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Section 1: IntroductionHere is a rough sketch of what I take to be an attractive, albeit naı¨ve, picture (its attractiveness I take to be obvious; its naivete´, though perhaps also obvious, will be discussed shortly). A primary purpose of a semantics for a natural language is to compositionally assign to sentences semantic values that determine whether the sentences are true or false. Since natural languages contain contextually sensitive expressions, semantic values must be assigned to sentences relative to contexts. These semantic values are propositions. Sentence types may also be associated with higher level semantic values that are or determine functions from contexts to propositions (something like what David Kaplan calls ''character''). 1 Propositions are the primary bearers of truth and falsity. 2 Propositions are also the objects of our attitudes: they are things we doubt, believe, and think. Further, sentences that contain verbs of propositional attitude, such as 1. Julia believes that Squaw Valley is a skier's paradise.assert that an individual stands in a certain cognitive relation to a proposition. In addition, there are various expressions that embed sentences, which I shall call sentence operators, that are such that the truth values of sentences containing them (relative to a context) depend in part on the propositions expressed by the sentences they embed (relative to the context). 3 I shall put this by saying that the sentence operators in question operate on the propositions expressed by the sentences they embed. For example, the truth-value of a sentence (relative to a context) like: 2. Necessarily, a skier is an athlete. depends in part on the proposition expressed by the embedded sentence (relative to the context) (and not merely on the truth value of the embedded sentence (relative to the context)).