A Theory of Conditional Assertion

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (6) ◽  
pp. 293-318
Author(s):  
Simon Goldstein ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Indicative Conditional ◽  
New Family ◽  
Traditional Test ◽  
Formal Framework ◽  
Test Operator ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Conditional Assertion

According to one tradition, uttering an indicative conditional involves performing a special sort of speech act: a conditional assertion. We introduce a formal framework that models this speech act. Using this framework, we show that any theory of conditional assertion validates several inferences in the logic of conditionals, including the False Antecedent inference (that not A implies if A, then C). Next, we determine the space of truth-conditional semantics for conditionals consistent with conditional assertion. The truth value of any such conditional is settled whenever the antecedent is false, and whenever the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Then, we consider the space of dynamic meanings consistent with the theory of conditional assertion. We develop a new family of dynamic conditional-assertion operators that combine a traditional test operator with an update operation.

scholarly journals The search for truth: Appositives weigh in

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 180
Author(s):  
Margaret Kroll ◽  
Amanda Rysling
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Work ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Task Features ◽  
Truth Value

The semantic and pragmatic contribution of appositives to their containing sentence is a subject of continuing debate. While unidimensional semantic accounts propose that appositives contribute their truth conditions to their containing sentence, multidimensional accounts predict that they do not. In three experiments, we directly compared judgments of the truth of sentences containing appositives and sentences containing conjunctions. Our findings contribute both a method- ological and a theoretical point. First, we show that no conclusions about the truth-conditional contributions of appositives can be drawn from experimental work without further investigation of how participants provide truth value judgments for complex sentences. Second, we show that while appositives appear to contribute truth values to their containing sentences, participants are highly sensitive to task features when they compute the truth value of sentences with appositives and also, crucially, with conjunctions. Specifically, we show that both sentences containing appositives and those containing conjunctions can be judged true even when the appositive or one conjunct is patently false. We conclude that it is unlikely that these results reflect semantic judgments, and suggest that they reflect truth only at the speech-act level.

scholarly journals Conditional Propositions and Conditional Assertions

2019 ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Robert C. Stalnaker
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Indicative Conditional ◽  
Subjunctive Conditionals ◽  
Conditional Statements ◽  
Conditional Assertion ◽  
Limiting Case

A comparison of accounts of indicative conditional statements that treat them as a distinctive kind of conditional speech act—qualified assertion of the consequent qualified by the supposition of the antecedent—and accounts that treat them as unqualified assertions of propositions that are a function of antecedent and consequent. The aim is to reconcile the two accounts by making them precise in a common pragmatic framework, and showing that the former can be seen to be equivalent to a limiting case of the latter. It is argued that this way of representing the conditional assertion account helps to explain the relation between indicative and subjunctive conditionals.

scholarly journals The meanings of positive polarity minimizers in Japanese: a unified approach

2015 ◽  
pp. 599
Author(s):  
Osamu Sawada
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Lexical Item ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Expressive Meaning ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation ◽  
Internal Variation

In Japanese there are multiple lexical items for positive polarity minimizers (hereinafter, minimizer PPIs), each of which can differ in meaning/use. For example, while sukoshi ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can only express a quantitative (amount) meaning, chotto ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can express either a quantitative meaning or an ‘expressive’ meaning (i.e. attenuation in degree of the force of a speech act). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese minimizer PPIs chotto and sukoshi and to consider (i) the parallelism/non-parallelism between truth conditional scalar meanings and non-truth conditional scalar meanings, and (ii) what mechanism can explain the cross-linguistic and language internal variation between minimizer PPIs. As for the semantics/pragmatics of minimizers, I will argue that although the meanings of the amount and expressive minimizers are logically and dimensionally different (non-parallelism), they can systematically be captured by positing a single lexical item (parallelism). As for the language internal and cross-linguistic variations, it will be shown that there is a point of variation with respect to whether a particular degree morpheme allows a dimensional shift (i.e. an extension from a semantic scale to a pragmatic scale). Based on the above proposals, this paper will also investigate the pragmatic motivation behind the use of minimizers in an evaluative context.

scholarly journals Articulation and Liars

Disputatio ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (46) ◽  
pp. 383-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergi Oms
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The Liar

Abstract Jamie Tappenden was one of the first authors to entertain the possibility of a common treatment for the Liar and the Sorites paradoxes. In order to deal with these two paradoxes he proposed using the Strong Kleene semantic scheme. This strategy left unexplained our tendency to regard as true certain sentences which, according to this semantic scheme, should lack truth value. Tappenden tried to solve this problem by using a new speech act, articulation. Unlike assertion, which implies truth, articulation only implies non-falsity. In this paper I argue that Tappenden’s strategy cannot be successfully applied to truth and the Liar.

Indicators and procedures: nevertheless and but

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIANE BLAKEMORE
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Contextual Effects ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Utterance Interpretation

The paper aims to clarify the Relevance theoretic notion of procedural meaning (cf. Blakemore 1987, Wilson & Sperber 1993) through the analysis of but and nevertheless. I show, first, that a procedural analysis is able to account for differences between these expressions that cannot be explained in terms of the speech-act theoretic notion of non-truth conditional indicators, and, second, that these differences show that the conception of procedural meaning as a constraint on contextual effects (cf. Blakemore 1987) is too narrow and must be extended to include all information about the inferential processes involved in utterance interpretation, including context selection.

Ästhetische Urteile und ästhetische Eigenschaften

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Briesen
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Combined Approach ◽  
Aesthetic Properties ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Aesthetic Judgments

What do we mean by uttering aesthetic judgements, such as: "This is beautiful"? Are we merely expressing our enthusiasm, or do we rather describe objects as having properties that are mind-independent and objective? Can aesthetic judgments be true or false, and if so, does their respective truth value apply universally and absolutely, or does it need to be modified in some way? This book is dedicated to the task of answering these kinds of questions with respect to the meaning of aesthetic judgements, which also requires providing a metaphysical analysis of aesthetic properties. The book thus sets out to give a detailed account of both aesthetic judgements and aesthetic properties and defends this “combined approach” against various objections. The theory combines elements of a double-speech-act-theory, according to which voicing aesthetic statements involves performing two speech-acts simultaneously – an assertive act and an expressive act – with a response-dispositional characterization of aesthetic properties.

Going through the motions

1980 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Wachtel
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Performative Utterance ◽  
Truth Value

Harris (1978) discusses the ‘descriptivist’ and ‘non-descriptivist’ interpretations of performative utterances; on the former account, a performative utterance is an assertion, and may thus be true or false, depending on whether the speech act is felicitous or not, and on the latter account, the performative utterance itself constitutes the act in question, and is not an assertion, and therefore has no truth value.1 He presents the following argument against the descriptivist position. A speech act (I apologize, say) may be reported by using the same verb non-performatively: He apologized. This report, however, can be true even when the reported speech act was infelicitous in some way, e.g., He apologized, but to the wrong person. He claims that utterances of this type create a dilemma for the descriptivist position. If the assertion reported is considered to be true in this case, then its truth value does not depend on the success or failure of the performance.

scholarly journals The meanings of positive polarity minimizers in Japanese: a unified approach

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Osamu Sawada
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Lexical Item ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Expressive Meaning ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation ◽  
Internal Variation

In Japanese there are multiple lexical items for positive polarity minimizers (hereinafter, minimizer PPIs), each of which can differ in meaning/use. For example, while sukoshi ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can only express a quantitative (amount) meaning, chotto ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can express either a quantitative meaning or an ‘expressive’ meaning (i.e. attenuation in degree of the force of a speech act). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese minimizer PPIs chotto and sukoshi and to consider (i) the parallelism/non-parallelism between truth conditional scalar meanings and non-truth conditional scalar meanings, and (ii) what mechanism can explain the cross-linguistic and language internal variation between minimizer PPIs. As for the semantics/pragmatics of minimizers, I will argue that although the meanings of the amount and expressive minimizers are logically and dimensionally different (non-parallelism), they can systematically be captured by positing a single lexical item (parallelism). As for the language internal and cross-linguistic variations, it will be shown that there is a point of variation with respect to whether a particular degree morpheme allows a dimensional shift (i.e. an extension from a semantic scale to a pragmatic scale). Based on the above proposals, this paper will also investigate the pragmatic motivation behind the use of minimizers in an evaluative context.

Mirativity as Expressive Meaning: The Case of adiós

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-330
Author(s):  
Juan M. Escalona Torres
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Puerto Rican Spanish ◽  
Structural Distribution ◽  
Expressive Meaning ◽  
The Status ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Expressive Content ◽  
Essential Function ◽  
Truth Value

AbstractThe study of mirativity as a semantic-pragmatic concept is the study of the status or expectation of knowledge (DeLancey 2012; Sánchez López 2017). In Spanish, mirativity is expressed by the use of strategies such as intonation, exclamatory sentences, focus fronting, and the use of mirative particles. This paper examines the mirative particle adiós (lit. ‘to god’) in Puerto Rican Spanish. I divide the paper into two parts: first, I examine the structural distribution of adiós and its various mirative values (cf. Aikhenvald 2012); second, I look into several properties of adiós that are characteristic of expressive meaning rather than truth-conditional meaning (cf. Potts 2007). The essential function of adiós is to signal that a proposition-at-hand is new and unexpected information to the speaker. As derived from this mirative value, adiós implicates a speaker-oriented perspective and the speaker’s concomitant surprise. Aside from its mirative role in the sentence, adiós does not alter the truth-value of the sentence. For this reason, the function of Spanish mirative particles is best captured within an expressive account of meaning. As I illustrate in the analysis, the use of adiós, and other mirative particles alike, is consistent with Potts’ (2007) characteristics of expressive content: independence, non-displaceability, descriptive ineffability, and repeatability.

scholarly journals Reconditioning the conditional [Recondicionando o condicional]

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (40) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
David Miller
Keyword(s):  
Conditional Probability ◽  
Probability Function ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Conditional Probabilities ◽  
Indicative Conditional ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Conditional Statements ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Truth Value

Many authors have hoped to understand the indicative conditional construction in everyday language by means of what are usually called conditional probabilities. Other authors have hoped to make sense of conditional probabilities in terms of the absolute probabilities of conditional statements. Although all such hopes were disappointed by the triviality theorems of Lewis (1976), there have been copious subsequent attempts both to rescue CCCP (the conditional construal of conditional probability) and to extend and to intensify the arguments against it. In this paper it will be shown that triviality is avoidable if the probability function is replaced by an alternative generalization of the deducibility relation, the measure of deductive dependence of Miller and Popper (1986). It will be suggested further that this alternative way of orchestrating conditionals is nicely in harmony with the test proposed in Ramsey (1931), and also with the idea that it is not the truth value of a conditionalstatement that is of primary concern but its assertability or acceptability.

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