Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of \"personal taste\" such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). A formal semantic theory is presented which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. The context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals.

Paul Grice's (1989) use of the term common ground to refer to background information presumed to be shared by participants in a conversation is argued to highlight the social character of speaker presuppositions, the abstract structure of which is clarified by introducing a simplifying assumption that identifies common ground with common belief. The logic of common belief is formalized in a highly idealized semantic framework that identifies belief with truth in all doxastic alternatives, which are represented by a binary relation of accessibility for each believer. Common beliefs & individuals' beliefs about common beliefs are derived from ordinary individual beliefs, & presupposition accommodation is characterized as a natural kind of belief change; a notion of common ground is developed in terms of acceptance to allow for divergence between common ground & common belief due to accommodation to a recognition of defective contexts. 24 References. J. Hitchcock

This paper is about the relationship between two questions: the question of what the objects of assertion are and the question of how best to theorise about 'shifty' phenomena like modality and tense. I argue that the relationship between these two questions is less direct than is often supposed. I then explore the consequences of this for a number of debates in the philosophy of language.

Evidence is produced showing that David Kaplan's (1989) fixity thesis is contradicted by operators that shift the context of evaluation of an indexical. Adopting Kaplan's designation of \"monsters\" for such sifted indexicals, it is demonstrated that several indexicals across languages have a \"monstrous\" behavior when they appear in the scope of an attitude operator. The problems posed by indexicals for Kaplan's solutions proposed in his analyses of indexicals & indirect discourse & a Fregean theory of sense are presented. It is argued that Kaplan's theory is empirically inadequate because his semantics for attitude reports is insufficiently fine-grained & his prohibition against monsters is its principal source of difficulties. A solution is offered in the form of two versions of an account based on the use of quantification over contexts. The first version, proposed earlier (Schlenker, 1999), relies on heavily indexed logical forms while the second seeks to eliminate some of the syntactic stipulations of the first theory, offering an account which is more elegant & makes better predictions. Problems with the filtering & agreement mechanisms postulated in both versions are recognized & attempts are made to get rid of both stipulations. 2 Appendixes, 91 References. Z. Dubiel

The properties colored and red stand in a special relation. Namely, red is a determinate of colored, and colored is determinable relative to red. Many other properties are similarly related. The determination relation is an interesting topic of logical investigation in its own right, and the prominent philosophical inquiries into this relation have, accordingly, operated at a high level of abstraction. It is time to return to these investigations, not just as a logical amusement, but for the payoffs such investigation can yield in solving some basic metaphysical problems.

We revisit a typological puzzle due to Horn (Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA, 1972) regarding the lexicalization of logical operators: in instantiations of the traditional square of opposition across categories and languages, the O corner, corresponding to 'nand' (= not and), 'nevery' (= not every), etc., is never lexicalized. We discuss Horn's proposal, which involves the interaction of two economy conditions, one that relies on scalar implicatures and one that relies on markedness. We observe that in order to express markedness and to account for a bigger typological puzzle, namely the absence of lexicalizations of 'XOR' (= exclusive or), 'all-or-none', and many other imaginable logical operators, one must restrict the basic lexicalizable elements to a small set of primitives. We suggest that an ordering based perspective, following Keenan and Faltz (Boolean semantics for natural language, 1985), makes the stipulated primitives that we arrive at more natural. We also propose a modification to Horn's proposal, based on recent work on implicatures, in which only the implicature condition is operative and in which markedness is part of the definition of the alternatives for scalar implicatures rather than an independent condition.

In this paper, I defend the thesis that all effects of extra-linguistic context on the truth-conditions of an assertion are traceable to elements in the actual syntactic structure of the sentence uttered. In the first section, I develop the thesis in detail, and discuss its implications for the relation between semantics and pragmatics. The next two sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples. In the second section, I argue that there are no convincing examples of true non-sentential assertions. In the third section, I argue that there are no convincing examples of what John Perry has called 'unarticulated constituents'. I conclude by drawing some consequences of my arguments for appeals to context-dependence in the resolution of problems in epistemology and philosophical logic.

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean \"John does not own more than one dog\", but rather \"John does not own a dog\". A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the 'more than one' meaning of the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert 'more than one', but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The 'more than one' meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy).

The paper presents a proof-theoretic semantics (PTS) for a fragment of natural language, providing an alternative to the traditional model-theoretic (Montagovian) semantics (MTS), whereby meanings are truth-condition (in arbitrary models). Instead, meanings are taken as derivability-conditions in a \"dedicated\" natural-deduction (ND) proof-system. This semantics is effective (algorithmically decidable), adhering to the \"meaning as use\" paradigm, not suffering from several of the criticisms formulated by philosophers of language against MTS as a theory of meaning. In particular, Dummett's manifestation argument does not obtain, and assertions are always warranted, having grounds of assertion. The proof system is shown to satisfy Dummett's harmony property, justifying the ND rules as meaning conferring. The semantics is suitable for incorporation into computational linguistics grammars, formulated in type-logical grammar.

In a recent paper (Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 4, June 2000), Jason Stanley argues that there are no 'unarticulated constituents', contrary to what advocates of Truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) have claimed. All truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, he says. In this paper I maintain that there are unarticulated constituents, and I defend TCP. Stanley's argument exploits the fact that the alleged unarticulated constituents can be 'bound', that is, they can be made to vary with the values introduced by operators in the sentence. I show that Stanley's argument rests on a fallacy, and I provide alternative analyses of the data.