 Although its formulation is primarily epistemological, Sneed’s problem of theoretical terms has a semantic reading. Let the meaning of a term be identified with the methods of determining its extension, as suggested in  Section 1.2.  Then we can say that our understanding of T-theoretical relations and functions originates from the axioms of the scientific theory T. In standard truth-conditional semantics, by contrast, one assumes that the truth value of an axiom is determined by the semantic values of those descriptive symbols which have occurrences in \(\phi\). Among these symbols, there are theoretical terms of T. Hence, it appears that standard truth-conditional semantics does not accord with the order of our grasping the meaning of theoretical terms. In the next section, we will deal with indirect means of interpreting theoretical terms. These proved to be ways out of the present problem of theoretical terms.