Formal semantics is an enterprise which accounts for meaning in formal, mathematical terms, in the expectation of providing a helpful explication1 of the concept of the meaning of specific word kinds (such as logical ones), or of words and expressions generally. Its roots go back to Frege, who proposed exempting concepts, meanings of predicative expressions, from the legislation of psychology and relocating them under that of mathematics. This started a spectacular enterprise, fostered at first within formal logic and later moving (...) into the realm of natural languages, and featuring a series of eminent scholars, from Tarski and Carnap to Montague and David Lewis. Partly independently of this, Frege set the agenda for a long-term discussion of the question of what a natural language is, his own contribution being that language should be seen not as a matter of subjective psychology, but rather as a reality objective in the sense in which mathematics is objective. His formal semantics, then, was just an expression of this conception of language. And many theoreticians now take it for granted that formal semantics is inseparably connected with a Platonist conception of language. Moreover, the more recent champions of formal semantics, Montague and David Lewis, took for granted that natural language is nothing else than a structure of the very kind envisaged by the theories of formal logicians. While Montague claims quite plainly that there is no substantial difference between formal and natural languages ("I reject the contention," he says, 1974, p. 188, "that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages"), Lewis states that it is fully correct to say that a linguistic community entertains a language in the form of a mathematical structure ("we can say", states Lewis, 1975, p.. (shrink)

In considering the very possibility of deviant logic, we face the following question: what makes us see an operator of one logical system as a deviant version of an operator of another system? Why not see it simply as a different operator? Why do we see, say, intuitionist implication as an operator 'competing' with classical implication? Is it only because both happen to be called implications?1 It is clear that if we want to make cross-systemic comparisons, we need an 'Archimedean (...) point' external to the systems compared. Some logicians and philosophers, including Quine (1986), come close to saying that no such Archimedean point is available, and hence that there can be no deviant logics, for if two operators are governed by different axioms, then they are simply two different operators (or, if you prefer, operators with different meanings). From this viewpoint, intuitionist implication is no less different from classical implication than, say, intuitionist or classical conjunction. This conclusion is indeed plausible if we consider logical calculi simply as algebraic structures2; however, things are different if we see them as a means of accounting for something that is already 'there' before we establish the structures and is to be explicated by them. From such a perspective, two operators of different systems may be variants of the same operator in virtue of the fact that they are both means of capturing the same pretheoretical item. What might these items be? Sometimes it seems that logicians tacitly assume that there are some mythical archetypes of implication, conjunction etc., located somewhere in some Platonic heaven or somehow underlying the a priori structures of our mind, which logic tries to capture (for better or worse). However, when it comes to the comparison of the concrete outcomes of our logical efforts, say the classical and the intuitionist implications with the archetypal Implication, the latter can never be materialized so distinctly as to be of any help. A more constructive proposal is that the operators are related to elements or constructions of our language.. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, semantic theory has been marked by a continuing shift from a static view of meaning to a dynamic one. The increasing interest in extending semantic analysis from isolated sentences to larger units of discourse has fostered the intensive study of anaphora and coreference, and this has engendered a shift from viewing meaning as truth conditions to viewing it as the potential to change the "informational context".

Some twenty years ago, semanticists of natural language came to be overwhelmed by the problem of semantic analysis of belief sentences (and sentences reporting other kinds of propositional attitudes): the trouble was that sentences of the shapes X believes that A and X believes that B appeared to be able to have different truth values even in cases when A and B shared the same intension, i.e. were, from the viewpoint of intensional semantics, synonymous 1 . Thus, taking intensional semantics (...) for granted, belief sentences appeared to violate the principle of intersubstitutivity of synonyms. The verdict of the gurus of intensional semantics was that hence intensional semantics is inadequate, or at least insufficient for the purposes of analysis of propositional attitudes; and that we need a kind of a ‘hyperintensional semantics’. (shrink)