What is meaning?

A traditional answer is that the meaning of a sentence lies in its truth conditions.

However, the primary use of language is not to give a name to truths, but rather to allow individuals to exchange information.

One would like to understand how language fulfills this role. The question of what meaning is then takes a more concrete form: how does meaning work?

The “truth” approach answers this question in a very simple way. Roughly: the effect of a sentence φ is to provide the conversational participants the information that the actual world is one where φ is true.

This is neat, but very restrictive: certainly there are many other things that meaning can do other than providing information. In particular, in order for an information exchange to be possible, language must at least have the power to request information, that is, to raise issues.

The aim of inquisitive semantics is to model how this process of raising and resolving issues in conversation works, and more broadly to study meaning as information exchange potential.