A Bridge from Semantic Value to Content

A common view relating compositional semantics and the objects of assertion holds the following: Sentences φ and ψ expresses the same proposition iff φ and ψ have the same modal profile. Following Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley argues that this view is fundamentally mistaken. According to Dummett, we must distinguish the semantic contribution a sentence makes to more complex expressions in which it occurs from its assertoric content. Stojnić insists that views which distinguish the roles of content and semantic value must nevertheless ensure a tight connection between the two. But, she contends, there is a crucial disanalogy between the views that follow Lewis and the views that follow Dummett. Stanley’s Dummettian view is argued to contain a fatal flaw: On such views, there is no way to secure an appropriate connection between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. I will review the background issues from Dummett, Evans, Lewis, and Stanley, and provide a principled way of bridging the gap between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content

Minimal Disagreement

In the recent debate about the semantics of perspectival expressions, disagreement has played a crucial role. In a nutshell, what I call “the challenge from disagreement” is the objection that certain views on the market cannot account for the intuition of disagreement present in ordinary exchanges involving perspectival expressions like “Licorice is tasty./no, it’s not.” Various contextualist answers to this challenge have been proposed, and this has led to a proliferation of notions of disagreement. It is now accepted in the debate that there are many notions of disagreement and that the search for a common, basic notion is misguided. In this paper I attempt to find such a basic notion underneath this diversity. The main aim of the paper is to motivate, forge and defend a notion of “minimal disagreement” that has beneficial effects for the debate over the semantics of perspectival expressions

On the Connection between Semantic Content and the Objects of Assertion

The Rigidity Thesis states that no rigid term can have the same semantic content as a nonrigid one. Drawing on Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley rejects the thesis since it relies on an illicit identification of compositional semantic content and the content of assertion. 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. 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

Diamonds are Forever

We defend the thesis that every necessarily true proposition is always true. Since not every proposition that is always true is necessarily true, our thesis is at odds with theories of modality and time, such as those of Kit Fine and David Kaplan, which posit a fundamental symmetry between modal and tense operators. According to such theories, just as it is a contingent matter what is true at a given time, it is likewise a temporary matter what is true at a given possible world; so a proposition that is now true at all worlds, and thus necessarily true, may yet at some past or future time be false in the actual world, and thus not always true. We reconstruct and criticize several lines of argument in favor of this picture, and then argue against the picture on the grounds that it is inconsistent with certain sorts of contingency in the structure of time

Donagan's Spinoza

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156075/1/Donagan's Spinoza.pdfSEL

Being at the Centre: Self-location in Thought and Language

Self-locating attitudes and assertions provide a challenge to the received view of mental and linguistic intentionality. In this paper I try to show that the best way to meet this challenge is to adopt relativistic, centred possible worlds accounts for both belief and communication. First, I argue that self-locating beliefs support a centred account of belief. Second, I argue that self-locating utterances support a complementary centred account of communication. Together, these two claims motivate a unified centred conception of belief and communication

No longer true

There are sentences that express the same temporally fully specified proposition at all contexts--call them 'context-insensitive, temporally specific sentences.' Sentence (1) 'Obama was born in 1961' is a case in point: at all contexts, it expresses the proposition ascribing to the year 1961 the property of being a time in which Obama was born. Suppose that someone uttered (1) in a context located on Christmas 2000 in our world. In this context, (1) is a true sentence about the past. Moreover, it seems impossible that (1) will be false in a successive context (one located, say, on Christmas 2020 in our world). More generally, one might be tempted to endorse the following principle: if a context-insensitive, temporally specific sentence is uttered in a context in which it is about the past and takes a certain truth value in this context, it cannot be the case that it takes a different truth value in a successive context located in the same world. In this paper, we present linguistic evidence that shows that this principle fails. On this basis, we draw an apparently crazy conclusion: the past can change. We then explain why this conclusion is not that crazy, after all

Temporalismo e Eternismo

Temporalismo e eternismo são teses semânticas. Segundo a primeira, que prevaleceu ao longo da maior parte da história da lógica no Ocidente, existem proposições completas cujo valor de verdade varia com o tempo (proposições temporais), e a investigação das relações entre tempo e verdade é parte integral da lógica. Para a segunda, que emerge gradualmente na obra dos pioneiros da lógica moderna e recebe sua primeira formulação sistemática na obra de Frege, o que o temporalismo percebe como uma proposição com valor de verdade variável deve ser concebido, antes, como uma função proposicional em que pelo menos uma variável livre (usualmente inarticulada na expressão linguística da proposição) toma como argumentos instantes ou intervalos de tempo. As duas teses têm consequências importantes, aqui brevemente resenhadas, para a concepção das relações entre tempo e modalidade e para a semântica das atitudes proposicionais.Abstract: Temporalism and eternalism are semantical theses. According to the former, which prevailed throughout most of the history of Western logic, there are complete propositions whose truth-value changes with time (temporal propositions), and the examination of the relations be - tween time and truth is part and parcel of the subject-matter of logic. According to the latter, which surfaced gradually in the work of the pioneers of modern logic and received its first systematic formulation in Frege’s work, what temporalism perceives as a proposition with changing truth-values should rather be conceived as a propositional function in which at least one free variable (usually unarticulated in the linguistic expression of the proposition) takes as arguments instants or time intervals. Both theses have important consequences, here briefly reviewed, for the conception of the relations between time and modality, and for the semantics of propositional attitudes.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisbo