Modelling Selectional Super-Flexibility

The selectional flexibility of some attitude verbs (e.g. know, realize, report) between declarative and interrogative complements has been the subject of much recent work in formal semantics. However, little attention has been paid to verbs (e.g. see, remember, observe) that embed an even wider variety of complements (incl. subject-controlled gerundive small clauses and concrete object-denoting DPs). Since the familiar types of some of these complements resist an embedding in the type for questions [= sets of propositions], these verbs challenge Theiler, Roelofsen & Aloni’s (2018) uniform interpretation strategy for the complements of responsive verbs. My paper answers this challenge by uniformly interpreting the different complements of selectionally super-flexible verbs like remember in a generalized type for questions, viz. as parametrized centered questions. It shows that the resulting semantics captures the intuitive entailment pattern of these verbs

The selectional variability of 'imagine whether'

White (2021) has observed that some clause-embedding predicates (esp. doxastic attitude verbs like believe, non-veridical preferential predicates like hope) vary w.r.t. their selection properties: While these predicates commonly combine with declarative complements, they sometimes accept interrogative complements. My paper notes a similar selectional variability for fiction verbs like imagine: while imagine is typically taken to reject polar interrogative complements, some uses of imagine whether are acceptable. Curiously, this acceptability cannot be explained through the techniques (e.g., highlighting, no presupposition, multiple senses) that have recently been used to explain the acceptability of believe and hope whether. To still account for the ability of imagine to take whether-complements, I draw on recent work on attitudinal parasitism (see Blumberg 2019). This work assumes that some cases of imagination depend, for their reference, on the objects of another experience (e.g. visual perception). My semantics holds that imagine whether is felicitous only when the truth of the embedded TP is decided at the possible world of which the experienced scene is a spatio-temporal part. This condition is more easily satisfied when the verb in the TP has future tense (will), or when imagine is embedded under a negated ability modal or under try

Intertheoretic Reduction, Confirmation, and Montague’s Syntax-Semantics Relation

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. This paper presents a case study of a new type of intertheoretic relation that is inspired by Montague's analysis of the linguistic syntax-semantics relation. The paper develops a simple model of this relation. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model extends the scope of application of the Nagelian (or related) models and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework

Intertheoretic Reduction, Confirmation, and Montague’s Syntax-Semantics Relation

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. This paper presents a case study of a new type of intertheoretic relation that is inspired by Montague's analysis of the linguistic syntax-semantics relation. The paper develops a simple model of this relation. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model extends the scope of application of the Nagelian (or related) models and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework

Montague Reduction, Confirmation, and the Syntax-Semantics Relation

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. In this paper, we present a model of a new type of intertheoretic relation, called 'Montague Reduction', which is assumed in Montague's framework for the analysis and interpretation of natural language syntax. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model extends the scope of application of the Nagelian (or related) models, and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework

A Single-Type Semantics for Natural Language

Montague (1970) interprets a small fragment of English through the use of two basic types of objects: individuals and propositions. My dissertation develops an alternative semantics that only uses one basic type (hence, *single-type semantics*). Such a semantics has been conjectured by Partee (2006) as a ‘minimality test’ for the Montagovian type system, which captures the lowest ontological requirements on any successful semantics for Montague’s fragment. The development of this semantics answers a number of important open questions about the salience of the Montagovian type system, the robustness of semantic theories w.r.t. their basic-type choice, and the classification of these theories according to their objects’ informational strength

Intensionality and propositionalism

Propositionalism is the view that all intensional constructions (including nominal and clausal attitude reports) can be interpreted as relations to truth-evaluable propositional content. While propositionalism has long been silently assumed in semantics and the philosophy of language, it has only recently entered center stage in linguistic research. This article surveys the properties of intensional constructions, which require the introduction of fine-grained semantic values (intensions). It contrasts two ways of obtaining such values: through the introduction of either Russellian propositions or Frege-Church-style senses. The article identifies propositionalism with a specific variant of the Russellian strategy, reviews key arguments for propositionalism, and compares familiar varieties of propositionalism on the basis of instructive examples. It closes by discussing various challenges for propositionalism and suggesting a generalization of propositionalism that meets some of these challenges. Because of the association of propositions with semantic information, the article also addresses the more general question of whether all information content (including mental and pictorial content) is propositional

Integrative Reduction, Confirmation, and the Syntax-Semantics Map

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their discussion in (Nagel, 1961), such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. In this paper, we present models of two new types of intertheoretic relations, called 'Montague Reduction' and 'Integrative Reduction', that are assumed in Montague's (1973) theories of natural language syntax and semantics. To show the rationale behind our adoption of these two kinds of relations, we analyze them in the framework of Bayesian confirmation theory

Experiential attitudes are propositional

Attitudinal propositionalism is the view that all mental attitude content is truth-evaluable. While attitudinal propositionalism is still silently assumed in large parts of analytic philosophy, recent work on objectual attitudes (i.e. attitudes like "fearing Moriarty" and "imagining a unicorn" that are reported through intensional transitive verbs with a direct object) has put attitudinal propositionalism under explanatory pressure. This paper defends propositionalism for a special subclass of objectual attitudes, viz. experiential attitudes. The latter are attitudes like seeing, remembering, and imagining whose grammatical objects intuitively denote (events or) scenes. I provide a propositional analysis of experiential attitudes that preserves the merits of propositionalism. This analysis uses the possibility of representing the target-scenes of experiential attitudes by the intersection of all propositions that are true in these scenes. I show that this analysis makes available the usual (Russellian) account of intensionality and the common (Boolean) logic for entailments