Abstract

The goal of standard semantics is to provide truth conditions for the sentences of a given language. Probabilistic Semantics does not share this aim; it might be said instead, if rather cryptically, that Probabilistic Semantics aims to provide belief conditions.The central and guiding idea of Probabilistic Semantics is that each rational individual has ‘within’ him or her a personal subjective probability function. The output of the function when given a certain sentence as input represents the degree of likelihood which the individual would assign to that sentence. One can characterize these functions via a set of axioms, and in the terms of this defined structure develop probabilistic analogues of all important semantical notions. Then, dealing with ‘being given probability 1’ instead of ‘truth,’ one can proceed to give a completely adequate semantics for the particular language under consideration. The axioms delimiting the class of probability functions are, in fact, chosen with this goal and language in mind.