Tõetingimusi

Tõetingimusi, often translated as "conditions of truth" or "truth conditions," is a philosophical concept primarily associated with analytic philosophy, particularly the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It refers to the circumstances or states of affairs in the world that would make a given statement true. In simpler terms, understanding the truth conditions of a statement means knowing what needs to be the case for that statement to be considered accurate.

The concept is fundamental to the theory of meaning, suggesting that the meaning of a declarative sentence is determined by its truth conditions. To understand a sentence, one must grasp the conditions under which it would be true. For example, the truth condition for the statement "The cat is on the mat" is that there is indeed a cat, and it is situated on a mat. If these conditions are met, the statement is true; otherwise, it is false.

This idea has significant implications for logic and semantics. It forms the basis of truth-conditional semantics, a dominant approach in linguistics and philosophy of language, which seeks to analyze sentence meaning in terms of truth. The focus is on how the meanings of words and the structure of a sentence combine to determine the conditions under which the entire sentence is true. Disagreements about the meaning of a word or sentence can often be reframed as disagreements about their respective truth conditions. The concept also plays a role in epistemology, as it relates to how we verify or falsify claims about the world.