Editing Truth-conditional semantics (section)

==Criticism==

===Refutation from necessary truths===
[[Scott Soames]] has harshly criticized truth-conditional semantics on the grounds that it is either wrong or uselessly circular.

Under its traditional formulation, truth-conditional semantics gives every [[logical truth|necessary truth]] precisely the same meaning, for all of them are true under precisely the same conditions (namely, all of them). And since the truth conditions of any unnecessarily true sentence are equivalent to the conjunction of those truth conditions and any necessary truth, any sentence means the same as its meaning plus a necessary truth. For example, if ''"snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white'', then it is trivially the case that ''"snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white and 2+2=4'', therefore under truth-conditional semantics "snow is white" means both that snow is white and that 2+2=4.

[[Scott Soames|Soames]] argues further that reformulations that attempt to account for this problem must beg the question. In specifying precisely ''which'' of the infinite number of truth-conditions for a sentence will count towards its meaning, one must take the meaning of the sentence as a guide. However, we wanted to specify meaning with truth-conditions, whereas now we are specifying truth-conditions with meaning, rendering the entire process fruitless.<ref>Soames, Scott. "Truth, Meaning and Understanding." ''Philosophical Studies 65''(1-2):17-35.</ref>

===Refutation from deficiency===
[[Michael Dummett]] (1975) has objected to Davidson's program on the grounds that such a theory of meaning will not explain what it is a speaker has to know in order for them to understand a sentence. Dummett believes a speaker must know three components of a sentence to understand its meaning: a theory of [[Sense and reference|sense]], indicating the part of the meaning that the speaker grasps; a theory of [[Sense and reference|reference]], which indicates what claims about the world are made by the sentence, and a theory of force, which indicates what kind of [[speech act]] the expression performs. Dummett further argues that a theory based on inference, such as [[proof-theoretic semantics]], provides a better foundation for this model than truth-conditional semantics does.

===Pragmatic intrusion===
Some authors working within the field of [[pragmatics]] have argued that linguistic meaning, understood as the output of a purely formal analysis of a sentence-type, underdetermines truth-conditions.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Recanati|first=François|authorlink = François Recanati|date=2001|title=What is said|journal=Synthese|language=en|volume=128|issue=1/2|pages=75–91|doi=10.1023/A:1010383405105|s2cid=46235399 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author1=Dan Sperber|author2=Deirdre Wilson|title=Relevance: Communication and Cognition|year=1986|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|isbn=978-0-631-19878-9}}</ref> These authors, sometimes labeled 'contextualists',<ref>{{cite book|author1=Hermann Cappelen|author2=Ernst Lepore|title=Insensitive Semantics: a Defence of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism|year=2005|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|isbn=9781405126748}}</ref> argue that the role of pragmatic processes is not just pre-semantic (disambiguation or reference assignment) or post-semantic (drawing [[Implicature|implicatures]], determining [[Speech act|speech acts]]), but is also key to determining the truth-conditions of an utterance. That is why some contextualists prefer to talk about 'truth-conditional pragmatics' instead of semantics.<ref>{{cite book|author1=François Recanati|title=Literal Meaning|year=2004|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=9780511615382}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author1=François Recanati|title=
Truth-conditional pragmatics|year=2011|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=9780199226986}}</ref>