 The orthodox approach to this last question appeals to the notion of truth, suggesting, roughly, that a sentence \(S\) means that \(p\) just in case \(S\) is true if and only if \(p\). This approach to meaning, known widely as “truth-conditional semantics”, is historically associated with  Donald Davidson’s  (1967) thesis that the “(T)-sentences” (i.e., the instances of the (T)-schema) generated by a Tarski-truth-definition for a language give the meanings of the sentences they mention, by specifying their truth conditions. In contemporary linguistics, a prominent approach to sentence meaning explains it in terms of propositions, understood (following Lewis 1970 and Stalnaker 1970) as sets of possible worlds, which amount to encapsulations of truth conditions (Elbourne 2011, 50–51).