Supervaluations and the Propositional Attitude Constraint

For the sentences of languages that contain operators that express the concepts of definiteness and indefiniteness, there is an unavoidable tension between a truth-theoretic semantics that delivers truth conditions for those sentences that capture their propositional contents and any model-theoretic semantics that has a story to tell about how indetifiniteness in a constituent affects the semantic value of sentences which imbed it. But semantic theories of both kinds play essential roles, so the tension needs to be resolved. I argue that it is the truth theory which correctly characterises the notion of truth, per se. When we take into account the considerations required to bring model theory into harmony with truth theory, those considerations undermine the arguments standardly used to motivate supervaluational model theories designed to validate classical logic. But those considerations also show that celebration would be premature for advocates of the most frequently encountered rival approach – many-valued model theory.     

Thomason’s Paradox for Belief,and Two Consequence Relations

Thomason (1979/2010)’s argument against competence psychologism in semantics envisages a representation of a subject’s competence as follows: he understands his own language in the sense that he can identify the semantic content of each of its sentences, which requires that the relation between expression and content be recursive. Then if the scientist constructs a theory that is meant to represent the body of the subject’s beliefs, construed as assent to the content of the pertinent sentences, and that theory satisfies certain ‘natural assumptions’, then it implies that the subject is inconsistent if the beliefs include arithmetic. I challenge the result by insisting that the motivation for Thomason’s principle (ii), via Moore’s Paradox, leads to a more complex representation, in which stating the facts and expressing one’s beliefs are treated differently. Certain logical connections among expressions of assent, and between expression and statement, are a matter of consequence on pain of pragmatic incoherence, not consequence on pain of classical logical inconsistency. But while this salvages the possibility that a modification of the above sort of representation could be adequate, Thomason’s devastating conclusion returns if the scientist identifies himself as the subject of that representation, even when paying heed to the requirement of pragmatic coherence of the sort highlighted by Moore’s Paradox.     

Structured propostions and sentence structure

It is argued that taken together, two widely held claims ((i) sentences express structured propositions whose structures are functions of the structures of sentences expressing them; and (ii) senteces have underlying structures that are the input to semantic interpretation) suggest a simple, plausible theory of propositional structure. According to this theory, the structures of propositions are the same as the structures of the syntactic inputs to semantics they are expressed by. The theory is defended against a variety of objections.I have benefitted from discussions with Michael Jubien, Michacl Liston, Paul Teller, Howard Wettstein, Mark Wilson and especially David Copp. The comments of Mark Richard and an anonymous referee for Journal of Philosophical Logic on an earlier draft resulted in a much improved paper. Various circumstances resulted in this paper appearing after King [1995], though the latter was written later and amends the present view in several ways. See notes 9, 13, 15 and 33 of King [1995].     

Game theoretical semantics and entailment

The essence of the meaning of a declarative sentence is given by stating its truth conditions, and consequently semantics, the study of meaning, must include a theory of truth conditions. Such a theory must not only describe accurately the truth conditions of declarative sentences, it must also answer the question of when two sentences have the same truth conditions. The fundamental semantic relation of having the same truth conditions cannot be ignored by any reasonable theory.This paper is an attempt to find a partial account of this relation by using game theoretical semantics as developed by Hintikka and his followers. The account given will establish a connection between this approach to semantics and the theory of firstdegree entailment formulated by Anderson and Belnap.     

Induction,indifference and guessing

Pragmatism in semantics is hampered by its proponents' tendency to tie understanding too closely to our mastery of epistemic practice. Both Brandom's inferentialist semantics and the anti-realist semantics championed by Dummett and Tennant amply illustrate this tendency. As a consequence, neither theory can successfully handle cases of the innocuously unknowable in which two sentences, though mutually consistent, nonetheless cannot be known to be true together. On Brandom's account, such sentences are treated as being mutually inconsistent after all. According to both Dummett's and Tennant's version of anti-realist semantics, we cannot know that there are any true sentences of this kind. Neither result is the least acceptable, whence either theory fails. The lesson to be learnt from this failure is that understanding should not be identified with the ability to reach warranted verdicts, but with the ability to think, where thinking is constitutively involved in, but nonetheless distinct from judging.     

The Application of Constraint Semantics to the Language of Subjective Uncertainty

This paper develops a compositional, type-driven constraint semantic theory for a fragment of the language of subjective uncertainty. In the particular application explored here, the interpretation function of constraint semantics yields not propositions but constraints on credal states as the semantic values of declarative sentences. Constraints are richer than propositions in that constraints can straightforwardly represent assessments of the probability that the world is one way rather than another. The richness of constraints helps us model communicative acts in essentially the same way that we model agents’ credences. Moreover, supplementing familiar truth-conditional theories of epistemic modals with constraint semantics helps capture contrasts between strong necessity and possibility modals, on the one hand, and weak necessity modals, on the other.     

汉语句子加工中句法信息与语义信息的交互作用：来自ERP的证据

采用ERP技术考察句子加工过程中句法信息和语义信息交互作用的时间进程。以汉语“把字句”为实验材料,分别比较句法违例句与双重违例句的LAN和P600效应、语义违例句与双重违例句的N400效应。与句法违例句相比,双重违例句的LAN效应的波幅更负,潜伏期更长,皮层分布更广泛;双重违例句的P600效应出现减弱趋势;双重违例句的N400效应的潜伏期显著长于语义违例句。结果表明,在句子加工的各个阶段,句法信息和语义信息呈持续交互作用,支持句子的平行加工模型。     

Buridan's Consequentia: Consequence and Inference Within a Token-Based Semantics

I examine the theory of consequentia of the medieval logician, John Buridan. Buridan advocates a strict commitment to what we now call proposition-tokens as the bearers of truth-value. The analysis of Buridan's theory shows that, within a token-based semantics, amendments to the usual notions of inference and consequence are made necessary, since pragmatic elements disrupt the semantic behaviour of propositions. In my reconstruction of Buridan's theory, I use some of the apparatus of modern two-dimensional semantics, such as two-dimensional matrices and the distinction between the context of formation and the context of evaluation of utterances.     

言语的情绪韵律和情绪语义对听觉去信息掩蔽的作用

言语的情绪信息(情绪性韵律和情绪性语义)具有去听觉掩蔽的作用, 但其去掩蔽的具体机制还不清楚。本研究通过2个实验, 采用主观空间分离范式, 通过操纵掩蔽声类型的方式, 分别探究言语的情绪韵律和情绪语义去信息掩蔽的机制。结果发现, 情绪韵律在知觉信息掩蔽或者在知觉、认知双重信息掩蔽下, 均具有去掩蔽的作用。情绪语义在知觉信息掩蔽下不具有去掩蔽的作用, 但在知觉、认知双重信息掩蔽下具有去掩蔽的作用。这些结果表明, 言语的情绪韵律和情绪语义有着不同的去掩蔽机制。情绪韵律能够优先吸引听者更多的注意, 可以克服掩蔽声音在知觉上造成的干扰, 但对掩蔽声音在内容上的干扰作用很小。言语的情绪语义能够优先获取听者更多的认知加工资源, 具有去认知信息掩蔽的作用, 但不具有去知觉信息掩蔽的作用。     

“If you’d wiggled A,then B would’ve changed”

This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl (2000) to formalize a causal notion of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1979) will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions.     

The copredication argument

The standard view of truth-conditional semantics is that it is world-involving in the sense that a theory that specifies truth conditions eo ipso is a theory that specifies the way the world must be if the target sentences are to be true. It would appear to follow that the semantic properties of expressions, such as nominals, specify the very worldly objects that make true or false the sentences that host the nominals. Chomsky and others have raised a fundamental complaint against this thought: perfectly quotidian nominals, such as London or book, may occur copredicatively as a single argument of categorically mismatched predicates, which prima facie preclude a coherent uniform construal of the nominal argument. The argument has hitherto been presented via examples that challenge the standard view. My aim here is to present the argument explicitly, defend it against some likely counterclaims, and resolve what might appear to be a decisive consideration against the conclusion of the argument, viz., if nominals as copredicatively occurring do not contribute uniform worldly entities, then how can the copredicative constructions be counted as true?     

How to Be an Ethical Expressivist

Expressivism promises an illuminating account of the nature of normative judgment. But worries about the details of expressivist semantics have led many to doubt whether expressivism's putative advantages can be secured. Drawing on insights from linguistic semantics and decision theory, I develop a novel framework for implementing an expressivist semantics that I call ordering expressivism. I argue that by systematically interpreting the orderings that figure in analyses of normative terms in terms of the basic practical attitude of conditional weak preference, the expressivist can explain the semantic properties of normative sentences in terms of the logical properties of that attitude. Expressivism's problems with capturing the logical relations among normative sentences can be reduced to the familiar, more tractable problem of explaining certain coherence constraints on preferences. Particular attention is given to the interpretation of wide‐scope negation. The proposed solution is also extended to other types of embedded contexts—most notably, disjunctions.     

The Understanding of Word Definitions in School-Age Children

This study investigated children’s understanding of unfamiliar noun and verb definitions in tasks that were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties of definitions. The study was also designed to examine the relation between understanding word definitions and the skills of syntactic awareness and making inferences. A total of 117 children over three upper elementary grades (3, 4, 5) participated in the study. The definitional tasks were presented in multiple choice format, with each definition followed by four context sentences. In the syntactic/semantic condition, which included nouns and verbs, the context sentences were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties. In the semantic condition, which included only nouns, the context sentences were manipulated only for semantics. All children also completed a syntactic awareness task and a making inferences task. Results indicated that children did not make significant grade improvements in the semantic task, but did so in the syntactic/semantic task, suggesting the dependence of syntactic cues on definitional understanding. Findings further suggested that inferencing and syntactic awareness are important to children’s ability in understanding a definition for an unfamiliar word and to integrating that meaning into a context sentence.     

Semantic relationism, belief reports and contradiction

In his book Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine propounds an original and sophisticated semantic theory called ‘semantic relationism’ or ‘relational semantics’, whose peculiarity is the enrichment of Kaplan’s, Salmon’s and Soames’ Russellian semantics (more specifically, the semantic content of simple sentences and the truth-conditions of belief reports) with coordination, “the very strongest relation of synonymy or being semantically the same”. In this paper, my goal is to shed light on an undesirable result of semantic relationism: a report like “Tom believes that Cicero is bald and Tom does not believe that Tully is bald” is correct according to Fine’s provided truth-conditions of belief reports, but its semantic content is (very likely) a contradiction. As I will argue in the paper, even the resort to the notion of token proposition, introduced in Fine’s recent article “Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination Problems’”, does not suffice to convincingly eliminate the contradiction; moreover, it raises new difficulties.     

On Value‐Attributions: Semantics and Beyond

This paper is driven by the idea that the contextualism‐relativism debate regarding the semantics of value‐attributions turns on certain extra‐semantic assumptions that are unwarranted. One is the assumption that the many‐place predicate of truth, deployed by compositional semantics, cannot be directly appealed to in theorizing about people's assessments of truth value but must be supplemented (if not replaced) by a different truth‐predicate, obtained through certain “postsemantic” principles. Another is the assumption that semantics assigns to sentences not only truth values (as a function of various parameters, such as contexts, worlds and times), but also semantic contents, and that what context‐sensitive expressions contribute to content are contextually determined elements. My first aim in this paper will be to show how the two assumptions have shaped two ways of understanding the debate between contextualism and relativism. My second aim will be to show that both assumptions belong outside semantics and are, moreover, questionable.     

The Justification of the Logical Laws Revisited

The proof-theoretic analysis of logical semantics undermines the received view of proof theory as being concerned with symbols devoid of meaning, and of model theory as the sole branch of logical theory entitled to access the realm of semantics. The basic tenet of proof-theoretic semantics is that meaning is given by some rules of proofs, in terms of which all logical laws can be justified and the notion of logical consequence explained. In this paper an attempt will be made to unravel some aspects of the issue and to show that this justification as it stands is untenable, for it relies on a formalistic conception of meaning and fails to recognise the fundamental distinction between semantic definitions and rules of inference. It is also briefly suggested that the profound connection between meaning and proofs should be approached by first reconsidering our very notion of proof.     

Bootstrapping in miniature language acquisition

Given the difficulties in learning meanings of words by observing the referent, it has been suggested that children use the syntactic context of the word to predict part of its meaning, a hypothesis known as syntactic bootstrapping. Semantic bootstrapping is the opposite theory that the knowledge of semantics helps in acquiring syntax. While there is evidence that children can apply their knowledge of correlations between syntax and semantics to perform bootstrapping, it is not clear how they come to know about these correlations in the first place. Here, a connectionist network is presented that learns to comprehend a miniature language by associating sentences with the corresponding scenes. In doing so, it learns the syntactic/semantic correlations and exhibits bootstrapping behavior. It is argued that such specialized phenomena can emerge when general mechanisms are applied to a specific task, and it is not always necessary to endow the learner with pre-existing specialized mechanisms.     

Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics

When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences (“X is wrong”/“X is not wrong”), it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences (i.e., that it has to be the case that at least one of them is incorrect). This inference then plays a key role in a now‐standard argument against certain theories in moral semantics. In this paper, we introduce new evidence that bears on this debate. We show that there are moral conflict cases in which people are inclined to say both (a) that the two speakers disagree and (b) that it is not the case at least one of them must be saying something incorrect. We then explore how we might understand such disagreements. As a proof of concept, we sketch an account of the concept of disagreement and an independently motivated theory of moral semantics which, together, explain the possibility of such cases.     

A future for the thin red line

The thin red line (TRL) is a theory about the semantics of future-contingents. The central idea is that there is such a thing as the ??actual future??, even in the presence of indeterminism. It is inspired by a famous solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge associated with William of Ockham, in which the freedom of agents is argued to be compatible with God??s omniscience. In the modern branching time setting, the theory of the TRL is widely regarded to suffer from several fundamental problems. In this paper we propose several new TRL semantics, each with differing degrees of success. This leads up to our final semantics, which is a cross between the TRL and supervaluationism. We discuss the notions of truth, validity and semantic consequence which result from our final semantics, and demonstrate some of its pleasing results. This account, we believe, answers the main objection in the literature, and thus places the TRL on the same level as any other competing semantics for future contingents.