for determining, for any singular term in its universe.
Clearly some more articulate way of referring to meanings than any we have seen is essential if criteria are to be met. Meanings as entities or the related concepts of synonymy allow people to formulate rules relating to sentences and its parts for example, sentences are synonymous whose corresponding parts are synonymous. The one thing meanings do not seem to do is oil the wheels of a theory of meaning that is a theory that it nontrivially gives the meaning of every sentence in the language.
There is no need to suppress the obvious connection between definition truths of the kind of Tarski has shown how to construct and the concept of meaning. The definition works by giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of every sentence and to give truth conditions is a way of giving the meaning of a sentence. To know the semantic concept of truth for a language is to know what it is for a sentence, ay sentence to be true and in good sense people can give to the phrase, to understanding the language.
A theory of meaning is an empirical theory and its ambition is to account for the workings of a natural language. It may be tested by comparing some of its consequences with the facts. In the process, the concept of truth when applied to colloquial language in conjunction with the normal laws of logic leads inevitably to confusions and contradictions. In spite of difficulties to pursue the semantics of colloquial language with the help of methods will be driven first to undertake the thankless task of language reform regarding colloquial language. Indeed, there are all the sentences that seem not to have truth values at all, the imperatives, the interrogatives and a lot more. A comprehensive theory of meaning for a natural language must successfully cope with various issues concerning to the truth and meaning of a language.
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