Truth-conditional semantics

Truth-conditional semantics is the foundational program in formal semantics holding that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the conditions under which it is true — 'to know the meaning of a sentence is to know what the world would have to be like for the sentence to be true.' Pioneered by Alfred Tarski's theory of truth for formal languages and extended by Richard Montague to natural language, truth-conditional semantics treats language as a recursive function from syntactic structures to model-theoretic interpretations. The approach dominated linguistics and philosophy of language from the 1970s through the 1990s, producing rigorous analyses of quantification, modality, tense, and intensionality. Yet the program faces a persistent challenge: many utterances that are clearly meaningful do not have truth conditions in any straightforward sense. Questions, commands,expressions of gratitude, and performative utterances ('I promise,' 'I sentence you') are meaningful but not truth-apt. Truth-conditional semantics handles these by reducing them to implicit assertions or by excluding them from the domain of semantics proper — relegating them to pragmatics. Critics argue this is not analysis but eviction: the theory excludes the data it cannot explain. The deeper question is whether truth is the right foundational concept for natural language meaning, or whether it is a specialized concept appropriate to scientific and logical discourse but ill-suited to the social, emotional, and performative dimensions of ordinary language use.