Propositions and the Meaning of ‘Ought’

Matthew Chrisman’s new book, The Meaning of ‘Ought’: Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics, presents a semantic treatment of the deontic modal operator Ought designed to address the problem of subject-sensitivity: why, for example, “I ought to dance with you” might be true, while “You ought to dance with me” is false. Such sentence-pairs challenge the view that Ought is an operator on propositions—an assumption which is common ground amongst both classical and much contemporary work. Chrisman argues that rather than propositions, the operator Ought takes as its argument a non-propositional formal object called a practition. In this review, I discuss the inspiration and formal features of this treatment. While I argue that the distinction between practitions and propositions is not adequately characterized in Chrisman’s compositional semantics, subject-sensitivity raises interesting questions about the metaethical assumptions at play in the formal semantics—including the worry that treating Ought as a propositional operator illicitly begs the question in favor of broadly consequentialist views.

LOGICS FOR PROPOSITIONAL CONTINGENTISM

Robert Stalnaker has recently advocated propositional contingentism, the claim that it is contingent what propositions there are. He has proposed a philosophical theory of contingency in what propositions there are and sketched a possible worlds model theory for it. In this paper, such models are used to interpret two propositional modal languages: one containing an existential propositional quantifier, and one containing an existential propositional operator. It is shown that the resulting logic containing an existential quantifier is not recursively axiomatizable, as it is recursively isomorphic to second-order logic, and a natural candidate axiomatization for the resulting logic containing an existential operator is shown to be incomplete.

German participle II constructions as adjuncts

The present investigation is concerned with German participles II (past participles) as lexical heads of adjuncts. Within a minimalist framework of sound-meaning correlation, the analysis presupposes a lexicalist conception of morphology and the differentiation of Semantic Form and Conceptual Structure. It is argued that participles II have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. As for the potential of participles to function as modifiers, it is shown that attributive and adverbial participle constructions involve further operations of conversion. Participle constructions are considered as reduced sentences. They do not have a syntactic position for the subject, for an operator (comparable to the relative pronoun in relative clauses) or for an adverbial relator (as in adverbial clauses). The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure. Two templates serve the composition of modifiers - including participle constructions - with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modification which unifies two predicates relating to participants or to situations and frame setting modification where the modifier is given the status of a propositional operator. The proposed analysis shows that the high degree of semantic underspecification and interpretative flexibility of German participle II constructions resides in the indeterminacy of participles II with respect to voice and perfect, in the absence of certain constituents in the syntactic structure and in the presence of corresponding parameters in the Semantic Form of the participle phrases.

Partizip II-Konstruktionen des Deutschen als Modifikatoren

This contribution concerns the interaction of morphology, syntax and semantics. It treats German past participles and concentrates on their function as heads in attributive and adverbial modifier phrases. It is argued that participles have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. Since these three operations involve changes in the morphosyntactic categorization they are considered as zero affixation. Two affixless templates – without any categorical changes – convert participle constructions to modifiers relating to participants or to situations. These phrases do not have a syntactic position for the grammatical subject, an operator or an adverbial relator. The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure. Two further templates serve the composition of participle constructions as modifiers with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modifiers which function as predicates and those which have the status of a propositional operator. In syntax, these different semantic functions correspond to different adjunct positions of the respective participle phrases.