Semantics

   The Nature of Semantics in Philosophy and Linguistics

   There are people who maintain that there is no distinction between syntax and semantics, and there are others who lump the entire inference and "thought" component of an AI system under the label "semantics." Moreover, the philosophers, linguists, and programming language theorists have notions of semantics which are distinct from each other and from many of the notions of computational linguists and psychologists. . . .

   First, let me set up two caricatures which I will call the Linguist and the Philosopher, without thereby asserting that all linguists fall into the first category or philosophers in the second. Both, however, represent strong traditions in their respective fields. The Linguist has the following view of semantics in linguistics: He is interested in characterizing the fact that the same sentence can sometimes mean different things, and some sentences mean nothing at all. He would like to find some notation in which to express the different things which a sentence can mean and some procedure for determining whether a sentence is "anomalous" (i.e., has no meanings). The Philosopher on the other hand is concerned with specifying the meaning of a formal notation rather than a natural language. . . . His notation is already unambiguous. What he is concerned with is determining when an expression in the notation is a "true" preposition (in some appropriate formal sense of truth) and when it is false. . . . Meaning for the Philosopher is not defined in terms of some other notation in which to represent different possible interpretations of a sentence, but he is interested in the conditions for truth of an already formal representation. (Woods, 1975, pp. 40-41)