Meaning, Context, and Logical Truth

Included in a special issue, edited by J. van Benthem and A. Gupta, on "Logic and Philosophy Today"Formal semantics emerged at the interface of logic and philosophy of language in the early 1970's as a result of using tools provided by logic and model-theory to study natural language. We start by discussing the philosophical motivations, in particular compositionality and truth-conditionality, behind those early developments. We then turn to the question of how to reconcile the context-dependence of meaning in natural language with the conception of logical truth as 'truth in virtue of meaning'. We end with a discussion of some open issues related to the notion of validity in indexical intensional logics