Utterance Meaning and Mental States

Publisher Summary This chapter reconciles the more or less elaborate approaches in linguistics and intensional logic to deal with the formal aspect of verbal utterance type of mental operation. A simple example is described in the chapter to clarify the notion of utterance meaning, which is to be distinguished from the semantic structure of a sentence. One type of differences depends on the time and the addressee of an utterance—that is, on the interpretation of the “deictic elements” “you,” “your,” and “will.” This type of context dependent variation in the utterance meaning is fairly obvious and is widely discussed both in linguistics and logic. The crucial point of the initial considerations is that assigning a linguistic structure to an inscription does not yet determine the pertinent utterance meaning. The chapter also describes the model-theoretic semantics and intensional logic. The distinction between semantic structure and utterance meaning to the Fregean distinction between “Sinn” and “Bedeutung,” taken up by Carnap in terms of intension and extension are connected.