In the pair of articles of which this is the second, I present a set of problems and philosophical proposals that have in recent years been associated with the term “relativism”. These problems are related to the question of how we should represent thought and speech about certain topics. The main issue is whether we should model such mental states or linguistic acts as involving representational contents that are absolutely correct or incorrect, or whether, alternatively, their correctness should be thought (...) of as varying with some (more or less surprising) factor. In the first article, “Relativism 1: Representational Content”, I discussed the general issue of relativism about representational content. I argued for the conciliatory view that both relativist and absoutist conceptions of representational content can be legitimate. In the present continuation, I look in more detail at a special case of the general issue, namely the question of whether semantic contents, i.e. the contents assigned to linguistic utterances in the semantics of natural language, should be construed in an absolutist or in a relativist way. (shrink)

The Rigidity Thesis states that no rigid term can have the same semantic content as a nonrigid one. Drawing on Dummett (1973; 1991), Evans (1979; 1982), and Lewis (1980), Stanley (1997a; 1997b; 2002) rejects the thesis since it relies on an illicit identification of compositional semantic content and the content of assertion (henceforth, assertoric content). I argue that Stanley’s critique of the Rigidity Thesis fails since it places constraints on assertoric content that cannot (...) be satisfied by any plausible notion of content appropriately related to compositional semantic content. For similar reasons, I also challenge a recent two-dimensionalist defense of Stanley by Ninan (2012). The moral is far-reaching: any theory that invokes a distinction between semantic and assertoric contents is unsatisfactory unless it can plausibly explain the connection between them. (shrink)

Illocutionary force and semantic content are widely held to occupy utterly different categories in at least two ways: Any expression serving as an indicator of illocutionary force must be without semantic content, and no such expression can embed. A refined account of the force/content distinction is offered here that does the explanatory work that the standard distinction does, while, in accounting for the behavior of a range of parenthetical expressions, shows neither nor to be compulsory. (...) The refined account also motivates a development of the "scorekeeping model" of conversation, helps to isolate a distinction between illocutionary force and illocutionary commitment, and reveals one precise respect in which meaning is only explicable in terms of use. (shrink)

In the wake of contemporary turns to externalist theories of mind and language, historians of philosophy have re-evaluated philosophical theories of linguistic content from the past. Motivated in part by the frequent mischaracterization of most pre-twentieth-century theories as ‘internalist’, locating linguistic content somehow ‘in the head’, scholars point to philosophers such as the fourteenth-century Franciscan philosopher William of Ockham (_c_. 1287–1347), who seem to have certain externalist commitments about linguistic (and mental) content. Gyula Klima’s ‘Semantic (...) class='Hi'>Content in Aquinas and Ockham’ elaborates upon this characterization of Ockham. If Ockham is a semantic externalist, then Thomas Aquinas (1225–74)—and a host of philosophers before him—ought to be characterized as ‘hyper-externalists’. (shrink)

In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic content to behaviors that reliably achieve a difficult goal-directed function, and it also suggests a (...) productive role for attributions of semantic content in the process of animal behavior research. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions (...) and, specifically, how we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this (...) thesis into a detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to propose an account of the notion of semantic content. I will try to show that my account has some advantages over the existing accounts, and that, at the same time, it captures the most valuable insights behind both parties involved in the contextualism-minimalism debate. The proposed account of semantic content differs from the more traditional ones in that it puts more burden on the parameters of the point of evaluation, (...) leaving very little in the content itself. In particular, even in the case of indexical and demonstrative pronouns, the semantic content is, I suggest, stable across contexts, and does not include the reference of the pronoun. In a nutshell, the semantic content associated with (an utterance of) a sentence that contains one or more pronouns is a function that asks not only for a world and a time of evaluation, but also one or more individuals, before it can return a truth value. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions (...) and, specifically, how we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

The article considers Jürgen Habermas's views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas's shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though (...) translated into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to, it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to, it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful. (shrink)

The problem of semantic content is the problem of explicating those features of brain processes by virtue of which they may properly be thought to possess meaning or reference. This paper criticizes the account of semantic content associated with fodor's version of cognitive science, And offers an alternative account based on mathematical communication theory. Its key concept is that of a neuronal representation maintaining a high-Level of mutual information with a designated external state of affairs under (...) changing conditions of perceptual presentation. (shrink)

Gives a general method as well as some results (inspired by Asimov, 1951; since discovered to be in Bar-Hillel and Carnap [several versions; Charles Parsons referred me to /Language and Information/]) to recover meaning (eventually automatically) from logical form/logical probability, which are mirror images. (Sets are taken as extensions of predicates, and knowledge of the sizes is needed; to that extent the method is a posteriori).

This paper compares Charles Peirce’s and Robert Brandom’s conceptions of normative objectivity. According to Brandom, discursive norms are instituted by practical attitudes of the members of a community, and yet the objectivity of these norms is not reducible to social consensus. Peirce’s conception of normative objectivity, on the contrary, is rooted in his idea of a community of inquiry, which presupposes a consensus achievable in the long run. The central challenge in both cases is to explain how the norms that (...) all members of a community take to be correct differ from those that are correct objectively. I argue that, in meeting the challenge of reconciling the social character of knowledge and the objectivity of norms shared by a community of knowers, Brandom’s approach might benefit from the Peircean idea of the ultimate agreement. (shrink)

In both philosophical and linguistic research, the explicit cancelability test is widely used to distinguish semantic contents from conversational implicatures. Assuming a straightforward relation between semantic content and explicit cancelability, a researcher might think that: if the proposition _p_ is expressed semantically by an utterance, then _p_ is not explicitly cancelable. In this paper, however, I argue for two amendments to this assumption. First, following Jerrold Sadock, I argue that the semantic content of an ambiguous (...) utterance may be explicitly cancelable. Against this widely accepted view, a recent paper by Arthur Sullivan argues that the ambiguity problem should be rejected. I respond to Sullivan’s arguments and argue that the ambiguity problem remains despite Sullivan’s objections. Second, I argue that there is also another type of case complicating the relation between semantic content and explicit cancelability. In some cases where an utterance of a sentence _s_ semantically expresses the proposition that _p_, certain resources that speakers have available for metalinguistic communication may be employed to make _p_ satisfy a sufficient condition for explicit cancelability, although _s_ is not ambiguous. These two weaknesses of the explicit cancelability test have important implications for its diagnostic use. (shrink)

Michael Devitt claims that the predicative material that constitutes complex referential expressions makes a semantic contribution to the proposition expressed. He thus deviates from direct referentialism, according to which every referential expression -either simple or complex- contributes just with an object to the proposition expressed, leaving the predicative material out of the semantic content. However, when dealing with misdescriptions, Devitt has suggested a pragmatic way out: the audience can understand what the speaker is referring to even if (...) the object does not fall under the corresponding description. From my perspective, this proposal questions the semantic validity of the predicative material, together with Devitt's original claim. In this paper, I propose a way to solve the problem posed by misdescriptions that appeals to the idea of epistemically relativized properties, according to which the properties ascribed to the object -by means of the predicative material- correspond to the way the speaker thinks of it and not to the way the object really is. Michael Devitt sostiene que el material predicativo que constituye las expresiones referenciales complejas hace un aporte semántico a la proposición expresada, alejándose así del referencialismo directo, para el cual toda expresión referencial -sea ésta simple o compleja- contribuye sólo con un objeto singular a la proposición expresada. Sin embargo, al enfrentarse al problema de las descripciones fallidas, Devitt ofrece una salida pragmática: el oyente comprende a qué se refiere el hablante aun cuando el objeto referido no caiga bajo la descripción utilizada. Esto pone en cuestión la validez semántica del material predicativo, desestimando la postura original de Devitt. En el trabajo propongo una solución a este problema, apelando a la idea de propiedades epistémicamente relativizadas, de acuerdo con la cual lo que se predica del objeto por medio del material predicativo corresponde a las creencias del hablante, y no a lo que el objeto realmente es. (shrink)

The paper addresses the problem which consists in that the semantic content of an utterance is often much richer than the content fixed by the semantic conventions and compositionality. The semantic content of an utterance is, therefore, supposed to involve so-called unarticulated constituents, over and above those articulated at the linguistic level. It is often claimed that this problem undermines traditional conceptions of semantics. The paper shows that every unarticulated constituent has to be determined (...) at the syntactic level. Consequently, there are no unarticulated constituents tout courts. This claim is resulting from a careful specification of the notions used to show that there are unarticulated constituents . Given these specifications, it is possible to develop a theory of syntactic ellipsis as a viable solution to the above mentioned problem. (shrink)

In an important paper for the literature on slurs, Robin Brontsema shows that slur-reclamation is a phenomenon that can take more than one form. One aspect underlying this variation is whether the derogatory content of a slur is preserved in reclamation or not. Brontsema (2004) shows that each of the two options is viable, and after discussing the virtues and vices of each of them, concludes that the multifaceted nature of reclamation points towards a pluralistic approach. In this paper, (...) I engage with extant accounts of reclamation and assess how fit they are to capture the two forms of reclamation mentioned above under a unitary theory. I thus consider three of the most well-developed theories of reclamation in the literature: the Echoic View championed by Bianchi (2014), the speech act theoretic account proposed by Anderson (2018) and the general view that slurs are polysemous (Jeshion (2021), [author a]). I show that each of them has problems with accounting for one of the two forms, and is thus unsuitable to be the unitary theory sought after. Although the conclusion is negative, some of the avenues I discuss in relation to each view look promising and thus invite further exploring. (shrink)

The philosophy of language faces three interrelated foundational problems that have resisted unified treatment. The first is the problem of semantic content: what constitutes the determinate meaning of a linguistic expression, and how is that content related to the referents, inferential roles, and use conditions associated with the expression? The second is the problem of vagueness: why are so many natural language predicates genuinely vague, and what is the correct ontological account of that vagueness? The third is (...) the problem of linguistic communication: how do speakers and hearers coordinate on shared content, and what is the relationship between what is explicitly said and what is conveyed by the full communicative act? -/- This paper proposes that all three problems receive unified treatment within Constraint Theory (CT) — the thesis, established by transcendental argument, that constraint is the ontological primitive constitutive of determinate existence as such. On the CT account, semantic content is constituted by exclusion: the meaning of an expression is the constraint it imposes on the interpretation space, determining what the expression rules out as much as what it rules in. This is not a reformulation of inferentialism, though it subsumes it: inferential roles are one expression of a constraint structure that is ontologically prior to any particular inferential system. -/- Vagueness, on the CT account, is genuine ontological indeterminacy in constraint structure rather than epistemic ignorance about a precise boundary (against epistemicism) or a formal gap in truth value (against supervaluationism). Vague predicates have genuinely open constraint profiles: the exclusion relations that constitute their meaning do not determine a verdict for every case, and this indeterminacy is ineliminable because natural language constraint structures are constitutively open-textured. The paper develops this account in detail and shows how it dissolves Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox: following a rule is operating within a constraint structure, and the indeterminacy of rule-following for novel cases is the indeterminacy of applying a finite constraint specification to an indefinitely extended possibility space. -/- Linguistic communication is constraint propagation: the speaker’s constraint structures propagate into the hearer’s interpretive possibility space, closing some dimensions and leaving others open. Gricean implicature is the communicative significance of which possibilities the speaker chose to exclude by their specific linguistic choices; metaphor is the productive propagation of constraint structures across domain boundaries; and the context-sensitivity of meaning is the interaction of linguistic constraint structures with the contextual constraints that further determine interpretive possibility spaces in specific conversational situations. The paper engages the principal positions in the philosophy of language and addresses the principal objections. (shrink)

A popular view in metasemantics is the view that a speaker’s dispositions regarding the use of a symbol determine the meaning of that symbol for the speaker. Kripke (Wittgenstein on rules and private language, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982) arguments against simple versions of semantic dispositionalism have inspired ever new versions. A recent account in the literature, due to Warren (Noûs 54(2):257–289, 2020) offers a sophisticated version of semantic dispositionalism whereby certain conditions are imposed on speaker’s dispositions to (...) count as meaning determining—conditions we can refer to as ‘standard’. In this paper, I argue that there are a number of cases that suggest that even under such conditions, a speaker’s meaning and their dispositions can come apart, and that this suggests that dispositional accounts of semantic content presuppose that there are semantic norms, independent of a speaker’s dispositions, and thus do not explain semantic content. I conclude that, since these problems generalise to non-standard dispositionalist accounts, the dispositionalist’s prospects are dim. (shrink)

The problem of semantic content is the problem of explicating those features of brain processes by virtue of which they may properly be thought to possess meaning or reference. This paper criticizes the account of semantic content associated with fodor's version of cognitive science, And offers an alternative account based on mathematical communication theory. Its key concept is that of a neuronal representation maintaining a high-Level of mutual information with a designated external state of affairs under (...) changing conditions of perceptual presentation. (shrink)

Followers of Wittgenstein allegedly once held that a meaningful claim to know that p could only be made if there was some doubt about the truth of p. The correct response to this thesis involved appealing to the distinction between the semantic content of a sentence and features attaching to its use. It is inappropriate to assert a knowledge-claim unless someone in the audience has doubt about what the speaker claims to know. But this fact has nothing to (...) do with the semantic content of knowledgeascriptions; it is entirely explicable by appeal to pragmatic facts about felicitous assertion. (shrink)

Communitarian accounts of semantic content have been widely rejected in the literature on the rule-following paradox and related issues, for good reason. In this paper, I offer a game-theoretic account of semantic content and focus on how it can give replies to some of the most difficult and important objections to communitarian accounts, namely (i) Boghossian’s horsey cow case, (ii) the community version of the problem of error, as well as what I will call (iii) the (...) logical problem of error. -/- I also show how the account can handle a recent argument in the literature, the so-called privilege argument (Guardo 2022), as well as addressing a more fundamental worry that communitarian accounts of meaning cannot result in our judgements being objective, particularly, that our judgements would be infallible on such accounts. I argue that the specifics of the account under consideration show that such worries are misguided. (shrink)

Scotus holds that dispositional and occurrent cognitions (intelligible species and acts of cognition, in the medieval jargon) are qualities that inhere in the soul. These qualities have semantic or conceptual content. I show that such content is nothing in any sense real, and that this content consists either in the relevant quality’s being (factually) measured by an extramental object, or in its being such that it would be measured (counterfactually) by such an object in the case (...) that there were such an object. The measurement relation, in the case of an intelligible species, is secured by the species’s internal structure; in the case of an act of cognition, it is secured either by some sort of (non-causal) relation to a species, or by a (non-causal) relation to an external object. (shrink)

Some years ago, Howard Wettstein provided an original defense of the New Theory of Reference (NTR), the doctrine that singular terms such as names and indexicals are directly referential terms (DRTs), contributing only their reference to the truth-conditions of the tokened sentence they occur in. Wettstein maintained that in order to be semantically adequate, NTR does not have to account for what he calls Frege’s data on cognitive significance, those puzzling facts about language that prompt one to think that meaning (...) entails more than reference to (real) objects. He later put forward another, apparently paradoxical, thesis, namely that whatever this cognitive significance that explains Frege’s data is, it cannot be reduced to the representations one has in one’s mind. In what follows, however, I will first apply the notion of referential anaphorical transfer to mixed contexts in order to show that a New Theorist has to reject Wettstein’s initial thesis as it stands, although she may endorse a weaker version of it, one that especially tallies with his second thesis. I will further argue that, insofar as rejecting Wettstein’s initial thesis does not force the New Theorist to revert to a representional conception of cognitive significance, in particular one based on the notion of a mental file, the latter thesis is absolutely correct. It is thus fitted to become a cornerstone of the New Theory, whatever form of non-mentalistic interpretation the New Theorist might wish to give to the notion of cognitive significance. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the possibility of semantic content in pure music. The paper argues that pure music does not have semantic content. This conclusion relies on the Gricean analysis of meaning in terms of speakers’ intentions and on Peter Kivy’s argument that pure music does not meet the Gricean requirement for the composers’ intention. First, we analyze the results of empirical studies of metaphorical conceptualization of music; they show that the connections (...) between properties of sound and various metaphors are not “one-to-one” but “one-to-many”. These results support a further argument that it is not possible for a composer to have an intention to communicate by his work of music what is, as we know from the empirical studies, perceived in music by the listeners; and if he has an intention to communicate something more specific than what is perceived by the listeners, the communication is bound to fail. This failure shows the absence of a Gricean communicative intention in the composer, even if an informative intention would be present. (shrink)

In this paper we consider whether a pragmatics of semantic content can be a useful approach to legal interpretation. More broadly speaking, since a pragmatic conception of meaning is a component of inferential semantics, we consider whether an inferentialist approach to legal interpretation can be useful in dealing with some problems of this important aspect of law. In other words, we ask whether Legal Inferentialism is a suitable conception for legal interpretation. In Section 1 we briefly consider the (...) semantics/pragmatics debate in contemporary philosophy of language and in relation to legal interpretation. In Section 2 we discuss the relations between a pragmatics of semantic content and an inferentialist conception of content. In Section 3 we consider how Inferentialism can be applied to legal interpretation. Finally, in Section 4 we consider some possible advantages and drawbacks of Inferentialism applied to legal interpretation and adjudication. (shrink)

The philosophy of information has produced a mature technical apparatus without a settled ontology to underwrite it. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication gives a precise, axiomatically unique measure of uncertainty reduction, but Shannon himself explicitly excluded the question of what information is from the theory’s scope; the semantic theories that have since tried to supply an answer (Bar-Hillel and Carnap’s early logical account, Dretske’s naturalized epistemology, Floridi’s veridicality-constrained definition) have not been shown to share a common foundation with the (...) syntactic theory they build on, nor with the physical theories of information that connect entropy to thermodynamic cost. This paper argues that Constraint Theory (CT) – the thesis, established by transcendental argument, that constraint is the ontological primitive constitutive of determinate existence as such – provides that common foundation. On the CT account, a bit is an elementary exclusion: the closure of one dimension of a possibility space into one of two admissible states. Shannon entropy is the general measure of how open a possibility space remains under a specific and independently motivated compositional constraint on how exclusions combine; relaxing that constraint yields the R´enyi and Tsallis entropies as different but equally coherent measures of the same underlying quantity, in a manner structurally continuous with the choice of axiom system in mathematics. Communication is constraint propagation, semantic content is constraint propagation under a fidelity condition linking signal to source, and the physical cost of erasure identified by Landauer’s principle is the informational instance of the general thesis that constraint maintenance requires continuous work against entropic dissolution. The paper engages the principal existing positions in the philosophy of information and addresses the central objections to the constraint-theoretic account. (shrink)

There are various reasons one might think that the semantic content of occurrences of sentences does not coincide with assertoric content –content of belief and assertion– corresponding to those sentences. But if a semantic theory exploiting such distinction is to play a role in explaining communication, there needs to be a tight connection between the two types of content. Drawing upon the considerations of McDowell and Evans concerning rigidity, Stanley proposes to extend Lewis’ argument (...) for the distinction between the two types of content –an argument concerning behavior of certain English language operators– to argue that modals do not operate on assertoric, but merely on semantic contents of sentences they embed. I argue that the Dummett-Evans-Stanley line of argument fails due to its inability to explain the connection between semantic and assertoric content. Unable to provide a plausible way of recovering assertoric content from semantic content, the theory renders successful communication mysterious. The moral of its failure is far-reaching –any theory that appeals to the distinction between these two types of content remains less than fully satisfactory unless the challenge of accounting for their connection is met. (shrink)

In this short monograph, John Horty explores the difficulties presented for Gottlob Frege's semantic theory, as well as its modern descendents, by the treatment of defined expressions. The book begins by focusing on the psychological constraints governing Frege's notion of sense, or meaning, and argues that, given these constraints, even the treatment of simple stipulative definitions led Frege to important difficulties. Horty is able to suggest ways out of these difficulties that are both philosophically and logically plausible and Fregean (...) in spirit. This discussion is then connected to a number of more familiar topics, such as indexicality and the discussion of concepts in recent theories of mind and language. In the latter part of the book, after introducing a simple semantic model of senses as procedures, Horty considers the problems that definitions present for Frege's idea that the sense of an expression should mirror its grammatical structure. The requirement can be satisfied, he argues, only if defined expressions--and incomplete expressions as well--are assigned senses of their own, rather than treated contextually. He then explores one way in which these senses might be reified within the procedural model, drawing on ideas from work in the semantics of computer programming languages. With its combination of technical semantics and history of philosophy, Horty's book tackles some of the hardest questions in the philosophy of language. It should interest philosophers, logicians, and linguists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: When we describe an event as sad or happy, we attribute to it a certainemotional value. Attributions of emotional value depend essentially on an agent ; and yet, people readily disagree over such values. My aim in this paper is to explain what happens in the case of “emotional disagreement”, and, more generally, to provide some insight into the semantics of value-attributions.

This volume brings together two series of papers: one began with Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's 1997 paper 'On an Alleged Connection Between the Theory of Meaning and Indirect Speech'. The other series started with their 1997 paper 'Varieties of Quotation'. The central theme throughout is that only when communicative content is liberated from semantic content will we make progress in understanding language, communication, contexts, and their interconnection. These are the papers in which Cappelen and Lepore introduced (...) speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism, and they provide the foundation for one of the most powerful attacks on contextualism in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that common nouns have a dual semantic structure that includes extension-determining and non-extension-determining components. I argue that the non-extension-determining components are part of linguistic meaning because they play a key compositional role in certain constructions, especially in privative noun phrases such as "fake gun" and "counterfeit document". Furthermore, I show that if we modify the compositional interpretation rules in certain simple ways, this dual content account of noun phrase modification can be implemented in (...) a type-driven formal semantic framework. In addition, I also argue against traditional accounts of privative noun phrases which can be paired with the assumption that nouns do not have a dual semantic structure. At the most general level, this paper presents a proposal for how we can begin to integrate a psychologically realistic account of lexical semantics with a linguistically plausible compositional semantic framework. (shrink)

In part I, we presented an algebraic-style of semantics, which we called “content semantics,” for quantified relevant logics based on the weak systemBBQ. We showed soundness and completeness with respect to theunreduced semantics ofBBQ. In part II, we proceed to show soundness and completeness for extensions ofBBQ with respect to this type of semantics. We introducereduced semantics which requires additional postulates for primeness and saturation. We then conclude by showing soundness and completeness forBB d Q and its extentions with (...) respect to this reduced semantics. (shrink)

In addition to expressing some main content, utterances often convey secondary content, which is content that is not their "main point", but which rather provides side or background information, is less prominent than the main content, and shows distinctive behavior with respect to its role in discourse structure and which discourse moves it licenses. This volume collects original research papers on the semantics and pragmatics of secondary content. By covering a broad variety of linguistic phenomena (...) that convey secondary content - including expressives, various particles, adverbials, pronouns, quotations, and dogwhistle language - the contributions show that secondary content is pervasive throughout different aspects of natural language and provide new insight into the nature of secondary content through new semantic and pragmatic analyses. (shrink)

A remarkable thing about natural language is that we can use it to share our beliefs and thoughts about the world with other speakers of our language. In cases of successful communication, beliefs seem to be transferred from speakers to hearers by means of the hearer recovering the contents of the speaker’s utterances. This is so natural to us that we take it for granted in our everyday life, and rarely stop to think about how it's is possible. Nevertheless, it's (...) a phenomenon that calls for explanation. It is natural to expect that natural language semantics has a key explanatory role to play here. In order to understand this role, we must relate the semantic values assigned to sentences by semantic theory with the content of our speech acts. The simplest possible relation would be identity; the meaning of a sentence is simply the belief expressed by an assertion of the sentence in a given context of utterance. However, a number of problem cases in the literature suggest that this cannot be the case. This dissertation offers a critical assessment of the arguments for distinguishing the semantic value of a sentence from it's so called assertoric content, focusing on problems arising from the analysis of tense and temporal expressions. I conclude that they are indeed distinct, and offer a constructive account of how they must be related in order to allow for an explanation of communicative success. (shrink)