Relation to truth· Truth, language and science
Referentialism
Axis: The meaning of words — Where do words get their meaning?
A word's meaning is what it refers to in the world: a name designates an object, a sentence describes a state of affairs. To understand is to know what one is talking about.
Philosophers 1
Russellexplicit
The problem is not to find what a word designates, but to see that an expression can have a logical role while designating nothing at all. By analysing 'the king of France' as a that dissolves into quantifiers — there is an x, exactly one, that reigns over France, and that x is bald — Russell secures three gains at once: statements about non-existent objects become false rather than nonsensical, negation stops being ambiguous, and the ontology slims down without having to people the world with subsisting entities. What is at stake is the trust placed in grammar: the form of a sentence is not the form of the fact it states.
"On Denoting", Mind (1905) · Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), ch. XVI