What is the meaning of meaning?

In this essay, I argue that we can know what a sentence means without knowing what, if anything, would make it true, due to semantic competence consisting in grasping truth conditions as an intelligible sentence, separated from what grounds those conditions ontologically. I formulate my argument by introducing the best possible argument against me, the Ontological Sufficiency Constraint, a mix of both Ayer and Armstrong’s perspectives on grounding language in verifiability, whether experiential or ontological. I begin with a steelman of the OSC, build a counter framework of Frege and Davidson, then refute it decisively with modal semantics.

To evaluate the Ontological Sufficiency Constraint (OSC), it is necessary to define it, and then steelman the philosophers who seem to abide by it charitably. To begin my inquiry, the two philosophers I have criticised as the OSC have accepted the following argumentative structure in one form or another:
For any sentence (S), a speaker can only competently understand S if they satisfy the following conditions.

1. Grasping the truth-conditions of S as a mapping from S to a state of affair.
2. Knowing what class of worldly facts, whether experiential, ontological, or causal, are sufficient to ground p.7

The OSC is not a naïve move; it is grounded in the idea of accepting (i) , truth-conditions exist and matter, but a sentence is only meaningful insofar as there is a real object which can be used to verify its meaning. Accepting (i) alone is insufficient. If I made the sentence: “The Witcher is a fantasy book series written by Andrzej Sapkowski”, it is only meaningful so long as there are at least two books written by an author by the name of Andrzej Sapkowski.

This is best represented through AJ Ayer’s verification principle: a sentence is meaningful iff its truth would make some observable difference to the course of possible conditions (Ayer, 1946, p.16). For Ayer, the set of possible experiences tending to show a sentence is true, simply is the meaning of the sentence (Ayer, 1946, p.107). So, the existence of a fantasy book series named The Witcher, written by Andrzej Sapkowski, would be effective as I can order it online, and have the possibility of reading it tomorrow. This embodies condition (ii) experientially: sufficient worldly facts to ground p are facts about possible experience and tangible action; without an experiential element, there is no meaning. There is an intuitive argument within this: a sentence that makes no experiential difference seems to make no difference at all. What would it mean for a sentence to be meaningful or true but make no difference to any possible experience ever? Ayer would also ask, in what sense is this sort of sentence a meaningful claim, rather than an empty vacuum of sounds without substance? Take the following sentences:

(1) The Lord Dragon of Egypt is called Tameem and enjoys KFC.
(2) Wuimdndwpudiwohnhwhwo.

Both sentences have some legibility. (1) I can imagine a lord dragon in Egypt named Tameem who enjoys KFC, and with (2) I can discern the letters within it. But neither of these sentences has a real meaning which truthfully impacts possible experience. There is no such thing as dragons, less so a KFC enjoying lord dragon Egypt named Tameem, nor does the second sentence mean anything besides noise.

Armstrong strengthens this narrative for the defenders of OSC: for every “true” statement, there exists an entity which makes it true (Armstrong, 2004, p.5). Truth is necessarily reliant on being; there is not a single truth which floats free of ontological grounding (Armstrong, 2004, p.17). If Ayer was condition (ii) experientially, Armstrong is it ontologically, worldly facts sufficient in the grounding of p are truth makers, whether concrete entities, states of affairs, or necessary universals whose existence grounds the truth of p. Within this framework, any ontological entity can be a truth maker, expanding and strengthening the thesis put forward by Ayer. The philosophical appeal is that any good semantic theory should account for our metaphysical realities. If we posit abstract truth conditions, have we not merely built a complex structure that realistically describes nothing? A mapping that can map onto nothing seems to be merely a mapping in name only.

Despite their clear disagreements, I unite Ayer and Armstrong as the targets of my enquiry, as, despite their different interpretations, they are both motivated by a clear structural worry: formal semantics risks being nonsense semantics in a vacuum. The most prevalent intuition of OSC is that meaning must contact ontological reality at some point, (i) alone can be verified by any internally coherent system, such as Plato’s Theory of Forms, regardless of whether it connects to anything real (Plato, Timaeus, 51d-52a). While condition (ii) consolidates the connection. Yet if semantic competence truly requires an ontological or experiential grounding, we should expect a theory of meaning to reflect this demand. In the next section, I will flesh out the theory of truth conditions within Davidson and Frege to test the OSC.

Davidson is the best philosopher to introduce in response to the OSC, as he provides the exact theory that the established constraints would automatically dismiss. His central claim is that an adequate theory of meaning for any language (L) must generate for every sentence (S), a T-sentence in the form (Davidson, 1967, p.309):
S is true iff p; Snow is white iff snow is white. (Davidson, 1967, p.311)
T-sentences here operate purely as semantic biconditionals; they map a sentence to its conditions for truth or meaning and do not ask what in reality is responsible for those conditions obtaining (Davidson, 1967, p.310) . Understanding for Davidson is simply grasping the mapping; no actual verification is required beyond this. So, for Davidson, sentence (1) is meaningful: as I can grasp the idea that there exists a Lord Dragon of Egypt named Tameem who eats KFC, regardless of whether such a creature is real. Effectively, Davidson separates my interpretation of the OSC constraints from (i) to Question 1 (Q1) and Q2. Q1 asks what condition must obtain for S to be true? This is a semantic question and is answered by T-sentences. Q2 asks what is responsible for this condition obtaining in reality? Davidson sees it as a separate metaphysical inquiry, downstream and irrelevant to the constitution of meaning (Davidson, 1967, p.316).

Without a sufficient foundational system, Davidson’s argument can seem stipulative. Frege’s notion of sense and reference helps argue why it is not. For Frege, Sense is the manner of presentation, the cognitive content grasped by a competent speaker of any given language, while reference is the objective object language attempts to refer to (Frege, 1949, p. 86). Hesperus and Phosphorus were understood as distinct by ancient astronomers long before it was discovered that both refer to Venus; sense-grasp and meaning were ascertained before the objective referent was settled. Linguistic comprehension lies within grasping sense, which is categorically prior to and independent of knowing what grounds the reference in reality (Frege, 1949, p.92). Condition (ii) of the OSC conflates these two distinct cognitive processes. Maximal testing of the grounding question is required for a conclusion, which can be found within modal discourse.

Modality presents the most rigorous challenge for my thesis; if the OSC succeeds anywhere, it will succeed here. Modal sentences are significant because they are meaningful, truth-apt, and commonly appear in everyday language. Examples such as “In another world we ended up together” or “Imagine if I studied medicine” are used frequently. The OSC claims we understand these sentences through experiential verification or truth makers. In this section, I will explain why this approach fails.
A modal statement is a linguistic expression (which uses forms of necessarily or possibly), by locating truth within the space of alternate realities or possibilities. Kripkean possible worlds semantics provide the most rigorous truth-conditions for modal operators (Kripke, 1980, pp.16-20). Kripke frame pairs are used to evaluate the validity of modal formulas (necessity □, and possibility ◇), consisting of W (a non-empty set of possible worlds), and R (accessibility relation between possible worlds: w1rw2 means w2 is accessible from world 1).Truth conditions exist at each world w:
• ◇P: true at w iff ∃w' ∈ W such that wRw' and P is true at w'
• □P (necessarily P): true at w iff ∀w' ∈ W, if wRw' then P is true at w.
Possible world semantics state that Possibly P is true at w iff an accessible world exists where P is true. Kripke does not use modal logic to settle modal reality. Instead, he creates tools that clarify the logic, deliberately separating semantic machinery from ontological grounding questions.

David Lewis presents radically competing accounts of what possible worlds could be:
• Concrete modal realism: other worlds are spatiotemporally isolated concrete universes which exist simultaneously to ours, and all possibilities occurred elsewhere. (Lewis, 1986, p.2.)
• Abstractionism: worlds are abstract objects, with maximally consistent states of affairs. (Lewis, 1986, p.174)
• Linguistic eratzism: worlds exist as a maximal consistent set of sentences, a product of our semantics. (Lewis, 1986, p.136)
• Fictionalism: possible worlds semantics are useful fictions with zero ontological grounding. (Lewis, 1986, p.133)

If Armstrong is to be believed that a semantic theory should not create sentences with no meaning, then Kripke’s semantics ought to fail here, and the comprehension of modal statements would be found within resolving the modal realism debate. However, Kripke’s semantic theory holds invariant across all the types of worlds, ◇P is true at w iff P is true is accessible at w1, regardless of whether that w1 is a concrete universe, abstract object, or fiction. Conclusively, the grounding question of (ii) is downstream from the semantic section and serves nothing to whether a statement is meaningful or not.

Take the statement: “In any possible world, Geralt of Rivia exists; he is necessarily a witcher.” Formally □P is true at w iff at all accessible worlds w' where the rigid designator "Geralt of Rivia" picks out the same individual, he is a Witcher (Kripke, 1980, p.6;pp.19-20). The truth-conditions are obvious and specifiable; the designator named Geralt of Rivia has the profession of Witcher. Kripke’s framing allows a genuine sense to be made of this; every reader of Sapkowski, or player of the games, gets it immediately. Now, when we apply OSC’s second demand (ii), what grounds this necessity? Is Geralt a counterpart of someone in the actual world? An abstract fictional object? A possibiltà? Armstrong’s truth makers cannot get started; there is no concrete entity whose existence could necessitate Geralt’s witcherhood across worlds. The grounding clause does not just go unanswered; it is unanswerable. The OSC demands grounding as a condition of meaning; here, grounding is absent, yet meaning persists. Even though with no knowledge of the series, one can ascertain that Geralt of Rivia is a name and a Witcher as an occupation or role of sorts. The mapping is complete and functional, meaning it was successfully embedded within it before any question of grounding I raised. This is precisely the lesson drawn from Frege applied to modal discourse: the sense of Geralt of Rivia is necessarily a witcher that is grasped by any competent speaker of the English language, the reference, and what grounds possible worlds remain open. Sense-grasp, therefore, precedes and is independent of reference grounding. The OSC collapses this distinction and remains not just challenged but defeated.

In conclusion, using modal semantics and truth-conditions, I have argued that we can understand sentences without knowing whether anything makes it true or not. Utilising Davidson, Frege, Kripke and Lewis, I was able to prove that OSC arguments fail once we consider modal statements; an inherent part of our language, with the final example of a fictional character which the OSC cannot explain, while truth-conditional semantics can. The question of what makes a sentence true is fascinating, but simply not the same question of what makes a sentence meaningful. We can know what a sentence means without knowing what makes it true, as meaning is constituted at the level of formal mapping, and grounding is a separate metaphysical question that competence never required.

Bibliography
Armstrong, D.M. (2004) Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ayer, A.J. (1946) Language, Truth and Logic. 2nd edn. London: Victor Gollancz.
Davidson, D. (1967) 'Truth and Meaning', Synthese, 17(3), pp. 304–323.
Frege, G. (1949) 'On Sense and Nominatum', in Feigl, H. and Sellars, W. (eds.) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 85–102.
Kripke, S.A. (1980) Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, D. (1986) On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.
Plato (1929) Timaeus, translated by R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.