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.
Semantics is the study of meaning in language. It can be applied to entire texts or to single words. For example, destination and last stop technically mean the same thing, but students of semantics analyze their subtle shades of meaning. In the late 1800s, Michel BrÃ©al coined the term sÃ©mantique to describe the psychology of language.