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In the preceding chapter, I sketched the protosemantics of basic claims — simple indicative declarative non-modal sentences in which all designators were proper names. I envisaged a representation of the world laid out in such claims — the Basic World Story — which was ideally complete. Each natural object was specifically protocorrelated with a natural linguistic object (designator-inscription) and non-linguistic objects of various kinds or characteristics were genetically protocorrelated with designators-inscriptions of various kinds or characteristics in such a way that the resulting systems were extensionally isomorphic. It will be useful to look at this as the world story of an omniscient Author. Its most striking fictional posit is that every object is named, one name for each object. Whether it even makes sense to think of such a picture, given my earlier fusion of language with theory-writ-large, is one of the primary problems of this chapter. But before engaging this question, it will be useful to develop a view of truth-functions and, in the process, correct several oversimplifications and distortions.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-2301-6_7

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