This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

Formal semantics constitutes the framework of this thesis, and the aim is to characterise the semantics of the progressive, as it appears in sentence. Max was running towards the station Among the problems is one known as the "imperfective paradox". According to intuitions, sentence entails, but no entailment holds between and. Max was running towards the station Max ran towards the station Max was running to the station Max ran to the station Since and would seem to have the same (...) logical form, they ought to have similar entailments. Why is this not so? This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part, containing chapters 2 to 5, evaluates the current formal theories that tackle the imperfective paradox. Solving the imperfective paradox consists of two tasks: the first is to characterise a semantic distinction between and, and the second is to supply a semantic analysis of the progressive that is sensitive to this distinction and so results in a solution to the imperfective paradox. According to how the current theories tackle these two tasks, they can be classified into three camps which I will name as follows: the Heterogeneous Strategy provides one approach for fulfilling the first task, the Eventual Outcome Strategy provides an approach for defining the semantics of the progressive, and the Event-based Strategy provides a further alternative for achieving the two tasks at hand. All these strategies are intuitively motivated, but we will argue that they are ultimately untenable. The Heterogeneous Strategy and the Event-based Strategy fail to mesh with the treatment of point adverbials such as "At 3pm", and the Eventual Outcome Strategy produces a definition of the progressive that is viciously circular. Thus although the current theories that tackle the imperfective paradox are highly intuitively motivated, we will ultimately show that the formulations of these intuitions give rise to conflicts and tensions when it comes to explaining the natural language data. The second part of the thesis, containing chapters 6 and 7, offers a new approach for tackling the imperfective paradox. This new approach invokes two tools; the interval-based temporal logic IQ, and Moens' event-based AI model of temporal reference. IQ is an interval-based temporal logic with several innovations. First, unlike the previous interval-based theories, IQ maintains a high level of homogeneity: an atomic sentence is true at an interval I only if it is true at all subintervals of I. Second, IQ offers a technique whereby temporal expressions can have representations that receive their semantic interpretation with respect to context. We use the roles of homogeneity and context in IQ to characterise the semantics of aspect, where the characterisation is based on Moens' model. This provides an arena in which to tackle the imperfective paradox anew. We explain the entailment between and, and at the same time explain why no entailment holds between and. Furthermore, we overcome the problems concerning the treatment of adverbials such as "At 3pm" that are encountered in the Heterogeneous Strategy and the Event-based Strategy, and, since we do not adopt the Eventual Outcome Strategy in defining the progressive, we overcome that strategy's problem of circularity. Hence our solution to the imperfective paradox will provide answers to the puzzles posed in the earlier chapters of the thesis. (shrink)

Frege proved an important result, concerning the relation of arithmetic to second-order logic, that bears on several issues in linguistics. Frege’s Theorem illustrates the logic of relations like PRECEDES(x, y) and TALLER(x, y), while raising doubts about the idea that we understand sentences like ‘Carl is taller than Al’ in terms of abstracta like heights and numbers. Abstract paraphrase can be useful—as when we say that Carl’s height exceeds Al’s—without reflecting semantic structure. Related points apply to causal relations, and even (...) grammatical relations like DOMINATES(x, y). Perhaps surprisingly, Frege provides the resources needed to recursively characterize labelled expressions without characterizing them as sets. His theorem may also bear on questions about the meaning and acquisition of number words. (shrink)

We think recent work in linguistics tells against the traditional claim that a string of words like (1) Every girl pushed some truck has two readings, indicated by the following formal language sentences (with restricted quantifiers): (1a) [!x:Gx]["y:Ty]Pxy (1b) ["y:Ty][!x:Gx]Pxy. In our view, (1) does not have any b-reading in which ‘some truck’ has widest scope.1 The issue turns on details concerning syntactic transformations and terms like ‘every’. This illustrates an important point for the study of natural language: ambiguity hypotheses (...) are indeed hypotheses—i.e., theoretical claims to be justified in light of various considerations, not theses whose truth can be directly observed by speakers. (shrink)

It is, I suppose, a truism that an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language L will associate each sentence of L with its meaning. But the converse does not hold. A theory that associates each sentence with its meaning is not, by virtue of that fact, an adequate theory of meaning. For it is also a truism that a semantic theory should explain the (interesting and explicable) semantic facts. And one cannot decree that the relevant facts are all (...) reportable with instances of schemata like ‘S means that p’ or ‘S, by virtue of its meaning, is true iff p’. Investigation suggests that there is much more for semanticists to explain: natural languages exhibit synonymies, ambiguities, and entailments; for any string of words, there are endlessly many meanings it cannot have; there are semantic generalizations, including crosslinguistic generalizations, that go uncaptured and unexplained by merely associating sentences with their meanings; etc. Initially, one might think these facts are “peripheral” and can thus be ignored if the aim is to explain why sentences mean what they do. But the study of natural language suggests otherwise. (One can’t tell, in advance of investigation, which facts are peripheral to a given domain. It was initially tempting to think that one could ignore falling bodies, and the tides, if the aim was to explain why planets move as they do.). (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of John Austin’s views both on assertion and on adverbs, as result of which an expressivist thesis concerning the semantics for action sentences is advanced. First, Austin’s analysis of assertion based on various, specific assertive forces and his remarks on adverbs are systematically connected in order to obtain assertive schemata for action sentences. Finally, those schemata are put to work as the expression of inferential commitments implicit in argumentative practices of different sorts (exculpatory, justificatory (...) and illustrative) in the deployment of which, both logical contrariety and contradiction are exploited. (shrink)