Semantic Explanations Made Easy: The Case for Truth in Virtue of Meaning

The positivists’ notion of truth in virtue of meaning presupposes that the truth of certain sentences can be explained merely by reference to semantic rules. The currently most popular objection to the notion denies the possibility of such semantic explanations, on the grounds that semantic rules can only explain what a sentence says, but not whether what a sentence says is true. Though recent critics of the objection have insisted that semantic rules do explain the truth of certain sentences, the very notion of a semantic explanation is often left unclear. This paper proposes to define the notion of semantic explanation as a valid argument that derives the truth of a sentence from accepted semantic rules. The account offered will then be used to respond to some of the most pressing objections to the idea of truth in virtue of meaning.