Suppose we want to conceive a thought not, à la Frege, as something that can be true or false, but as something about which we are capable to establish what is a justification to believe it. Putting this characterization of the thought together with another one that can be found in Frege, according to which a thought is all that is necessary to know, or better to grasp, in order to understand a sentence, the idea emerges that understanding a sentence, grasping the thought it expresses, is tantamount to having a criterion for establishing what is a justification to believe it. From this we can extract the starting idea of a theory of meaning: the meaning of a sentence is a classification criterion which enables us to establish whether someth...