Felicitous Underspecification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. King
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Propositional Attitude ◽  
Single Female ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Semantic Values

Felicitous uses of contextually sensitive expressions generally have unique semantic values in context. For example, a felicitous use of the singular pronoun ‘she’ generally has a single female as its unique semantic value in context. In the present work, it is argued that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses where they lack unique semantic values in context. The author calls such uses instances of felicitous underspecification. In these uses, the underspecified expression is associated with a range of candidate semantic values in context. A rule is provided for updating the Stalnakerian common ground when sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions are uttered and accepted in a conversation. The author also gives an account of the mechanism that associates the range of candidate semantic values in context with an underspecified expression. Sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions can be embedded in various constructions. The author considers the result of embedding such sentences under negation and verbs of propositional attitude. He also examines the question of why some uses of underspecified expressions are felicitous and others aren’t. This investigation yields the notion of a context being appropriate for a sentence (LF), where a context is appropriate for a sentence containing an underspecified expression if the sentence is felicitous in that context. Finally, some difficulties are covered that arise in virtue of the fact that pronouns and demonstratives have some sorts of implications of uniqueness that clash with their being underspecified.

Two‐Dimensional Semantics

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Chalmers
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Cognitive Significance ◽  
Dimensional Approach ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Sense And Reference ◽  
Semantic Values ◽  
Distinctive Role

Two-dimensional approaches to semantics, broadly understood, recognize two ‘dimensions’ of the meaning or content of linguistic items. On these approaches, expressions and their utterances are associated with two different sorts of semantic values, which play different explanatory roles. Typically, one semantic value is associated with reference and ordinary truth-conditions, while the other is associated with the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world. The second sort of semantic value is often held to play a distinctive role in analyzing matters of cognitive significance and/or context-dependence. In this broad sense, even Frege's theory of sense and reference might qualify as a sort of two-dimensional approach.

Musical Minimalism and the Metaphysics of Time

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 1267-1306
Author(s):  
Nemesio García-Carril Puy
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Phenomenal Knowledge ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Static View ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Musical Context ◽  
In Virtue Of

I defend in this paper the thesis that there is a complex relation between minimalist musical works and the metaphysics of time, involving ontological, epistemological and axiological issues. This relation is explained by means of three sub-theses. The first one is that minimalist musical works literally exemplify –in Goodman’s sense– the properties ascribed to time by the metaphysical static view: 1) minimalist works intrinsically possess those properties by being composed according to the technique of minimal repetition; 2) they extrinsically refer to those properties in virtue of pragmatic processes of accommodation of disagreements on what is taken to be common ground in a particular musical context. The second sub-thesis is that, in exemplifying those properties, minimalist musical works are valuable from two perspectives: a formalist one, according to which minimalist works purify the concept of what a musical work is; and a cognitive one, insofar they allow us to obtain phenomenal knowledge of what it is like to experience time as the static view conceives it. The third sub-thesis is that each particular minimalist musical work is valuable insofar it achieves either the formalist or the cognitive goals in an original way.

Frege's Detour

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Perry
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Propositional Attitude ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Cognitive States ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Attitude Reports ◽  
Sense And Reference ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Indirect Reference

I argue that Frege’s treatment of propositional attitudes in “On Sense and Reference” put the philosophy of language on a detour. His doctrine of “indirect reference” reflected and reinforced the view that beliefs, desires, etc. consist in having relations to propositions. According to this doctrine expressions in embedded sentences in indirect discourse and propositional attitude reports do refer as they do when unembedded, but instead refer to their ordinary senses, so sentences refer to Thoughts, Frege’s version of what are now callled general or qualitative propositions. Davidson call this move abandoning “semantic innocence” which is the view that such embedded sentences work as they usually do. I agree with Davidson, that semantic innocence should not be abandonned. I argue that such cognitive states have truth-conditions in virtue of their causal and informational roles, which can be encoded in a variety of ways for different purposes, and provide a better explanation of the considerations that drove Frege to abandon innocence. I trace the problems I see to Frege’s abandonment of the framework of his early work, the Begriffsschrift. I argue that by adding the levels of senses and Thoughts to his Begriffsschriftframework, and retaining “circumstances” as the referents of sentences containing singular terms, Frege could have avoided the doctrine of indirect reference, and philosophy could have taken a different path.

PROOF-THEORETIC SEMANTIC VALUES FOR LOGICAL OPERATORS

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 466-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
NISSIM FRANCEZ ◽  
GILAD BEN-AVI
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Natural Deduction ◽  
Logical Operators ◽  
Logical Grammar ◽  
Basic Meaning ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Semantic Types ◽  
Theoretic Semantic ◽  
Semantic Values ◽  
Henkin Models

The paper proposes a semantic value for the logical constants (connectives and quantifiers) within the framework of proof-theoretic semantics, basic meaning on the introduction rules of a meaning conferring natural deduction proof system. The semantic value is defined based on Frege’s Context Principle, by taking “contributions” to sentential meanings as determined by the function-argument structure as induced by a type-logical grammar. In doing so, the paper proposes a novel proof-theoretic interpretation of the semantic types, traditionally interpreted in Henkin models. The compositionality of the resulting attribution of semantic values is discussed. Elsewhere, the same method was used for defining proof-theoretic meaning of subsentential phrases in a fragment of natural language. Doing the same for (the simpler and clearer case of) logic sheds more light on the proposal.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. King
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Value ◽  
Semantic Values

It is arguable that the word ‘I’ has a context invariant meaning that suffices to secure semantic values for it in context. Set ‘I’ in a context and its context invariant meaning secures the speaker of the context as its semantic value in that context (at least if there is one). Consider the class of contextually sensitive expressions whose context invariant meanings arguably do ...

EMBRACING THE TECHNICALITIES: EXPRESSIVE COMPLETENESS AND REVENGE

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS TOURVILLE ◽  
ROY T COOK
Keyword(s):  
Formal Language ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Semantic Paradoxes ◽  
A Value ◽  
Completeness Result ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Semantic Values

AbstractThe Revenge Problem threatens every approach to the semantic paradoxes that proceeds by introducing nonclassical semantic values. Given any such collection Δ of additional semantic values, one can construct a Revenge sentence:This sentence is either false or has a value in Δ.TheEmbracing Revengeview, developed independently by Roy T. Cook and Phlippe Schlenker, addresses this problem by suggesting that the class of nonclassical semantic values is indefinitely extensible, with each successive Revenge sentence introducing a new ‘pathological’ semantic value into the discourse. The view is explicitly motivated in terms of the idea that every notion thatseemsto be expressible (e.g., “has a value in Δ”, for any definite collection of semantic values Δ) should, if at all possible,beexpressible. Extant work on the Embracing Revenge view has failed to live up to this promise, since the formal languages developed within such work are expressively impoverished. We rectify this here by developing a much richer formal language, and semantics for that language, and we then prove an extremely powerful expressive completeness result for the system in question.

scholarly journals The Pragmatics of the 'Tenses' in Biblical Hebrew

1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. H. Baayen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Discourse Representation ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
Considerable Controversy ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Broad Consensus

In this paper, I present an analysis of the so-called tense forms of Biblical Hebrew. While there is fairly broad consensus on the interpretation of the yiqtol tense form, the interpretation of the qdtal tense form has led to considerable controversy. I will argue that the qātal form has no intrinsic semantic value and that it serves a pragmatic function only, namely, signaling to the hearer that the event or state expressed by the verb cannot be tightly integrated into the discourse representation of the hearer, given the speaker's estimate of their common ground.

Felicitous Underspecification and Metasemantics

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-79
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. King
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Value ◽  
Semantic Values

In cases of felicitous underspecification, instead of having a unique semantic value in context, the relevant expression is associated with a range of candidate semantic values in context. I formulate an account of the mechanism that associates this range of candidate semantic values in context with the relevant expression. I argue that it is the same mechanism that associates expressions with unique semantic values in context in “normal” cases.

Semantic overlaps of French modal expressions

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierrette Thibault
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Patterns Of Use ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Semantic Values

ABSTRACTAlthough there is no consensus on whether French has any true modal auxiliary, devoir ‘must’ is one of the very few possible candidates. Most studies of devoir concentrate on criteria for distinguishing its epistemic and root semantic values, but some also explore the subtle semantic nuances it conveys depending on context. Here, we identify discrete meanings through the analysis of semantic overlaps between devoir and other French modal expressions, such as probablement ‘probably’, être supposé ‘to be supposed to’, or falloir ‘ought to’. The analysis of data from two corpora on Montreal French, collected in 1971 and 1984, shows that:1. There is only one root semantic value exclusively associated with devoir, namely, the notion of desirability (as in the English ‘should’).2. There are different patterns of use of the competing modal expressions within each semantic field analyzed, according to the social class of the speaker. Moreover, some patterns characterizing a specific social group are acquired relatively late.

scholarly journals Verse Forms as Bearers of Semantic Values

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-128
Author(s):  
Teresa Dobrzyńska
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Study ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Verse Forms ◽  
Iconic Signs ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Semantic Values

Verse forms may be employed as bearers of semantic values. The present paper intends to show the richness of this resource in literary texts. The semantic values of particular verse structures are interpreted here in terms of the semiotic categories introduced by C. S. Peirce: as symptoms, symbols, or iconic signs. The basis for this kind of reflection is earlier systematic study of various verse forms and their linguistic morphology conducted by a group of Polish and Slavic researchers (as part of the Comparative Slavic Metrics programme).The semantic value can be attributed to the fact that verse forms function as filters of various linguistic units. It is why the metrical organisation of a text determines its stylistic characteristics. A verse form may be employed and interpreted in many different ways; for instance, to represent the social status of the speaker or to differentiate between various literary genres. Many metrical forms perform an iconic function. Some semantic values are derived from the intertextual relationships of a poem. Verse structure may also be seen as a kind of author’s signature. It may also be employed to perform axiological functions.

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