Coreference and Modality

The prevailing view on meaning in logical semantics from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the eighties has been one which is aptly summarized in the slogan ‘meaning equals truth conditions’. This view on meaning is one which can rightly be labeled static: it describes the meaning relation between linguistic expressions and the world as a static relation, one which may itself change through time, but which does not bring about any change itself. For non-sentential expressions (nouns, verbs, modifiers, etc.) the same goes through: in accordance with the principle of compositionality of meaning, their meaning resides in their contribution to the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they occur. In most cases this contribution consists in what they denote (refer to), hence the slogan can be extended to ‘meaning equals denotation conditions’. Of course, although this view on meaning was the prevailing one for almost a century, many of the people who initiated the enterprise of logical semantics, including people like Frege and Wittgenstein, had an open eye for all that it did not catch. However, the logical means which Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, and the generation that succeeded them, had at their disposal were those of classical mathematical logic and set-theory, and these indeed are not very suited for an analysis of other aspects of meaning than those which the slogan covers. A real change in view then had to await the emergence of other concepts, which in due course became available mainly under the influence of developments in computer science and cognate disciplines such as artificial intelligence. And this is one of the reasons why it took almost a century before any serious and successful challenge of the view that meaning equals truthconditions from within logical semantics could emerge. The static view on meaning was, of course, already challenged from the outside, but in most cases such attacks started from premises which are quite alien to the logical semantics enterprise as such, and hence failed to bring about any radical changes. An important development has been that of speech act theory, originating from the work of Austin, and worked out systematically by Searle and