The Philosophy of Language

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.”  Groucho Marx

Semantics is the study of the meanings of linguistic expressions (as opposed to their sound, spelling, etc.).  Of course, 'meaning' is a notoriously vague and ambiguous term; many different kinds of meaning are part of semantics.  Among the semantic notions we will make use of are these:

• reference or extension the object or set of objects to which an expression applies.  (Actually it might be better to regard the reference of an expression on a particular occasion of use as pragmatic rather than semantic.  More on this later.)
• truth and falsity (sometimes these are regarded as the extensions of declarative sentences)
• intension (what determines the extension of an expression; often regarded as a function from possible worlds to extensions)
• what a competent user of an expression must know (alas, although this is a very important concept, there is no term that unambiguously expresses it.  The word 'meaning' itself probably comes closest, but unfortunately 'meaning' can also mean intension, sometimes is used to mean 'extension', and sometimes is used to mean still other things.)

'Syntax' is more or less synonymous with 'grammar', though philosophers often use the term more broadly to refer to any characteristics of a sentence that don't involve semantics.  Thus, while a linguist would distinguish between phonology and syntax, philosophers may treat phonology (and orthography) as "syntactic".

This entry borrows from the Introduction to A. P. Martinich, ed., The Philosophy of Language, Third Edition (Oxford University Press, 1996).