Results for 'semantics-drefs'

961 found
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  1. Time and modality without tenses or modals.Maria Bittner - 2011 - In Renate Musan & Monika Rathert (eds.), Tense across Languages. Niemeyer. pp. 147--188.
    In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric moods and/or attitudinal verbs.
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  2. Semantic Priming on Ordering Tasks.John Beverley & Nate Lauffer - manuscript
    Moeser suggested participants default to linear ordering elements but they can be primed to impose either linear or partial ordering. This study seems problematic insofar as ‘greater than’ might be understood to incline participants to favor linear orderings. Recent follow-up studies strongly suggest participants do not default to linear ordering. It seems plausible, moreover, that the observed priming effect is far more pervasive than Moeser countenanced. The present work explores the extent to which priming for linear or partial orders conflicts (...)
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  3. Tagging: semantics at the iconic/symbolic interface.Gabriel Greenberg - 2019 - In Julian J. Schlöder, Dean McHugh & Floris Roelofsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium. pp. 11-20.
    Tagging is the phenomenon in which regions of a picture, map, or diagram are annotated with words or other symbols, to provide descriptive information about a depicted object. The interpretive principles that govern tagged images are not well understood, due in part to the difficulty of integrating pictorial and linguistic semantic rules. Rather than directly combining these rules, I propose to use the framework of perspectival feature maps as an intermediary representation of content, in which the outputs of pictorial and (...)
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  4. (1 other version)Semantic normativity.Åsa Maria Wikforss - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 102 (2):203-26.
    My paper examines the popular idea, defended by Kripke, that meaning is an essentially normative notion. I consider four common versions of this idea and suggest that none of them can be supported, either because the alleged normativity has nothing to do with normativity or because it cannot plausibly be said that meaning is normative in the sense suggested. I argue that contrary to received opinion, we don’t need normativity to secure the possibility of meaning. I conclude by considering the (...)
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  5.  74
    Map Semantics and the Geography of Meaning.Gabriel Greenberg - 2024 - In Ernest Lepore & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 489-522.
    This chapter develops a semantic theory for maps and situates it within the broader geography of meaning and semiotic significance. The discussion focuses on three central aspects of map semantics: the use of space, line marking, and linguistic tags. It is argued that the treatment of space in maps must be based on geometrical projection from a viewpoint rather than the traditional analysis in terms of spatial isomorphism. The chapter then shows how to integrate the projection-based semantics of (...)
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  6. Semantics without semantic content.Daniel W. Harris - 2020 - Mind and Language 37 (3):304-328.
    I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into (...)
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  7. The semantics of common nouns and the nature of semantics.Joseph Almog & Andrea Bianchi - 2023 - Acta Philosophica Fennica 100:115-135.
    In “Is semantics possible?” Putnam connected two themes: the very possibility of semantics (as opposed to formal model theory) for natural languages and the proper semantic treatment of common nouns. Putnam observed that abstract semantic accounts are modeled on formal languages model theory: the substantial contribution is rules for logical connectives (given outside the models), whereas the lexicon (individual constants and predicates) is treated merely schematically by the models. This schematic treatment may be all that is needed for (...)
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  8. Truthmaker Semantics, Ground, and Generality.Kit Fine & Louis de Rosset - forthcoming - Topoi:1-7.
    Our aim in this paper is to extend the semantics for the kind of logic of ground developed in (deRosset and Fine, 2023). In that paper, we very briefly suggested a way of treating universal and existential quantification over a fixed domain of objects. Here we explore some options for extending the treatment to allow for a variable domain of objects.
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  9. Beyond semantic pollution: Towards a practice-based philosophical analysis of labelled calculi.Fabio De Martin Polo - 2024 - Erkenntnis:1-30.
    This paper challenges the negative attitudes towards labelled proof systems, usually referred to as semantic pollution, by arguing that such critiques overlook the full potential of labelled calculi. The overarching objective is to develop a practice-based philosophical analysis of labelled calculi to provide insightful considerations regarding their proof-theoretic and philosophical value. To achieve this, successful applications of labelled calculi and related results will be showcased, and comparisons with other relevant works will be discussed. The paper ends by advocating for a (...)
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  10. Semantics of Pictorial Space.Gabriel Greenberg - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (4):847-887.
    A semantics of pictorial representation should provide an account of how pictorial signs are associated with the contents they express. Unlike the familiar semantics of spoken languages, this problem has a distinctively spatial cast for depiction. Pictures themselves are two-dimensional artifacts, and their contents take the form of pictorial spaces, perspectival arrangements of objects and properties in three dimensions. A basic challenge is to explain how pictures are associated with the particular pictorial spaces they express. Inspiration here comes (...)
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  11. Truthmaker Semantics for Natural Language: Attitude Verbs, Modals, and Intensional Transitive Verbs.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - Theoretical Linguistics 3:159-200.
    This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. It also présents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as ‘need’, ‘look for’, ‘own’, and ‘buy’ and gives an outline of their (...)
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  12. Truthmaker Semantics for Relevant Logic.Mark Jago - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (4):681-702.
    I develop and defend a truthmaker semantics for the relevant logic R. The approach begins with a simple philosophical idea and develops it in various directions, so as to build a technically adequate relevant semantics. The central philosophical idea is that truths are true in virtue of specific states. Developing the idea formally results in a semantics on which truthmakers are relevant to what they make true. A very natural notion of conditionality is added, giving us relevant (...)
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  13. The Semantic Error Problem for Epistemic Contextualism.Patrick Michael Greenough & Dirk Kindermann - 2017 - In Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism. New York: Routledge. pp. 305--320.
    Epistemic Contextualism is the view that “knows that” is semantically context-sensitive and that properly accommodating this fact into our philosophical theory promises to solve various puzzles concerning knowledge. Yet Epistemic Contextualism faces a big—some would say fatal—problem: The Semantic Error Problem. In its prominent form, this runs thus: speakers just don’t seem to recognise that “knows that” is context-sensitive; so, if “knows that” really is context-sensitive then such speakers are systematically in error about what is said by, or how to (...)
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  14. Semantic capital: its nature, value, and curation.Luciano Floridi - 2018 - Philosophy and Technology 31 (4):481-497.
    There is a wealth of resources— ideas, insights, discoveries, inventions, traditions, cultures, languages, arts, religions, sciences, narratives, stories, poems, customs and norms, music and songs, games and personal experiences, and advertisements—that we produce, curate, consume, transmit, and inherit as humans. This wealth, which I define as semantic capital, gives meaning to, and makes sense of, our own existence and the world surrounding us. It defines who we are and enables humans to develop an individual and social life. This paper discusses (...)
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  15. Situated semantics.Varol Akman - 2008 - In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 401-418.
    Situated semantics can be regarded as an attempt at placing situational context (context of situation) at the center of all discussions of meaning. Situation theory is a theory of information content that takes context very seriously. Individuals, properties, relations, and spatiotemporal locations are basic constructs of situation theory. Individuals are conceived as invariants; having properties and standing in relations, they tend to persist in time and space. An anchoring function binds the location parameters to appropriate objects present in the (...)
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  16. Default semantics and the architecture of the mind.Alessandro Capone - 2011 - Journal of Pragmatics 43:1741–1754..
    Relationship between default semantics and modularity of mind (in particular mind reading through the principle of Relevance).
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  17. Path Semantics for Indicative Conditionals.Paolo Santorio - 2022 - Mind 131 (521):59-98.
    The literature on indicative conditionals contains two appealing views. The first is the selectional view: on this view, conditionals operate by selecting a single possibility, which is used to evaluate the consequent. The second is the informational view: on this view, conditionals don’t express propositions, but rather impose constraints on information states of speakers. Both views are supported by strong arguments, but they are incompatible on their standard formulations. Hence it appears that we have to choose between mutually exclusive options. (...)
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  18. Semantic Externalism and Psychological Externalism.Åsa Wikforss - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (1):158-181.
    Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for (...)
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  19. Is semantic information meaningful data?Luciano Floridi - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2):351-370.
    There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske‐Grice approach: meaningful and well‐formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth‐values do not supervene on (...)
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  20. Contrastive Semantics for Deontic Modals.Justin Snedegar - 2013 - In Martijn Blaauw (ed.), Contrastivism in philosophy. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
    This paper argues for contrastivism about the deontic modals, 'ought', 'must', and 'may'. A simple contrastivist semantics that predicts the desired entailment relations among these modals is offered.
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  21. Moral realism and semantic accounts of moral vagueness.Ali Abasnezhad - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (3):381-393.
    Miriam Schoenfield argues that moral realism and moral vagueness imply ontic vagueness. In particular, she argues that neither shifty nor rigid semantic accounts of vagueness can provide a satisfactory explanation of moral vagueness for moral realists. This paper constitutes a response. I argue that Schoenfield's argument against the shifty semantic account presupposes that moral indeterminacies can, in fact, be resolved determinately by crunching through linguistic data. I provide different reasons for rejecting this assumption. Furthermore, I argue that Schoenfield's rejection of (...)
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  22. Naturalizing semantics and Putnam's model-theoretic argument.Andrea Bianchi - 2002 - Episteme NS: Revista Del Instituto de Filosofía de la Universidad Central de Venezuela 22 (1):1-19.
    Since 1976 Hilary Putnam has on many occasions proposed an argument, founded on some model-theoretic results, to the effect that any philosophical programme whose purpose is to naturalize semantics would fail to account for an important feature of every natural language, the determinacy of reference. Here, after having presented the argument, I will suggest that it does not work, because it simply assumes what it should prove, that is that we cannot extend the metatheory: Putnam appears to think that (...)
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  23. Semantic expressivism for epistemic modals.Peter Hawke & Shane Steinert-Threlkeld - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (2):475-511.
    Expressivists about epistemic modals deny that ‘Jane might be late’ canonically serves to express the speaker’s acceptance of a certain propositional content. Instead, they hold that it expresses a lack of acceptance. Prominent expressivists embrace pragmatic expressivism: the doxastic property expressed by a declarative is not helpfully identified with that sentence’s compositional semantic value. Against this, we defend semantic expressivism about epistemic modals: the semantic value of a declarative from this domain is the property of doxastic attitudes it canonically serves (...)
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  24.  51
    Do Semantics Properties Involve the Future?.Yang Zhiwei - manuscript
    Temporal Externalism posits the counterintuitive claim that the semantic properties of terms are influenced not only by present and past linguistic practices but also by future linguistic practices. In this paper, I primarily introduce a new challenge to Temporal Externalism, arguing that it presupposes a meta-belief about future linguistic practices but fails to explain how this belief relates to future properties. I then briefly highlight that Jussi Haukioja’s recent defense of Temporal Externalism still does not address the challenges posed by (...)
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  25. The semantics of belief ascriptions.Michael McKinsey - 1999 - Noûs 33 (4):519-557.
    nated discussion of the semantics of such verbs. I will call this view.
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  26. Hyperintensional semantics: a Fregean approach.Mattias Skipper & Jens Christian Bjerring - 2020 - Synthese 197 (8):3535-3558.
    In this paper, we present a new semantic framework designed to capture a distinctly cognitive or epistemic notion of meaning akin to Fregean senses. Traditional Carnapian intensions are too coarse-grained for this purpose: they fail to draw semantic distinctions between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, differ in meaning. This has led some philosophers to introduce more fine-grained hyperintensions that allow us to draw semantic distinctions among co-intensional sentences. But the hyperintensional strategy has a flip-side: it risks drawing semantic distinctions (...)
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  27.  95
    Update semantics for weak necessity modals.Alex Silk - 2016 - In Olivier Roy, Allard Tamminga & Malte Willer (eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems. London, UK: College Publications. pp. 237-256.
    This paper develops an update semantics for weak necessity modals like ‘ought’ and ‘should’. I start with the basic approach to the weak/strong necessity modal distinction developed in Silk 2018: Strong necessity modals are given their familiar semantics of necessity, predicating the necessity of the prejacent of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent “weakness” of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing the assumption that the relevant worlds in which the prejacent is necessary (deontically, epistemically, etc.) need (...)
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  28. A Semantics for the Impure Logic of Ground.Louis deRosset & Kit Fine - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (2):415-493.
    This paper establishes a sound and complete semantics for the impure logic of ground. Fine (Review of Symbolic Logic, 5(1), 1–25, 2012a) sets out a system for the pure logic of ground, one in which the formulas between which ground-theoretic claims hold have no internal logical complexity; and it provides a sound and complete semantics for the system. Fine (2012b) [§§6-8] sets out a system for an impure logic of ground, one that extends the rules of the original (...)
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  29. Success Semantics, Reinforcing Satisfaction, and Sensory Inclinations.Howard Nye & Meysam Shojaeenejad - 2023 - Dialogue:1-12.
    Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's “basic desires” to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it by restricting (...)
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  30. Semantics and Context-Dependence: Towards a Strawsonian Account.Richard Heck - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 327-364.
    This paper considers a now familiar argument that the ubiquity of context -dependence threatens the project of natural language semantics, at least as that project has usually been conceived: as concerning itself with `what is said' by an utterance of a given sentence. I argue in response that the `anti-semantic' argument equivocates at a crucial point and, therefore, that we need not choose between semantic minimalism, truth-conditional pragmatism, and the like. Rather, we must abandon the idea, familiar from Kaplan (...)
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  31. Semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions.Graham Oppy - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 67 (1):1 - 18.
    This paper provides a semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions. (In this respect, the title of the paper is quite well chosen.).
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  32. The Semantic Significance of Faultless Disagreement.Michele Palmira - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (3):349-371.
    The article investigates the significance of the so-called phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement for debates about the semantics of taste discourse. Two kinds of description of the phenomenon are proposed. The first ensures that faultless disagreement raises a distinctive philosophical challenge; yet, it is argued that Contextualist, Realist and Relativist semantic theories do not account for this description. The second, by contrast, makes the phenomenon irrelevant for the problem of what the right semantics of taste discourse should be. (...)
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  33. Relating Semantics for Hyper-Connexive and Totally Connexive Logics.Jacek Malinowski & Ricardo Arturo Nicolás-Francisco - 2023 - Logic and Logical Philosophy (Special Issue: Relating Logic a):1-14.
    In this paper we present a characterization of hyper-connexivity by means of a relating semantics for Boolean connexive logics. We also show that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is Abelardian, strongly consistent, Kapsner strong and antiparadox. We give an example showing that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is not simplificative. This shows that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is not totally connexive.
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  34. Parts and Wholes in Semantics.Friederike Moltmann - 1997 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    This book present a unified semantic theory of expressions involving the notions of part and whole. It develops a theory of part structures which differs from traditional (extensional) mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions. The book presents a great range of empirical generalizations involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as 'whole', (...)
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  35. The semantics of deadnames.Taylor Koles - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (4):715-739.
    Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a (...)
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  36. A Semantics for Virtual Environments and the Ontological Status of Virtual Objects.David Leech Anderson - 2009 - APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 9 (1):15-19.
    Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ontological status of the virtual objects that populate those environments? An adequate answer to that question requires a developed semantics for virtual environments. The truth-conditions must be identified for “tree”-sentences when uttered by speakers immersed in a virtual environment (VE). It will be argued that statements about virtual objects have truth-conditions roughly comparable to the verificationist conditions popular amongst some contemporary antirealists. This does not (...)
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  37. Belief in Truthmaker Semantics.Mark Jago - forthcoming - Synthese.
    Stephen Yablo has argued that ascriptions of belief and knowledge are sensitive to subject matter and that theorising in such terms may help resolve philosophical questions about the semantics of such ascriptions. Truthmaker semantics offers a way of theorising about subject matters. My main aim in this paper is to investigate what a semantics for knowledge or belief ascriptions might look like within truthmaker semantics. I then discuss what the resulting account might have to say about (...)
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  38. Functorial Semantics for the Advancement of the Science of Cognition.Posina Venkata Rayudu, Dhanjoo N. Ghista & Sisir Roy - 2017 - Mind and Matter 15 (2):161–184.
    Our manuscript addresses the foundational question of cognitive science: how do we know? Specifically, examination of the mathematics of acquiring mathematical knowledge revealed that knowing-within-mathematics is reflective of knowing-in-general. Based on the correspondence between ordinary cognition (involving physical stimuli, neural sensations, mental concepts, and conscious percepts) and mathematical knowing (involving objective particulars, measured properties, abstract theories, and concrete models), we put forward the functorial semantics of mathematical knowing as a formalization of cognition. Our investigation of the similarity between mathematics (...)
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  39. Strongly semantic information and verisimilitude.Gustavo Cevolani - 2011 - Ethics and Politics (2):159-179.
    In The Philosophy of Information, Luciano Floridi presents a theory of “strongly semantic information”, based on the idea that “information encapsulates truth” (the so-called “veridicality thesis”). Starting with Popper, philosophers of science have developed different explications of the notion of verisimilitude or truthlikeness, construed as a combination of truth and information. Thus, the theory of strongly semantic information and the theory of verisimilitude are intimately tied. Yet, with few exceptions, this link has virtually pass unnoticed. In this paper, we briefly (...)
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  40. Success semantics: the sequel.Bence Nanay - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (1):151-165.
    The aim of this paper is to reinterpret success semantics, a theory of mental content, according to which the content of a belief is fixed by the success conditions of some actions based on this belief. After arguing that in its present form, success semantics is vulnerable to decisive objections, I examine the possibilities of salvaging the core of this proposal. More specifically, I propose that the content of some very simple, but very important, mental states, the immediate (...)
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  41. Semantic dispositionalism and the rule‐following paradox.Elek Lane - 2022 - Metaphilosophy 53 (5):685-695.
    In virtue of what does a sign have meaning? This is the question raised by Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. Semantic dispositionalism is a (type of) theory that purports to answer this question. The present paper argues that semantic dispositionalism faces a heretofore unnoticed problem, one that ultimately comes down to its reliance on unanalyzed notions of repeated types of signs. In the context of responding to the rule-following paradox—and offering a putative solution to it—this amounts to simply assuming a solution to (...)
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  42. Semantic Rules, Modal Knowledge, and Analyticity.Antonella Mallozzi - 2023 - In Duško Prelević & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology. New York, NY: Routledge.
    According to Amie Thomasson's Modal Normativism (MN), knowledge of metaphysical modality is to be explained in terms of a speaker’s mastery of semantic rules, as opposed to one’s epistemic grasp of independent modal facts. In this chapter, I outline (MN)'s account of modal knowledge (§1) and argue that more than semantic mastery is needed for knowledge of metaphysical modality. Specifically (§2), in reasoning aimed at gaining such knowledge, a competent speaker needs to further deploy essentialist principles and information. In response, (...)
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  43. The semantics of mass-predicates.Kathrin Koslicki - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):46-91.
    Along with many other languages, English has a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction between mass-occurrences of nouns and their countoccurrences. As the mass-count distinction, in my view, is best drawn between occurrences of expressions, rather than expressions themselves, it becomes important that there be some rule-governed way of classifying a given noun-occurrence into mass or count. The project of classifying noun-occurrences is the topic of Section II of this paper. Section III, the remainder of the paper, concerns the semantic differences between (...)
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  44. Better Semantics for the Pure Logic of Ground.Louis deRosset - 2015 - Analytic Philosophy 56 (3):229-252.
    Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink over the past few years exploring the nature and significance of grounding. Kit Fine has made several seminal contributions to this discussion, including an exact treatment of the formal features of grounding [Fine, 2012a]. He has specified a language in which grounding claims may be expressed, proposed a system of axioms which capture the relevant formal features, and offered a semantics which interprets the language. Unfortunately, the semantics Fine offers faces a (...)
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  45. On the Semantics of Email Addresses.Brian Rabern - manuscript
    At the turn of the century, electronic mail emerged as a core mode of communication, fundamentally transforming the way individuals and organizations interact. In this digital age, one ubiquitous representational device is the email address. Given the importance of email addresses in our lives, it is natural to ask: what do email addresses represent? And how do they represent it? Given that email addresses have a semantic interpretation, and that they have a formal syntax, it is reasonable to assume that (...)
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  46. Semantical Hierarchies and Semantical Primitives.Charles Sayward - 1975 - In Hassan Sharifi (ed.), From Meaning to Sound: Proceedings of the 1974 Mid-American Linguistics Conference, 5: 38-40. college of arts and sciences, university of nebraska.
    Quine’s way of dealing with the semantical paradoxes (Ways of Paradox, pp. 9-10) is criticized. The criticism is based on three premises: (1) no learnable language has infinitely many semantical primitives; (2) any language of which Quine’s theory is true has infinitely many semantical primitives; (3) English is a learnable language. The conclusion drawn is that Quine’s theory is not true of English.
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  47. Probabilistic semantics for epistemic modals: Normality assumptions, conditional epistemic spaces and the strength of must and might.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (4):985-1026.
    The epistemic modal auxiliaries must and might are vehicles for expressing the force with which a proposition follows from some body of evidence or information. Standard approaches model these operators using quantificational modal logic, but probabilistic approaches are becoming increasingly influential. According to a traditional view, must is a maximally strong epistemic operator and might is a bare possibility one. A competing account—popular amongst proponents of a probabilisitic turn—says that, given a body of evidence, must \ entails that \\) is (...)
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  48. The semantics and pragmatics of complex demonstratives.Ernest Lepore & Kirk Ludwig - 2000 - Mind 109 (434):199-240.
    Complex demonstratives, expressions of the form 'That F', 'These Fs', etc., have traditionally been taken to be referring terms. Yet they exhibit many of the features of quantified noun phrases. This has led some philosophers to suggest that demonstrative determiners are a special kind of quantifier, which can be paraphrased using a context sensitive definite description. Both these views contain elements of the truth, though each is mistaken. We advance a novel account of the semantic form of complex demonstratives that (...)
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  49. The semantics of existence.Friederike Moltmann - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (1):31-63.
    The notion of existence is a very puzzling one philosophically. Often philosophers have appealed to linguistic properties of sentences stating existence. However, the appeal to linguistic intuitions has generally not been systematic and without serious regard of relevant issues in linguistic semantics. This paper has two aims. On the one hand, it will look at statements of existence from a systematic linguistic point of view, in order to try to clarify what the actual semantics of such statements in (...)
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  50. Semantic dispositionalism and non-inferential knowledge.Andrea Guardo - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (3):749-759.
    The paper discusses Saul Kripke's Normativity Argument against semantic dispositionalism: it criticizes the orthodox interpretation of the argument, defends an alternative reading and argues that, contrary to what Kripke himself seems to have been thinking, the real point of the Normativity Argument is not that meaning is normative. According to the orthodox interpretation, the argument can be summarized as follows: (1) it is constitutive of the concept of meaning that its instances imply an ought, but (2) it is not constitutive (...)
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