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Meaning and Use

Part of the book series: Synthese Language Library ((SLAP,volume 3))

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Abstract

Some sentences are true, some are false, and some are neither. According to what seem to be the usual standards, questions are neither true nor false; neither are optatives; neither are imperatives. A sentence with a truth value is a sentence in the indicative mood. But not all sentences in the indicative mood have truth values. Occasion sentences have no truth values they can call their own; only their utterances have truth values. Nor is it clear even that all utterances of indicative sentences have truth values; for there is the matter of truth-value gaps. If a sentence contains a singular term that fails to designate, then the utterances of the sentence may lack truth value; Strawson has plausibly urged that this account usually fits ordinary usage.

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© 1979 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Quine, W.V. (1979). Comments. In: Margalit, A. (eds) Meaning and Use. Synthese Language Library, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4104-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4104-4_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-3263-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-4104-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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