Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners does not go that route. It opens with a shot of a snowy forest, where a deer quietly noses around for food. Into the frame comes the barrel of a shotgun.
Just so, semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning are, pretty clearly, different sorts of theories. The term âtheory of meaningâ has, in the recent history of philosophy, been used to stand for both semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning.
In theoretical linguistics, semantics is the study of meaning in language. One way to view meaning is as the connection between language and world. For instance, consider the sentence It's raining in Boston. What is the world like when this sentence is true?