Conceptual Evolution and Reference

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-140
Author(s):  
Mark Richard
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Meaning Change ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
Conceptual Evolution

A word’s meaning, according to the argument of Chapter 3, is constituted by certain presuppositions that it is common ground speakers associate with uses of the word. Presumably there can be changes in the things that constitute a word’s meaning from one time to another, without there being change of its meaning—without the word’s coming to have a meaning distinct from that it used to have. This chapter discusses a number of accounts of what might be necessary, sufficient, or necessary and sufficient for change of meaning, though it does not endorse a particular account. Much of the chapter discusses relations between changes in reference and truth conditions and change in meaning, as well as relations among referential indeterminacy, meaning change, and ‘what is said’ by a sentence.

scholarly journals I Do Not Exist. Problems for Dynamic Semantics

2018 ◽  
pp. 393-414
Author(s):  
Eduardo García Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Dynamic Semantics ◽  
Recent Proposal ◽  
Static Semantics ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Existential Constructions ◽  
The Common

According to dynamic semantics, what is said by an utterance of a sentence is determined by how the common ground is affected by the acceptance of such utterance. It has been claimed that dynamic semantics offers an account of what is said by an utterance in a context that excels that of traditional static semantics. Assertions of negative existential constructions, of the form ‘X does not exist’, are a case in point. These assertions traditionally pose a problem for philosophers of language. A recent proposal, owed to Clapp (2008), argues that static semantics is unable to solve the problem and offers a dynamic semantics account that promises to succeed. In this paper I want to challenge this account and, more generally, the scope of the dynamic semantics framework. I will offer a counterexample, inspired by “answering machine” uses of indexical and demonstrative expressions, to show how dynamic semantics fails.  I conclude by considering the merits of both static and dynamic accounts.

Linguistic Pragmatism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
John Collins
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Linguistic Structure ◽  
What Is Said

This chapter articulates and defends linguistic pragmatism as a linguistic hypothesis that language alone underdetermines truth conditions (or what is said), and doesn’t even provide a variable licence for the truth conditions of an utterance in a context. Linguistic meaning is characterized, therefore, in terms of constraints upon what can be literally said with a linguistic structure, without the presumption that the linguistic properties of an utterance in a context will determine a content. The hypothesis is explained in terms of the resources language makes available to content, differentiated from related positions, and defended against numerous objections, especially those that argue for an essential role for minimal propositions in accounting for aspects of what is said.

scholarly journals Computing the meaning of the assertive speech act by a software agent

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Brian Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Software Agent ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Situation Type ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship

This paper examines the nature of the assertive speech act of Irish. We examine the syntactical constructional form of the assertive to identify its constructional signature. We consider the speech act as a construction whose meaning as an utterance depends on the framing situation and context, along with the common ground of the interlocutors. We identify how the assertive speech act is formalised to make it computer tractable for a software agent to compute its meaning, taking into account the contribution of situation, context and a dynamic common ground. Belief, desire and intention play a role in <em>what is meant</em> as against <em>what is said</em>. The nature of knowledge, and how it informs common ground, is explored along with the relationship between knowledge and language. Computing the meaning of a speech act in the situation requires us to consider the level of the interaction of all these dimensions. We argue that the contribution of lexicon and grammar, with the recognition of belief, desire and intentions in the situation type and associated illocutionary force, sociocultural conventions of the interlocutors along with their respective general and cultural knowledge, their common ground and other sources of contextual information are all important for representing meaning in communication. We show that the influence of the situation, context and common ground feeds into the utterance meaning derivation. The ‘<em>what is said’</em> is reflected in the event and its semantics, while the ‘<em>what is meant’</em> is derived at a higher level of abstraction within a situation.

The Difference between Lying and Misleading

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Stokke
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
The World ◽  
Question Under Discussion ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Prosodic Focus

The notions of what is said and assertion, as relative to questions under discussion, are used to provide an account of the lying-misleading distinction. The chapter argues that utterances are sometimes interpreted relative to the so-called Big Question, roughly paraphrased by “What is the world like?” This observation is shown to account for the fact that, when conveying standard conversational implicatures, what is asserted is likewise proposed for the common ground. The chapter applies the resulting account of the lying-misleading distinction to ways of lying and misleading with incomplete predicates, possessives, presuppositions, pronouns, and prosodic focus. A formal notion of contextual questionentailment is defined which shows when it is possible to mislead with respect to a question under discussion while avoiding outright lying.

Propositions, sentences and statements

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascal Engel
Keyword(s):  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Compositional Structure ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Semantic Properties

A sentence is a string of words formed according to the syntactic rules of a language. But a sentence has semantic as well as syntactic properties: the words and the whole sentence have meaning. Philosophers have tended to focus on the semantic properties of indicative sentences, in particular on their being true or false. They have called the meanings of such sentences ‘propositions’, and have tied the notion of proposition to the truth-conditions of the associated sentence. The term ‘proposition’ is sometimes assimilated to the sentence itself; sometimes to the linguistic meaning of a sentence; sometimes to ‘what is said’; sometimes to the contents of beliefs or other ‘propositional’ attitudes. But however propositions are defined, they must have two features: the capacity to be true or false; and compositional structure (being composed of elements which determine their semantic properties).

Anti-realist Semantics: the Role of Criteria

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 225-248
Author(s):  
Crispin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Good Evidence ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Michael Dummett ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
In Virtue Of

§I. Anti-realism of the sort which Michael Dummett has expounded takes issue with the traditional idea that an understanding of any statement (here, declarative sentence) is philosophically correctly analysed as involving grasp of conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Many kinds of statement to which, as we ordinarily think, we attach a clear sense would have to be represented, according to this tradition, as possessing verification-transcendent truth-conditions; if true that is to say, they would be so in virtue of circumstances of a type transcending our range of possible awareness. Exactly where to draw the boundaries of our possible awareness might be controversial; but there is clearly no being aware, in the relevant sense, of the kind of state of affairs which would make true a generalization of theoretical physics, an assertion about James II weight on his twenty-eighth birthday, a claim about what would have happened if Edward Heath had not sought a fresh mandate during the miners' strike, or—from your point of view—the statement that my left ear aches. In each of these kinds of case the traditional view, while granting that we (or you) cannot experience the truth-conferring states of affairs as such, would nevertheless credit us with a clear conception of the type of thing they would be. To be sure, there is then no possibility of a straightforward construal of this conception as a recognitional capacity. But the traditional view tends to conceal from itself the problematic status which the alleged grasp of truth-conditions therefore assumes by working with the picture that the ‘conception’ is indirectly recognitional, that it issues in a cluster of unproblematic recognitional capacities; in particular, the ability to recognize what is or is not good evidence for the relevant statement and the ability to recognize its logical relations to other statements.

Anti-realist Semantics: the Role of Criteria

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 225-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Good Evidence ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Michael Dummett ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
In Virtue Of

§I. Anti-realism of the sort which Michael Dummett has expounded takes issue with the traditional idea that an understanding of any statement (here, declarative sentence) is philosophically correctly analysed as involving grasp of conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Many kinds of statement to which, as we ordinarily think, we attach a clear sense would have to be represented, according to this tradition, as possessing verification-transcendent truth-conditions; if true that is to say, they would be so in virtue of circumstances of a type transcending our range of possible awareness. Exactly where to draw the boundaries of our possible awareness might be controversial; but there is clearly no being aware, in the relevant sense, of the kind of state of affairs which would make true a generalization of theoretical physics, an assertion about James II weight on his twenty-eighth birthday, a claim about what would have happened if Edward Heath had not sought a fresh mandate during the miners' strike, or—from your point of view—the statement that my left ear aches. In each of these kinds of case the traditional view, while granting that we (or you) cannot experience the truth-conferring states of affairs as such, would nevertheless credit us with a clear conception of the type of thing they would be. To be sure, there is then no possibility of a straightforward construal of this conception as a recognitional capacity. But the traditional view tends to conceal from itself the problematic status which the alleged grasp of truth-conditions therefore assumes by working with the picture that the ‘conception’ is indirectly recognitional, that it issues in a cluster of unproblematic recognitional capacities; in particular, the ability to recognize what is or is not good evidence for the relevant statement and the ability to recognize its logical relations to other statements.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
John Perry
Keyword(s):  
Propositional Attitude ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Attitude Reports ◽  
Partial Description

I explain my basic claim: Frege’s doctrine that sentences embedded in indirect discourse and propositional attitude reports refer to Thoughts, their customary senses, put the philosophies of mind and language on a detour. The doctrine reflected and reinforced a picture of the attitudes as consisting in relations to propositions. The alternative picture for which I argue is that the attitudes are rather episodes that have truth-conditions that can be classified in a variety of ways. The propositions we take to be “what is said” or “what is believed” give only a partial description of these truth-conditions. I then lay out the plan for the book, and discuss issues of terminology.

The Distinction between Semantics and Pragmatics

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoltán Gendler Szabó
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Utterance Interpretation

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning, or more precisely, the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings. This article gives a sketch of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics; it is the intention of the rest of this article to make it more precise. It starts by considering three alternative characterizations and explain what the article finds problematic about each of them. This leads to the discussion of utterance interpretation, which situates semantics and pragmatics in a larger enterprise. But the characterization of their contrast remains sketchy until the final section, where the article discusses how truth-conditions and the notion of what is said fit into the picture.

The extinction time of a general birth and death process with catastrophes

1986 ◽  
Vol 23 (04) ◽  
pp. 851-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Brockwell
Keyword(s):  
Laplace Transform ◽  
Size Distribution ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Death Process ◽  
Extinction Time ◽  
Birth And Death Process ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Laplace Transform ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

The Laplace transform of the extinction time is determined for a general birth and death process with arbitrary catastrophe rate and catastrophe size distribution. It is assumed only that the birth rates satisfyλ0= 0,λj&gt; 0 for eachj&gt; 0, and. Necessary and sufficient conditions for certain extinction of the population are derived. The results are applied to the linear birth and death process (λj=jλ, µj=jμ) with catastrophes of several different types.

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