That’s the main problem of interest to us, for purposes of this post: what’s the set of possible semantic targets for a word?
From the way you’ve defined things so far, it seems relatively clear what it would mean to solve this problem for sentences; translating from “X” to X has been operationalized as what you condition on if you take “X” literally.
However, the jump you are making to the meaning of a word seems surprising and unclear. If Carol shouts “Ball!” it is unclear what it would mean to condition on the literal content; it seems to be all pragmatics. Since Carol didn’t bother to form a valid sentence, she is not making a claim which can be true or false. It could mean “there is a ball coming at your head” or it could mean “We forgot the basketball at the court” or any number of other things, depending on context.
So, while it does indeed seem meaningful to talk about the semantics of words, the picture you have drawn so far of the “magic box” does not seem to fit the case of individual words. We do not condition on the literal meaning of individual words; those meanings have the wrong type signature to condition on.
From the way you’ve defined things so far, it seems relatively clear what it would mean to solve this problem for sentences; translating from “X” to X has been operationalized as what you condition on if you take “X” literally.
However, the jump you are making to the meaning of a word seems surprising and unclear. If Carol shouts “Ball!” it is unclear what it would mean to condition on the literal content; it seems to be all pragmatics. Since Carol didn’t bother to form a valid sentence, she is not making a claim which can be true or false. It could mean “there is a ball coming at your head” or it could mean “We forgot the basketball at the court” or any number of other things, depending on context.
So, while it does indeed seem meaningful to talk about the semantics of words, the picture you have drawn so far of the “magic box” does not seem to fit the case of individual words. We do not condition on the literal meaning of individual words; those meanings have the wrong type signature to condition on.