scholarly journals Truthmaker semantics for natural language: Attitude verbs, modals, and intensional transitive verbs

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 159-200
Author(s):  
Friederike Moltmann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Possible Worlds Semantics ◽  
Object Based ◽  
Attitude Reports ◽  
Transitive Verbs ◽  
Language Attitude ◽  
Attitude Verbs ◽  
Truthmaker Semantics ◽  
Further Development

Abstract This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. The semantics is applied to factive verbs and response-stance verbs as well as to cases of modal concord. The paper also presents new motivations for ‘object-based truthmaker semantics’ from intensional transitive verbs such as need, look for, own, and buy and gives an outline of their semantics based on a further development of truthmaker semantics.

Meaning, Modality, and Possible Worlds Semantics

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Soames
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Classical Logic ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Possible Worlds Semantics ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
Richard Montague ◽  
Close Parallel

This chapter begins with a discussion of Kripke-style possible worlds semantics. It considers one of the most important applications of possible worlds semantics, the account of counterfactual conditionals given in Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis. It then goes on to examine the work of Richard Montague. Montague specified syntactic rules that generate English, or English-like, structures directly, while pairing each such rule with a truth-theoretic rule interpreting it. This close parallel between syntax and semantics is what makes the languages of classical logic so transparently tractable, and what they were designed to embody. Montague's bold contention is that we do not have to replace natural language natural languages with formal substitutes to achieve such transparency. The same techniques employed to create formal languages can be used to describe natural languages in mathematically revealing ways.

scholarly journals Filtering Semantics for Counterfactuals: Bridging Causal Models and Premise Semantics

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Santorio
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Causal Models ◽  
Possible Worlds Semantics ◽  
Premise Semantics

<p>I argue that classical counterfactual semantics in the style of Stalnaker, Lewis, and Kratzer validates an inference pattern that is disconfirmed in natural language. The solution is to alter the algorithm we use to handle inconsistency in premise sets: rather than checking all maximally consistent fragments of a premise sets, as in Krazter's semantics, we selectively remove some of the premises. The proposed implementation starts from standard premise semantics and involves a new 'filtering' operation that achieves just this removal. The resulting semantics is interestingly related to the semantics for counterfactuals emerging from Judea Pearl's causal models framework in computer science: in particular, filtering is a possible worlds semantics counterpart of Pearl's interventions.</p>

The Failure of Conceptual Analysis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer McKitrick
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Causal Power ◽  
Possible Worlds Semantics ◽  
Conditional Statements ◽  
Reductive Analysis

Dispositions are often regarded with suspicion. Consequently, some philosophers try to semantically reduce disposition ascriptions to sentences containing only non-dispositional vocabulary. Typically, reductionists attempt to analyze disposition ascriptions in terms of conditional statements. These conditional statements, like other modal claims, are often interpreted in terms of possible worlds semantics. However, conditional analyses are subject to a number of problems and counterexamples, including random coincidences, void satisfaction, masks, antidotes, mimics, altering, and finks. Some analyses fail to reduce disposition ascriptions to non-modal vocabulary. If reductive analysis of disposition ascriptions fails, then perhaps there can be metaphysical reduction of dispositions without semantic reduction. However, the reductionist still owes us an account of what makes disposition ascriptions true. But to posit a causal power for every unreduced dispositional predicate is an overreaction to the failure of conceptual analysis.

scholarly journals AN OBJECT-BASED TRUTHMAKER SEMANTICS FOR MODALS

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friederike Moltmann
Keyword(s):  
Object Based ◽  
Truthmaker Semantics

scholarly journals Attitude reports with and without true belief

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deniz Ozyildiz
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Attitude Reports ◽  
Attitude Verbs ◽  
Embedded Clauses ◽  
Presupposition Triggers

In Turkish, attitude verbs or embedded clauses cannot be identified as factive presupposition triggers. Yet, the presupposition s observed when certain verbs embed nominalized clauses. I propose to derive the inference globally in the composition, rather than encoding it as a lexical property of certain "triggers."

Possible Worlds Counterfactual Theories of Causation

1980 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 119-138
Author(s):  
Richard Adler
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Treatment ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Great Length ◽  
Current Interest ◽  
Possible Worlds Semantics ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
Counterfactual Theory ◽  
Causal Theories ◽  
Counterfactual Approach

The numerous difficulties facing the traditional Humean regularity approach to the problem of causation have been discussed in the literature at great length. In view of the current interest in possible worlds semantics, it is not surprising that the only serious alternative treatment of causation presently available, the counterfactual approach, has been explored recently as a means of circumventing the apparently unresolvable difficulties facing regularity causal theories. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that such a strategy holds little promise. Specifically, I will argue that, in addition to giving rise to problems directly analogous to those facing regularity accounts, the counterfactual approach fails in principle to reflect important properties of causal relations as we understand them intuitively. David Lewis's possible worlds account, the most comprehensive counterfactual theory to date, is further criticized for implicit problems with natural lawhood even more serious than those typically raised for regularity accounts, for additional inadequacies in its analysis of causal relations, and for its failure to satisfy basic empiricist epistemological standards.

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