On the Meaning of Utterances
It is common to ask what something means, or what someone means by something, but rare to ask what it means for something to mean something. What does ‘meaning’ mean? This is arguably the most fundamental question a human enquirer can ask, and it is quite difficult to answer. The prevailing view in the philosophy of language is that a sentence's meaning is defined by its truth-conditions, or the conditions under which it would be true.