Self-Assessment Question and Possible Answer

1. What is meant by 'satisfactory theory of meaning'?

Ans.: A satisfactory theory of meaning gives an account of how meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words. A legible theory for a semantic determination of truth conditions of all statements provides the conditions under which a sentence will be treated as true or false. Thus, a theory of truth for a language L must be such that:

3. For each sentence S of L a T-sentence should be provable.
4. Each of such provable T-sentence should be true.

These two basic principles together explain the material adequacy of truth that explains the underlying conditions under which a sentence will be judged as either true or false.