truthaptness

Truthaptness is a term used in philosophy of language and semantics to denote the property of being truth-apt: capable of being true or false, having truth conditions. The term is a blend of truth and aptness and is often used to distinguish declarative statements from other sentence types that do not bear truth-values, such as questions, commands, or exclamations.

In standard theories of truth-conditions, a sentence's truthaptness determines whether it can be assigned a truth-value in a given model or interpretation. For example: “The cat is on the mat” is truth-apt because it asserts a proposition that can be evaluated for truth; “Close the door” is not truth-apt because it issues a directive rather than stating something.

Philosophical utility: truthaptness helps separate semantics of content from pragmatics of use; it is used to discuss which utterances constitute content-bearing statements and thus participate in truth-conditions. It is also relevant in discussions of non-cognitive content and in artificial intelligence to determine what kinds of inputs can be evaluated for truth.

Criticisms: some theorists argue that truth-value attribution can be extended to many utterances or that some sentences have context-sensitive truth-conditional semantics; the notion is not universally standardized and is used variably.

See also: truth-conditional semantics; proposition; declarative sentence; imperative; performative.