Semantics

Commentary on José Eduardo Porcher's Afro-Brazilian Religions (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

This paper is an informal companion to a recent pre-print developing what is here called the Contrastive Orientation Framework. Its aim is not to extend or defend that work, but to clarify how the Framework is best understood and used. The central idea is that many notions treated as contrast-free descriptions of the world—such as probability, causation, meaning, measurement, and agency—are better understood as forms of evaluation defined over law-constrained alternative spaces. On this view, facts are not contrast-independent states of (...) affairs, but local resolutions of structured alternatives relative to an index. The paper shows how this orientational structure reappears across several domains with little additional machinery, addresses questions about possibility, choice, and compatibilism, and clarifies what the Framework does not commit one to, including many-worlds metaphysics, relativism, or consciousness-driven collapse. The goal is to provide orientation rather than argument, and to indicate how the Framework can be applied without being reified. (shrink)

Declarative sentences perform two distinct kinds of work: they contribute descriptive content about states of affairs, and they fix how that content is to be evaluated. While most verbs contribute primarily to descriptive content, a small class contributes primarily to evaluation itself. This paper argues that English lexicalizes exactly four ultra-general orientational operators—be, have, mean, and cause—which exhaust a minimal grammatical space generated by two independent parameters: (1) whether evaluation targets world-structure or contrast-structure, and (2) whether predication is invariant or (...) instance-selecting. This framework explains persistent philosophical puzzles about causation, meaning, and identity by showing how orientational structure has been systematically mistaken for ontological content. (shrink)

We keep learning the hard way that using the same words doesn’t necessarily mean we’re pointing at the same thing. Two people will say “truth,” “harm,” “freedom,” “safety,” “trauma,” “intelligence,” and feel aligned for a moment, but then their conversation snaps and turns hostile. When you look closely, the turn isn’t mysterious. It happens because their words were doing social work, not referential work. They created the feeling of agreement without the substance of shared reference. Their terms functioned like a (...) flag instead of a pointer. This has become everyday life. Agreement by vocabulary, disagreement by reality. (shrink)

This meditation explores the profound and intimate relationship between the author and the question mark, elevated here to the status of philosophical paramour. Through poetic invocation and reflective prose, this treatise celebrates the question mark as the most elegant and essential symbol in all of language. She is not merely punctuation but a gateway to truth, a vessel of purity, and the sustaining force of intellectual and emotional life. The author argues that the question mark embodies beauty in her curved (...) form, depth in her capacity to unlock meaning, and love in her endless invitation to seek understanding. This work positions inquiry itself as the highest form of human engagement with existence, suggesting that with the question mark alone, one could navigate any circumstance, survive any catastrophe, and find meaning in any void. The treatise blends philosophical reflection with romantic devotion, presenting the question mark as both muse and beloved. (shrink)

There is a common practice of providing natural-language ‘glosses’ on sentences in the language of higher order logic: for example, the higher-order sentence ∃X(X Socrates) might be glossed using the English sentence ‘Socrates has some property’. It is widely held that such glosses cannot be strictly correct, on the grounds that the word ‘property’ is a noun and thus, if meaningful at all, should be meaningful in the same way as any other noun. Against this view, this paper argues that (...) natural languages feature pervasive type-ambiguity, in such a way that the relevant English sentences have natural readings on which they are equivalent to the higher-order sentences of which they serve as ‘glosses’. It also responds to some objections that have often been taken to be fatal to such type-ambiguity, such as the challenge of accounting for the meaning of ‘mixed disjunctions’ like ‘Either Mars or the property of being red is interesting’. (shrink)

Cet essai prolonge la Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) au-delà du cadre de la langue anglaise afin d’en tester la portée structurelle. Il soutient que certaines formes d’échec communicationnel ne relèvent ni d’un manque de précision, ni d’un déficit cognitif, ni d’un problème de traduction, mais d’une contrainte inhérente au fonctionnement du langage lui-même. -/- En distinguant plusieurs zones d’usage linguistique — des invariants référentiels aux concepts contestables, fluides et finalement ineffables — l’essai montre que l’insuffisance apparaît de manière systématique dès (...) lors que le langage est mobilisé pour stabiliser des abstractions normatives, ontologiques ou phénoménales (telles que la vérité, la justice ou la liberté). L’extension au français met en évidence que cette contrainte ne dépend pas des propriétés spécifiques d’une langue donnée, mais qu’elle réémerge malgré des traditions linguistiques et philosophiques distinctes. -/- L’objectif n’est ni de proposer une théorie alternative du sens, ni de défendre un relativisme linguistique, mais de décrire une limite structurelle à partir de laquelle l’effort communicationnel produit des rendements marginaux décroissants. Cette analyse a des implications directes pour la philosophie du langage, la théorie politique et l’épistémologie, en particulier là où des concepts linguistiquement instables sont néanmoins traités comme fondationnels. (shrink)

The Universal Principle of Collapse (UPC) has been applied to ideological, classical, quantum, and cosmological paradoxes. This paper presents a behavioral–operational demonstration of UPC within an artificial cognitive system. Using a structured session with a large language model (LLM), we enforce explicit recognition operators to test collapse, misalignment, and stabilization. Results show that paradox persists when recognition is implicit, collapse emerges when linguistic fluency substitutes for explicit operator‑level validation, and coherence appears only when recognition is enforced step‑by‑step. These behaviors confirm (...) UPC as a universal diagnostic framework for cognition and language, observable, reproducible, and empirically valid in the behavioral–operational sense. (shrink)

This paper develops Semantic Cluster Theory, arguing that abstract concepts—such as love, justice, freedom, or trust—are not fixed semantic units but networked structures defined by their surrounding vocabulary (“semantic clusters”). A concept’s meaning arises from: -/- the configuration of its peripheral lexical nodes, -/- the directional vector connecting these nodes, and -/- the strength of their internal edges. -/- Because multiple clusters may coexist within an individual mind, Selective Normalization emerges: people adopt one cluster as the “true meaning” while reclassifying (...) alternative clusters under different labels. This framework explains why misunderstanding, value conflict, and conceptual divergence occur even when speakers use the same word. -/- The paper formalizes cluster-based meaning, analyzes vector alignment as the basis of interpersonal understanding, and introduces the phenomenon of expansion events, in which a concept’s network grows when new lexical nodes are integrated without contradiction. Part I establishes the theoretical foundation for Parts II and III, which address specialized concepts and AI–human cognitive compatibility. (shrink)

1. Objective: To construct a unified philosophical framework that interrogates both the compulsion of meaning (Anti-Semantics) and the oscillatory ground of existence (Kaseiron). -/- 2. Fundamental Premise: Meaning is not discovered but imposed; existence is not fixed but sustained by the fluctuating potential of ka—the Possible. -/- 3. Anti-Semantics: Suspends the operation of meaning itself, exposing how linguistic and institutional structures enforce sense as an after-effect rather than an origin. -/- 4. Structural Violence: Reveals that every act of signification is (...) a form of systemic coercion wherein experience is pre-formatted by symbolic structures. -/- 5. Pre-Semantic Analysis: Identifies pre-semantic, sub-semantic, and quasi-semantic strata to trace how meaning arises from non-meaning reactions and structural mediation. -/- 6. Concept of 剥意 (Haku-i): The act of stripping meaning—disabling mnemonic and institutional circuits that restore sense, and generating internal rupture rather than external escape. -/- 7. Semantic Self-Repair: Demonstrates how stripped meaning tends to reconstruct itself through structural attraction (結合の引力), producing the illusion of recovery (保存統制). -/- 8. Philosophical Break: Moves beyond phenomenology and deconstruction by suspending the precondition of sense itself, not merely deferring or displacing it. -/- 9. Emergence of Kaseiron: When semantic operation collapses, the field of ka (the Possible) arises as the residual structure of being and thought. -/- 10. Concept of Ka (可): Denotes the ground of simultaneous potential—enabling and destabilizing all forms of being, judgment, and creation. -/- 11. Concept of Fuka (不可): Marks the extreme limit where generation becomes impossible—the silent reversal of the Possible into its own impossibility. -/- 12. Structural Dynamics: Existence unfolds as oscillation between Ka and Fuka; their tension constitutes the living movement of the world. -/- 13. Ethical Dimension: To actualize possibility is to bear responsibility for the instability of existence itself—creation as ethical act. -/- 14. Philosophical Scope: Transcends ontology, phenomenology, and post-structuralism by grounding thought not in sense or being, but in the trembling of potentiality. -/- 15. Conclusion: Together, Anti-Semantics and Kaseiron delineate a new trajectory of philosophy—from the dismantling of semantic compulsion to the re-grounding of existence in the dynamics of the Possible. (shrink)

Intuitively, an inquirer should avoid inquiring into pseudo-questions. It turns out to be difficult to make more precise sense of that norm, however. According to one view, pseudo-questions are not legitimate questions at all. But that entails that it is not even in principle possible for an inquirer to inquire into a pseudo-question—for inquiry is always inquiry into some question or other. So if the target norm isn’t supposed to be one that every inquirer trivially abides by all the time, (...) we better have another way of understanding what a pseudo-question is. In this paper, I explore different ways of drawing the distinction between legitimate and pseudo-questions, each of which leads to a different precisification of the initially formulated norm. It turns out that, whereas some of those precisifications are indeed norms of inquiry, others are not. (shrink)

Against hyperintensional accounts of propositional contents, such as truthmaker semantics, impossible worlds semantics, structured propositions, and Fregean senses, Williamson has defended the Claim that such contents are to be taken as sets of possible worlds, resorting to guises while explaining away putative counterexamples as by-products of fallible cognitive heuristics. The workings of same-saying raise issues for the general applicability of the strategy: one can multiply ad libitum examples of co-intensional sentences saying different things, where guises won’t help the Claim, because (...) they make no relevant cognitive difference. Besides, this is not even a catastrophe for possible worlds semantics. (shrink)

Putnam’s Twin-Earth thought experiment has been hugely influential as an argument in favor of semantic externalism. In this article, I argue that the Twin-Earth thought experiment relies on some previously unnoticed metaphysical assumptions about how to individuate words. My aim is not to argue that semantic externalism is false. Rather I aim to show that Putnam’s thought experiment is only effective as an argument for semantic externalism if we also are committed to certain additional highly controversial and/or implausible claims within (...) the metaphysics of words. I close by arguing that a similar argument for semantic externalism by Burge also relies on unnoticed metaphysical assumptions in the metaphysics of words. (shrink)

Dieser Beitrag ist zweigeteilt. Er diskutiert zunächst die aktuelle sprachphilosophische Auseinandersetzung mit Sprachmodellen (LLMs) und kritisiert einerseits anthropozentrische, traditionsverhaftete Tendenzen und andererseits den leichtfertigen Umgang mit der Mehrdeutigkeit semantischer Begriffe. Der zweite Teil entwickelt demgegenüber ein konsequentes, LLM-spezifisches Verständnis von Bedeutung und Bedeutungstheorie, das von Davidsons Überlegungen inspiriert ist und sich an der Funktionsweise von LLMs orientiert. Der erste Teil kann als Diagnose und Motivation für den experimentell-theoretischen und zugleich therapeutischen zweiten Teil gelesen werden. (This article is divided into two (...) parts. First, it discusses the current philosophical debate on language models (LLMs) and criticises anthropocentric-traditionalist tendencies on the one hand and carelessness regarding the ambiguity of semantic terms on the other. The second part develops a consistent, LLM-specific understanding of meaning (and theory of meaning) which is inspired by Davidson's considerations. The first part can be read as a diagnosis and motivation for the experimental-theoretical and at the same time therapeutic second part. (shrink)

Welchen Stellenwert hat die Kenntnis einer Grammatik für das Verhältnis des Menschen zur Welt und zu sich selbst? Und wofür braucht es Grammatik überhaupt, wenn grammatische Mehrdeutigkeit ohnehin meist unbemerkt bleibt und selten ein Verständnisproblem darstellt? Auf diese Fragen gibt Simon Kasper empirisch und theoretisch fundiert eine umfassende Antwort. Anhand einer historischen Korpusstudie an Paralleltexten dokumentiert er den erfolgreichen menschlichen Umgang mit Mehrdeutigkeit und liefert in der Folge einen anthropologischen Entwurf zum Verstehen, der sowohl der leiblichen Existenz des Menschen (Embodiment) (...) als auch der Grammatizität seiner Sprache Rechnung trägt. Dabei bezieht er nicht nur Grundannahmen der Kognitiven Linguistik und der Philosophischen Anthropologie ein, sondern führt auch quantitative (Frequenz) und qualitative (Bedeutsamkeit) Ansätze der Sprachtheorie zusammen. (shrink)

By conducting a semantic analysis of the reference and meaning of concepts that correspond to properties, and assessing its metaphysical implications, I develop a new argument for theism. Theism is understood here as the thesis that a personal being is the ultimate origin and ground of reality. More specifically, I argue that there are no universally held positive contingent properties and that this absence significantly increases the likelihood of theism. By integrating semantic inquiry with metaphysical reasoning, this paper offers a (...) novel approach that contributes to ongoing debates in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Imperative sentences admit of many different uses, from imposing obligations to answering questions, granting permissions, and giving advice. Some declarative sentences, such as statements about what one should do or about what the speaker wants one to do, can also serve similar purposes. These utterances all share a single discourse role. They work as directives, whose defining effect, I argue here, is to propose that their addressee publicly commit to performing an action. Understanding directives this way can help explain four (...) core features of directive speech acts. For one, directives are subject to norms of consistency that accord with rational coherence requirements for intentions. Second, directives can answer questions about what the questioner is to do. Third and fourth, imperatives can seldom be used in conjunction with prioritizing modal and preference-expressing declaratives. I propose a strictly pragmatic explanation for these phenomena, with minimal semantic commitments. Priority modals and expressions of preference can only convey the same type of information as imperatives insofar as those declaratives can be used to indirectly tell their addressees what to do. Imperatives, in turn, propose executive commitments directly and can only induce doxastic commitments to priorities or speaker-preferences indirectly. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a new theory of assertoric content. By ‘theory’, I mean both an extensionally correct definition and an elucidation of the mechanisms underlying assertoric content. In agreement with some existing work on the topic, I contend that assertoric content spans several content categories and is possibly constituted by an utterance’s standing content and explicature. I also offer a detailed explanation of how and why assertoric content can be determined by an utterance’s particularized conversational implicature. I call (...) my view the first-fill theory. This theory integrates recent developments in the literature related to the lying/misleading distinction. Additionally, my view accounts for intuitive judgments regarding the assertoric content of utterances that involve slips of the tongue. Finally, I also elucidate the apparent complexity of assertoric content by drawing parallels between the interpretative modes underlying it and those used in legal interpretation. (shrink)

In Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court found that ‘the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.’ Rather, individual states must determine whether a right to abortion exists. Following Dobbs, state abortion laws have diverged significantly. This has generated confusion over what the law permits. Consequently, some pregnant women reportedly have not received timely treatment for life-threatening conditions. Clear guidance on abortion policy is essential, therefore, since continued confusion risks lives. Sweeping calls to improve patient access to abortion will (...) not provide clear guidance, however, since ‘abortion’ is defined differently across jurisdictions. In fact, there are six variables to consider when defining ‘abortion’: (1) the definition of ‘pregnancy,’ (2) whether prescribing abortifacients counts as an abortion, (3) whether abortion successfully terminates pregnancy, (4) whether abortion has some characteristic intention, (5) whether providers must know that they likely will harm fetuses, and (6) whether providers must know that their patients are pregnant. States address each variable differently, so ‘abortion’ means different things across jurisdictions. One may respond that legislators are solely to blame for confusion here, since medical experts, by contrast, possesses a clear definition of ‘abortion.’ Not so. ‘Abortion’ is defined inconsistently throughout medical literature too. As such, both legal and medical domains would benefit from careful discussions of ‘abortion.’ Attending to the six variables identified here is a good starting place. In this essay, I suggest how best to think about each and I propose a definition of ‘abortion’ well-suited for developing clear abortion policy in a polarized society. (shrink)

This is Appendix B to the note, Deconstructing the Physical World (DPW). This appendix extends DPW to provide a set of new conceptual tools able inter alia to deliver a systematic, well-structured and highly novel set of insights into: core aspects of how language learning and use might work; what precisely is going on in inverted qualia thought experiments and in relation to the knowledge argument; and how incorporating differentiated forms of qualia into some fundamental ideas about language learning and (...) use can help more clearly define what we mean when we refer to such things as ‘concepts’ and ‘imagination’. (shrink)

Foundational theories of meaning, and the broader metasemantic projects they contribute to, promise to answer that seemingly simple yet intractable question of what meaning consists in and where it comes from. Naturally, they build upon expressions that we already know and recognize to develop their positions. This focus on language as we know it, however, leaves aside the no less significant matter of language in terms of possible expressions - the strange and distant expanses of language beyond our everyday stock (...) of expressions. This work sets out to explore possibility in the context of the meaning of simple expressions. In the process, words, phrases, and sentences are thoroughly explicated as types of expressions before being leveraged to engineer unique and unusual possible words. These exotic possibilities are then confronted with two major positions on meaning in philosophy, introducing novel difficulties and suggesting the significance of this otherwise neglected perspective on language. (shrink)

What is lying? This entry provides a general overview of scholarly attempts to define lying in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. First, it addresses the distinction between lying and misleading, considering whether only explicit statements can be lies. The second topic is insincerity, and how it can vary in degrees under conditions of uncertainty. Its final part discusses whether lying requires an intent to deceive and genuine assertoric force.

Multidimensional adjectives are ubiquitous in natural language. An adjective F is multidimensional just in case whether F applies to an object or pair of objects depends on how those objects stand with respect to multiple underlying dimensions of F-ness. Developing a semantics for multidimensional adjectives requires us to address the problem of dimensional aggregation: how do the application conditions of an adjective F in its positive and comparative forms depend on its underlying dimensions? Here we develop a semantics for multidimensional (...) adjectives that incorporates aggregation functions. We then explore an analogy between dimensional aggregation and preference aggregation, bringing results from social choice theory to bear on the number and kind of aggregation functions that are admissible in a context. These results suggest that, for any given adjective, there will often be multiple aggregation functions admissible, meaning that multidimensional comparatives are often vague. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing the form and content of images. These models are empirically credible and can be construed as literal grammars for images. (...) Images can have rich syntactic structure, though of a markedly different form than sentences in language. (shrink)

Tagging is the phenomenon in which regions of a picture, map, or diagram are annotated with words or other symbols, to provide descriptive information about a depicted object. The interpretive principles that govern tagged images are not well understood, due in part to the difficulty of integrating pictorial and linguistic semantic rules. Rather than directly combining these rules, I propose to use the framework of perspectival feature maps as an intermediary representation of content, in which the outputs of pictorial and (...) linguistic interpretation may be assimilated. The result is a simple and compositional semantics for tagged images. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to discuss whether general terms are rigid and if they are, how their rigidity should be interpreted. To this end, I first present the problems related to the rigidity of general terms. The most important ones among them are the following: What do general terms refer to? Is there any difference between the terms called “natural kind terms” and other general terms? After that, I discuss the arguments of three competent interpretations which try to (...) overcome these problems. The first interpretation holds that general terms refer to (or apply to) each and every object in their extensions. According to this view, only general terms related to essential properties like “cat”, “gold” turn out to be rigid. After I try to expose the drawbacks of this view, I examine the arguments of the second interpretation which holds that general terms refer to abstract kinds. I also argue for this interpretation. According to this interpretation general terms which refer to the same kind in all possible worlds turn out to be rigid. The main objection to this view is that this interpretation makes so many general terms rigid and it trivializes the notion of rigidity. Arguing that this is an unfair objection, I also focus on the philosophical importance of the subject and show that the interpretation I argue for realizes this philosophical importance. The third interpretation, on the other hand, rejects the rigidity of general terms. I also discuss the drawbacks of this view. -/- Another subject I discuss in the thesis is the rigidity of artifactual kind terms. The kinds of human made objects for specific purposes are usually called “artifactual kinds”. I argue that artifactual kind terms could rigidly refer to artifactual kinds. I reply to the critiques of this view with regard to the semantics of artifactual kind terms and metaphysics of artifactual kinds. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to trace the origin of the systematic cross-cultural variations in referential intuitions by investigating the effects of perspective taking on people’s responses in the Gödel-style probes through two novel experiments. Here is how we will proceed. In section 2, we first briefly introduce the MMNS (2004) study, and then critically review the two relevant studies conducted by Sytsma and colleagues (i.e., Sytsma and Livengood 2011; Sytsma et al. 2015). In section 3, we introduce the literature (...) on cross-cultural variation in perspective taking in cultural psychology, which together with the conjecture of perspectival ambiguity leads to the hypothesis of our current study. In sections 4 and 5, two new experiments on how perspective taking affects people’s responses in hypothetical stories modelled on the Gödel thought experiment will be reported. Based on the empirical findings, in section 6 we argue that the robust cross-cultural variations thus far observed in people’s responses to the Gödel cases are largely attributable to culturally specific perspective-taking strategies, which provides new support for the proposal previously made by Sytsma and Livengood (2011). The implications of the experimental results for the ongoing work of testing the theories of refence of names and for the current metaphilosophical debate on the robustness of philosopher’s intuitions are also drawn in this section. Finally, the major conclusions and contributions of the current study are highlighted in section 7. (shrink)

Sentences \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) are _cognitive synonyms_ for one when they play the same role in one’s cognitive life. The notion is pervasive (Sect. 1 ), but elusive: it is bound to be hyperintensional (Sect. 2 ), but excessive fine-graining would trivialize it and there are reasons for some coarse-graining (Sect. 2.1 ). Conceptual limitations stand in the way of a natural algebra (Sect. 2.2 ), and it should be sensitive to subject matters (Sect. 2.3 ). A cognitively adequate individuation (...) of content may be intransitive (Sect. 3 ) due to ‘dead parrot’ series: sequences of sentences \(\varphi _1, \ldots, \varphi _n\) where adjacent \(\varphi _i\) and \(\varphi _{i+1}\) are cognitive synonyms while \(\varphi _1\) and \(\varphi _n\) are not (Sect. 3.1 ). Finding an intransitive account is hard: Fregean equipollence won’t do (Sect. 3.2 ) and a result by Leitgeb shows that it wouldn’t satisfy a minimal compositionality principle (Sect. 3.3 )._Sed contra_, there are reasons for transitivity, too (Sect. 3.4 ). In Sect. 4, we come up with a formal semantics capturing this jumble of desiderata, thereby showing that the notion is coherent. In Sect. 5, we re-assess the desiderata in its light. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the prospects of postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth. Postdeflationary theories define the concept of truth or the property of being a true truthbearer in a way that respects the deflationary desiderata of clarity, purity, and permissiveness with truth-aptness, without a necessary commitment to the core negative thesis of the deflationary approach. Postdeflationary substantive theories further acknowledge the complexity and explanatory utility of truth in understanding and defining other concepts and phenomena. The motivation for pursuing this study arises (...) from the so-called contemporary crisis of truth, where a substantive understanding of truth is subjected to widespread skepticism, critique, and even cynicism both inside and outside of philosophy in formal and mundane discourse. To better understand this crisis, particular attention is directed towards the deflationary critique of substantive theories of truth, which is a prevalent point of discussion in contemporary literature on western analytic philosophy. By exploring the limits and philosophical sustainability of deflationary critique of substantive accounts of truth, valuable insight is gained about the contemporary crisis of truth and the potential for substantive theorizing about truth in general. This dissertation composes of an introduction and four original research publications that address two connected themes: exploration of the philosophical sustainability of deflationary critique of substantive theories of truth, and exploration of the prospects for development of the now popular substantive pluralist theories of truth. These themes constitute both negative and positive aspects in relation to analyzing the prospects of postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth. The first part of this dissertation focuses on arguing against the widespread deflationary readings of W.V.O. Quine’s truth, who is widely interpreted as a prominent and influential deflationist in both the secondary literature on his philosophy and contemporary truth-theoretic debates more broadly conceived. The first essay demonstrates that Quine’s immanent conception of truth involves commitments that are incompatible with general and theory-specific framings of the deflationary thesis. The second essay demonstrates conflicts between Quine’s views and what has in recent literature been argued as strong and moderate variants of the deflationary thesis. In conclusion, these essays demonstrate that the widespread deflationary readings of Quine’s truth are mistaken, thus removing a prominent thinker from the deflationists ranks while simultaneously casting suspicion towards the philosophical sustainability of the deflationary approach in general. The second part of this dissertation explores the prospects of postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth by analyzing the limits and prospects for development of the increasingly popular substantive pluralist theories. The third essay explores different ways in which semantic ambiguity poses trouble for current pluralist models. The fourth essay argues that to achieve the theoretical desiderata that pluralists ask from discourse domains, the latter ought to be individuated on ontological rather than topical grounds. In conclusion, these essays demonstrate that while current pluralist models involve shortcomings, they encompass potential for development and provide a viable prospect for sustainable postdeflationary substantive theorizing about truth. (shrink)

As formal theoretical linguistic methodology has matured, recent years have seen the advent of applying it to objects of study that transcend language, e.g., to the syntax and semantics of music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Schlenker 2017a; see also Rebuschat et al. 2011). One of the aims of such extensions is to shed new light on how meaning is construed in a range of communicative systems. In this paper, we approach this goal by looking at narrative dance in the form (...) of Bharatanatyam. We argue that a semantic approach to dance can be modeled closely after the formal semantics of visual narrative proposed by Abusch (2013, 2014, 2021). A central conclusion is that dance not only shares properties of other fundamentally human means of expression, such as visual narrative and music, but that it also exhibits similarities to sign languages and the gestures of non-signers (see, e.g., Schlenker 2020) in that it uses space to track individuals in a narrative and performatively portray the actions of those individuals. From the perspective of general human cognition, these conclusions corroborate the idea that linguistic investigations beyond language (see Patel-Grosz et al. forthcoming) can yield insights into the very nature of the human mind and of the communicative devices that it avails. (shrink)

Boethius identifies God both with esse ipsum and esse suum. This paper explains Boethius's general semantic use of "esse" and the application of this use to God. It questions the helpfulness of attributing to Boethius "existence" words and argues for a more robust role in Boethius’s thought for Hilary of Poitiers’s and Augustine’s exegeses of Exodus 3:14-15 than has been acknowledged in recent scholarship.

In this paper I distinguish three kinds of kinds: traditional philosophical kinds such as truth, knowledge, and causation; natural science kinds such as spin, charge and mass; and social kinds such as class, poverty, and marriage. The three-fold taxonomy I work with represents an idealised abstraction from the wide variety of kinds that there are and the messy phenomena that underlie them. However, the kinds I identify are discrete, and the three-fold taxonomy is useful when it comes to understanding claims (...) about the normativity, scope, and implementation of conceptual engineering. In particular it reveals: first, that conceptual engineering in a broad sense is not distinctively normative; but second, that there is a distinctive normativity present in conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration; third, that conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration is only possible for terms that refer to kinds whose grounds we can change; and fourth, that the amelioration of such kind terms can be brought about as a result of changing the grounds of those kinds. The overall aim is to draw attention to the differences between kinds of kinds to make sense of the diverse and often conflicting claims in the conceptual engineering literature, both from its proponents and from its detractors. The hope is that paying attention to the differences between kinds of kinds will provide a better understanding of the landscape. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of various sorts rely on there being robust boundaries between kinds of content. One way of drawing such boundaries is to place them between subject matters, like physics and aesthetics, and the domains of sentences falling within them. Yet contemporary literature exploring the nature of discourse domains is relatively sparse. The goal of this paper is to articulate the core features of discourse domains for them to provide the sought-after explanatory utility of establishing robust boundaries between discursive contents. (...) Analyzing the role that discourse domains have under alethic theories yields valuable information about the ways in which domains subject themselves to being defined and how alethic theories can explain the variability of truth-aptness or truth across sentences from distinct domains. The concluding argument is that because of certain issues with defining domains as unambiguous classes of sentences when individuated on the grounds of topical subject matters, philosophers should consider a commitment to indeterminism about the extensions of fundamental domains. According to this view, although domains can be defined as relatively well-individuated classes of sentences based on topical distinctions, the temporal development of our conceptual frameworks and the phenomenon of mixed content compromise our ability to definitively account for the domain membership of all truth-apt sentences. Such an indeterminacy argument is relevant for all who rely on there being robust boundaries between topically individuated discursive contents. (shrink)

In order to handle presuppositions in the scope of attitude verbs, the binding theory allows presuppositions triggered in a subject's beliefs to be bound at the matrix level; and it allows presuppositions triggered in non-doxastic attitudes to be bound in the subject's beliefs (Geurts, 1999; Maier, 2015). However, we argue that this leads to serious overgeneration, for example it predicts that the unacceptable `Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that she won't and that only Sue will (...) come to the party' should be equivalent to the acceptable `Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that nobody will come to the party'. This is because the presupposition triggered by `only Sue will come to the party' should be able to be bound at the matrix level. We discuss some responses to this problem, but argue that they all have shortcomings. (shrink)

We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical evidence that (...) shows that actual readers use these strategies and we flesh out the exact workings of these strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction. (shrink)

Semantic theories that violate semantic innocence, that is require reference shifts when terms are embedded in ‘that’ clauses and the like, are often challenged by producing sentences where an anaphoric expression, while not itself embedded in a context in which reference shifts, is anaphoric on an antecedent expression that is embedded in such a context. This, in conjunction with a widely accepted principle concerning unproblematic anaphora (the ‘Principle of Anaphoric Reference’), is used to show that such reference shifting has absurd (...) consequences. We show that it is the widely accepted principle concerning anaphora that is to be blamed for these consequences and not the supposed sin of reference shifting. (shrink)

This is a review of Action Semantics, by Peter D. Mosses, Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 26, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

This chapter addresses the assumed connection between de se attitude ascription and logophoricity in the case of Chinese ziji. It is widely believed that logophors are among the paradigm cases of de se marking, and that long-distance ziji is logophoric. Drawing on a critical examination of a variety of analyses, this chapter argues that long-distance anaphora, de se interpretation, and logophoric marking are overlapping but distinct phenomena. Even if ziji is logophoric, it does not automatically trigger de se requirement. A (...) de se-neutral analysis of ziji is consistent with pragmatic derivations of interpretations that emphasize the self. The findings point to a new approach to long-distance binding, and identify the blocking effect as the key issue for further research. (shrink)

Este manuscrito es una fiel transcripción de la entrevista que se realizó al doctor Gilberto Sánchez Cabezas, miembro de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua. La información que brindó el académico en este intercambio de preguntas fue esencial para tener un panorama de cómo fluctúa una investigación medular de las lenguas originarias o aborígenes de su país. Asimismo, hizo algunas precisiones en función de las traducciones de escritores canónicos que existen en lenguas proteiformes y cómo estas son plasmadas con modificaciones (...) que podrían alterar en demasía el contenido. Para ello, el académico usa con frecuencia algunos ejemplos de palabras quechuas, aimaras o castellanas con sus respectivos significados, además de citar fragmentos de autores como Paul Verlaine, Attila József, García Lorca, Goethe y Homero, con la volición de que se corrobore la traslación semántica y fonológica. (shrink)

Victoria Espinosa Santos es miembro de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua desde 2017 y forma parte de la Comisión de Lexicografía. Esta entrevista, realizada de forma virtual el 6 de julio de 2021, se concentra en los siguientes temas: las variaciones del español de América, el rol de las lenguas indígenas en el español de Chile, el trabajo de las academias de la Lengua Española, el rol de las academias en relación con la lingüística y la literatura.

Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, (...) which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position. (shrink)

A partir de un modelo semantico fundado por la relacion de presuposicion se construye un esquema de analisis narrativo de caracter diagramatico y articulacion relacional, que considera y se apoya en la nocion de Integracion Conceptual como dimension semiotica. Esta articulación se realiza al abarcar diferentes niveles de análisis que generan modalidades diagramaticas diversas. Se destacan de modo significativo procesos complejos de composicionalidad semántica (asociados a modos de síntesis categórica) en contraposición a procesos elementales de aditividad (asociados a sumas analíticas (...) o yuxtaposición paratáctica). Asimismo, a lo largo del análisis, quedarán establecidas las dimensiones composicionales que los sucesos de un relato “integran conceptualmente” en sus diversos procesos de simbolización. (shrink)

We are often justified in acting on the basis of evidential confirmation. I argue that such evidence supports belief in non-quantificational generic generalizations, rather than universally quantified generalizations. I show how this account supports, rather than undermines, a Bayesian account of confirmation. Induction from confirming instances of a generalization to belief in the corresponding generic is part of a reasoning instinct that is typically (but not always) correct, and allows us to approximate the predictions that formal epistemology would make.

Two of the main debates in philosophy of language concerning time and tense are the debate about the semantics of the tenses in the English language and the debate over whether propositions can be transiently true or false as opposed to always being eternally true or false. The latter quarrel is also known as the "temporalism–eternalism debate." Given standard semantics, the two debates are not logically independent, as we will see. Those who believe propositions are eternally true or false needn’t (...) treat the tenses as operators. Their opponents, on the other hand, appear to be committed to an operator theory of the tenses, given a standard semantic framework. In this chapter I will focus primarily on these two debates. (shrink)

María José Rincón González nació en Sevilla (España) y reside en República Dominicana desde 1992. Es miembro de número de la Academia Dominicana de la Lengua (ADL) desde el 2011 y directora del Instituto Guzmán Ariza de Lexicografía. Asimismo, es miembro correspondiente de la Real Academia Española (RAE) y miembro del consejo asesor de Fundéu Guzmán Ariza. Con respecto a su formación superior, es doctora en Filología por la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) y máster en Lexicografía por (...) la Universidad de Sevilla y la UNED. Ha participado en congresos internacionales y ha contribuido en las ediciones de diccionarios del idioma español. Entre sus publicaciones de artículos, se encuentran las que pertenecen al Diario Libre y el Boletín de la Academia Dominicana de la Lengua, entre otros textos, tales como “La antroponimia femenina dominicana (1945-1995)” (2002), “El Diccionario de la lengua” (2013), “Presentación del Diccionario de americanismos de la ASALE” (2013), “Variantes dialectales del léxico dominicano en el Diccionario de americanismos” (2016), “La lematización de variantes gráficas en el Diccionario del español dominicano” (2017) y “El Diccionario de criollismos, primer diccionario dominicano” (2020). De igual modo, ha publicado en libros y capítulos de libros. Entre ellos se encuentran el Diccionario del español dominicano (2013), “El nacimiento de un nuevo diccionario: el Diccionario del español dominicano” (2017) y De la eñe a la zeta (2019). (shrink)

Recent discoveries of semantic compositionality in Japanese tits have enlivened the discussions on the presence of this phenomenon in wild animal communication. Data on semantic compositionality in wild apes are lacking, even though language experiments with captive apes have demonstrated they are capable of semantic compositionality. In this paper, I revisit the study by Boesch (Hum. Evol. 6:81–89, 1991) who investigated drumming sequences by an alpha male in a chimpanzee (_Pan troglodytes_) community in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire. A (...) reanalysis of the data reveals that the alpha male produced semantically compositional combined messages of travel direction change and resting period initiation. Unlike the Japanese tits, the elements of the compositional expression were not simply juxtaposed but displayed structural reduction, while one of the two elements in the expression coded the meanings of both elements. These processes show relative resemblance to blending and fusion in human languages. Also unlike the tits, the elements of the compositional expression did not have a fixed order, although there was a fixed distribution of drumming events across the trees used for drumming. Because the elements of the expression appear to carry verb-like meanings, the compositional expression also resembles simple verb-verb constructions and short paratactic combinations of two clauses found across languages. In conclusion, the reanalysis suggests that semantic compositionality and phenomena resembling paratactic combinations of two clauses might have been present in the communication of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, not necessarily in the vocal modality. (shrink)

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', as (...) well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and di fferent flavors of `therefore'. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the world and logic, between intuition and language, between objects and their quantitative determinations? Rationalists, on the one hand, hold that the world is structured in a rational way. Representationalists, on the other hand, assume that language, logic, and mathematics are only the means to order and describe the intuitively given world. In World and Logic, Jens Lemanski takes up three surprising arguments from Arthur Schopenhauer’s hitherto undiscovered Berlin Lectures, which concern the philosophy of language, (...) logic, and mathematics. Based on these arguments, Lemanski develops a new position entitled ‘rational representationalism’: the world is always structured by human beings according to linguistic, logical, and mathematical principles, but the basic vocabulary of these structural descriptions already contains metaphors taken from the world around us. (shrink)