The Routledge Handbook of Semantics/
edited by Nick Riemer
- London : Routledge, 2016.
- xvi, 533 p.: 26 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Semantics is the study of meaning—in some sense. In what sense? According to a common view, semantics concerns inter alia the relation between words and the world—in particular, their intentional (or representational, aboutness) relations. When a competent user utters “Schnee ist weiss” to make an assertion, she makes a claim about how the world is. What in part enables her to represent the world as being this way is that “Schnee” refers to snow, something satisfies “ist weiss” just in case it’s white, and so “Schnee ist weiss” is true just in case snow is white. As David Lewis (1970: 18) famously put it: “semantics with no treatment of truthconditions is not semantics.” Similar sentiments are found in leading semantics textbooks: http://172.20.27.22:4000/handle/123456789/74