Situation semantics and its foundations

The aim of this thesis is to examine several aspects of situation semantics and to evaluate the contribution which the theory makes to our understanding of language, in particular whether it brings us nearer to a solution of some traditional puzzles with attitude reports.The presentation is in three parts. The first part, comprising chapters one and two, consists of a general introduction to the issues involved and tackles the question of where situation semantics places the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The second and main part, chapters three to six, is devoted to demonstrating the language- dependent status of abstract situations. The interpretations of expressions and the role of the setting in composition are analysed in chapter three. In chapter four I consider Russell's views on propositions and the Russellian semantics Richards has given. Chapter five examines in detail the suggestion of chapter three that the level of abstract situations is not independent of language, recasts situation semantics accordingly as an interpreted language, and lastly considers an extension of situation semantics to include molecular facts. In chapter six situation semantics is related to direct reference semantics. Finally, chapters seven and eight treat attitude reports, analysing firstly the ingredients of Barwise and Perry's approach to the semantics of the attitudes, and secondly setting out some traditional puzzles and considering how situation semantics deals with them.The goal throughout is to clarify and understand what the ideas and insights behind situation semantics are and to determine their importance for semantic theory

Vagueness and Normativity

[Author's note: I am posting this dissertation since it may be of interest to some people working on vagueness and related topics. It does not represent my current views on the topic.] Philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to vagueness in recent years, but there is still no general consensus about how to resolve the Sorites paradox. Timothy Williamson‘s epistemic view, which claims that our vague terms have unknown sharp boundaries, is the most popular and most controversial current account. No one has shown exactly what is wrong the epistemic view and no one has provided a satisfying alternative to it. These two projects – articulating what is wrong with the epistemic view, and providing a plausible alternative – are the primary goals of this dissertation. Additionally, I survey ordinary intuitions that underlie Sorites paradoxes, and I note how these intuitions inform, and are informed by, a number of deeper philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ethics. In part, this serves as an explanation of why the Sorites paradox has remained so difficult to resolve. The most common objection to the epistemic view – that it provides an unsatisfactory account of the connection between meaning and use – has not been successful in undermining the view. My own objection is a metaphysical, and not a semantic, objection: the epistemic view fails to provide the best explanation of what objects and properties exist. Instead, an eliminativist account of macro-level objects and properties, according to which there are no mountains and there is no property of being lavender-colored, is a better metaphysical account than one that claims that there are mountains and color properties that have sharp boundaries. Of course, this eliminativist view is intuitively unappealing, and to show how statements in ordinary language can in some way be taken to be true, I introduce the normative choice account. According to this view, although non-normative facts about linguistic behavior and about the external world do not determine a precise reference for our terms, our choices may do so. I claim that this provides all that is needed for there to be semantic normativity. First, we are still guided in our choices to some extent by psychological tendencies, and second, there are resources in semantic deliberation to respond to aberrant uses of language

Truth and Aletheic Paradox

My objective is to provide a theory of truth that is both independently motivated and compatible with the requirement that semantic theories for truth should not demand a substantive distinction between the languages in which they are formulated and those to which they apply. I argue that if a semantic theory for truth does not satisfy this requirement, then it is unacceptable. The central claim of the theory I develop is that truth is an inconsistent concept: the rules for the proper use of truth are incompatible in the sense that they dictate that truth both applies and fails to apply to certain sentences (e.g., those that give rise to the liar and related paradoxes). The most significant challenge for a proponent of an inconsistency theory of truth is producing a plausible theory of inconsistent concepts. Accordingly, I first construct a theory of inconsistent concepts, and then I apply it to truth. On the account I provide, inconsistent concepts are confused concepts. A concept is confused if, in employing it, one is committed to applying it to two or more distinct types of entities without properly distinguishing between them; that is, an employer of a confused concept thinks that two or more distinct entities are identical. I propose a semantic theory for predicates that express confused concepts, and a new many-valued relevance logic on which the semantic theory depends. This semantic theory serves as the basis for my theory of inconsistent concepts. Given this account of inconsistent concepts and my claim that truth is inconsistent, I am committed to the view that truth is confused. I use the semantic theory for confused predicates as a semantic theory for truth. On the account I advance, a proper theory of truth requires a distinction between several different types of truth predicates. I propose an account of each truth predicate, and I advocate using them as consistent replacements for the concept of truth. The result is a team of concepts that does the work of the inconsistent concept of truth without giving rise to paradoxes

Variables

Variables is a project at the intersection of the philosophies of language and logic. Frege, in the Begriffsschrift, crystalized the modern notion of formal logic through the first fully successful characterization of the behaviour of quantifiers. In Variables, I suggest that the logical tradition we have inherited from Frege is importantly flawed, and that Frege's move from treating quantifiers as noun phrases bearing word-world connection to sentential operators in the guise of second-order predicates leaves us both philosophically and technically wanting