Abstract

This article says something about previous work related to truth and meaning, goes on to discuss Davidson and related papers of his, and then discusses some issues arising. It begins with the work of Gottlob Frege. Much work in the twentieth century developed Frege's ideas. A great deal of that work continued with the assumption that semantics is fundamentally concerned with the assignments of entities to expressions. So, for example, those who tried to develop a formal account of sense did so by treating senses as functions of various kinds; the sense of a predicate, for example, was often seen as a function from possible worlds to extensions.