Denoteswhether

Denoteswhether is a hypothetical operator used in philosophy of language and formal semantics to describe how certain expressions convey the truth-conditional content of a proposition, especially in interrogatives and embedded questions. The term blends the idea of denotation (reference or meaning) with the semantic contribution of the particle whether, which signals doubt, alternative possibilities, or a truth-value stance.

In semantic models, denoteswhether is imagined as a function that takes an expression containing a question or disjunctive content and yields a proposition-valued content whose truth-value can be evaluated in a given possible world. Put simply, it links an expressive form (such as a phrase containing whether) to the proposition it is about, and then to whether that proposition is true in a model. Different formalizations may treat it as a world-dependent function from expressions to truth-values or as a relation between expressions and a set of possible worlds where the embedded proposition holds.

A common use case to illustrate the idea is an embedded question like “whether it will rain.” The embedded content is the proposition p = “it will rain.” Denoteswhether(“whether it will rain”) would then be the truth-conditional content of p, so that in each possible world, the evaluation reduces to whether p is true. This helps explain how questions contribute to discourse by foregrounding the truth-conditions of their embedded propositions.

Denoteswhether is not an established standard term in mainstream semantics, but it serves as a helpful heuristic for discussing how expressions denote the truth-conditional content of propositions, especially when interrogatives or disjunctive forms are involved. Related notions include denotation, truth-conditions, and question semantics.