This stage of the journey offers an explanation of how truth conditions and truth-value judgements can be used in understanding sentence meaning, moving on to the role of a formal metalanguage, possible worlds, and models. As ‘food for thought’, it focuses on the importance of selecting a suitable formal language, introducing some options available in the formal semantic tradition, as well as on the cognitive reality of such approaches to meaning.

This chapter introduces basic notions and questions about meaning, reference, content, truth, truth conditions, and context-sensitivity in semantic theories of natural languages.

This chapter uses a famous article on the communicative features of “bullshitting” (Frankfurt 2005) to shed fresh light on select statements by Donald Trump. Frankfurt’s central observation was that in bullshitting, unlike lying, the speaker isn’t deliberately aiming to deceive and cover up the truth; rather, he can’t be bothered to care about the truth conditions of a statement. While Trump has undoubtedly told countless willful lies, some of his utterances suggest instead a predominance of bullshit. This chapter investigates Trump’s bullshit from a communicative perspective, focusing on Trump’s stance in using bullshit (in particular his desire to produce a positive self-impression) and his use of Twitter as a medium that particularly encourages bullshit in its short character bursts. Bullshitting becomes another tool in Trump’s strategy of branded entertainment, used for self-aggrandizing and to boost his impression management, to create the Trump’ spectacle, and to test others’ loyalty.