I am going to describe a variant formulation of classical extensional first-order logic and contrast it with the standard formulation. The formulation I will give is in one clear sense equivalent to the standard one, and it is a routine task to show that it is equivalent to it in this sense. So one might regard my formulation as a mere notational variation. But there are also ways in which the two formulations I will contrast are not equivalent, and I (...) will argue that these ways reflect an important conceptual difference between them. The differences become more important as one generalizes or extends classical logic in various ways, but they are there even in the classical systems. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to argue for the fruitfulness for linguistic theory of an approach to semantics that has been developed primarily by logicians and philosophers. That the theory of possible worlds semantics has been extremely fruitful for logic and philosophy is widely if not universally accepted, and I will not try to convince remaining skeptics on that score. But the goals of linguistics are sufficiently different from those of philosophy and logic that there are independent and highly (...) reasonable grounds for skepticism about the appropriateness of such a theory for linguistics, and I will address what seem to me the most important of these in addition to offering positive evidence in favor of such an approach to semantics. (shrink)

What knowledge would suffice to yield an interpretation of an arbitrary utterance of a language when such knowledge is based on evidence plausibly available to a nonspeaker of that language? it is argued that it is enough to know a theory of truth for the language and that the theory satisfies tarski's 'convention t' and that it gives an optimal fit to data about sentences held true, Under specified conditions, By native speakers.

Constructs developed for the semantics of artificial languages are often proposed as the proper description of aspects of the semantics of natural languages. Most of us are familiar with the claims that conjunction, disjunction, negation, and material implication in standard versions of propositional calculus describe the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” in English. The argument for such claims is not only that these constructs account for meanings in English but that they offer the advantage of (...) well-understood formal apparatus for the explication of meaning in natural language. The argument against such claims is that explications based on this apparatus leave important aspects of the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” unexplicated. It is charged that the advantage of a well-understood formalism is secured at the expense of truth. Many of the most significant issues in philosophic logic are or depend on questions about whether constructs from artificial languages provide adequate semantic descriptions for natural languages. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with. Either way, the facts seem clear enough: questions first mooted by philosophers are sometimes coopted by people who do experiments. This seems to be happening now to the question: “what are propositional attitudes?” and cognitive psychology is the science (...) of note. (shrink)