Online research in philosophy

Formal semantics is an approach to SEMANTICS1, the study of meaning, with roots in logic, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, and since the 1980’s a core area of linguistic theory. Characteristics of formal semantics to be treated in this article include the following: Formal semanticists treat meaning as mind-independent (though abstract), contrasting with the view of meanings as concepts “in the head” (see I-LANGUAGE AND E-LANGUAGE and MEANING EXTERNALISM AND INTERNALISM); formal semanticists distinguish semantics from knowledge of semantics (Lewis 1975, Cresswell 1978), which has consequences for the notion of semantic COMPETENCE. A central part of the meaning of a sentence on this approach is its TRUTH CONDITIONS, and most although not all formal semantics is model-theoretic, relating linguistic expressions to model-theoretically constructed semantic values cast in terms of truth, REFERENCE, and possible worlds. This sets formal semantics apart from approaches which view semantics as relating a sentence just to a representation on another linguistic “level” (LOGICAL FORM) or a representation in an innate LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT. The formal semanticist could accept such representations as an aspect of semantics but would insist on asking what the model-theoretic semantic interpretation of the given representationlanguage is (Lewis 1970). Formal semantics is centrally concerned with COMPOSITIONALITY at the SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE, how the meanings of larger constituents are built up from the meanings of their parts on the basis of their syntactic structure, and with the relation between compositional SENTENCE MEANING and meaning in discourse.

Two-dimensional semantics is a theory in the philosophy of language that provides an account of meaning which is sensitive to the distinction between necessity and apriority. Usually, this theory is presented in an informal manner. In this thesis, I take first steps in formalizing it, and use the formalization to present some considerations in favor of two-dimensional semantics. To do so, I define a semantics for a propositional modal logic with operators for the modalities of necessity, actuality, and apriority that captures the relevant ideas of two-dimensional semantics. I use this to show that some criticisms of two-dimensional semantics that claim that the theory is incoherent are not justified. I also axiomatize the logic, and compare it to the most important proposals in the literature that define similar logics. To indicate that two-dimensional semantics is a plausible semantic theory, I give an argument that shows that all theorems of the logic can be philosophically justified independently of two-dimensional semantics.

The distinction between the semantic content of a sentence or utterance and its use is widely employed in formal semantics. Semantic minimalism in particular understands this distinction as a sharp dichotomy. I argue that if we accept such a dichotomy, there would be no reason to posit the existence of semantic contents at all. I examine and reject several arguments raised in the literature that might provide a rationale for assuming semantic contents, in this sense, exist, and conclude that Ockham’s razor should be applied to these postulated entities. Since the notion of “semantic content” doubles both as what a semantic theory is a priori supposed to account for and as the product of that same theory, it is methodologically unsound to appeal to this notion to fend off criticisms of and counterexamples to semantic theories.

There is an important family of semantic notions that are applied to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts--as when one says that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Christopher Hill presents a theory of the content of such notions. That theory is largely deflationary in spirit. It represents a broad range of semantic notions free from substantive metaphysical and empirical presuppositions. He also explains the relationship of mirroring or semantic correspondence linking thoughts to reality.

We sketch an account according to which the semantic concepts themselves are not pathological and the pathologies that attend the semantic predicates arise because of the intention to impose on them a role they cannot fulfill, that of expressing semantic concepts for a language that includes them. We provide a simplified model of the account and argue in its light that (i) a consequence is that our meaning intentions are unsuccessful, and such semantic predicates fail to express any concept, and that (ii) in light of this it is incorrect to characterize the pathology simply as semantic inconsistency; a more nuanced view of the problem is needed. We also show that the defects of the semantic predicates need not undercut the use of a truth theory in a compositional semantics for a language containing them because the meaning theory per se need not involve commitment to the axioms of the truth theory it exploits.

A lot of us have given up on the idea that there will be a naturalistic account of the relation of semantic reference and so have resolved to formulate our theories of semantics and communication without appeal to semantic reference. Still, there is a resilient intuition to the effect that I know the extensions of the terms of my language. This paper explicates that intuition without yielding to it. The key idea is to give a “skeptical” account of what it is to “know the meaning” of a word, by which I mean an account of the status that is granted to a person in saying that he or she “knows the meaning” of a word.

It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which Kripke’s work has changed the way we do philosophy. He has been compared to Socrates and touted as “arguably the world’s greatest living philosopher.” 1 The London Review of Books proclaims that “philosophers are busily rewriting all of semantics (and a good deal of epistemology) in Kripkean terms.” Just what are these terms? The central semantic notion is that of rigid designation, by now a household name. Kripke (Kripke 1972 (henceforth NN)) says that a rigid designator is something that designates the same object in every possible world where it designates at all. Kripke himself has been reluctant to give a theoretical account of rigid designation, preferring instead to talk in terms of a ‘better picture’ which comports with intuition but it seems reasonably clear that Kripke intends this to be a semantic property that some words have (like names and natural kind terms) and that others lack (like definite descriptions). This ‘better picture’ has been developed rigorously by Michael Devitt into a theory (Devitt 1974; Devitt 1981a; Devitt and Sterelny 1999). In the meantime attention has shifted from a general discussion of what rigid designation is to the question of whether and how rigid designation works for natural kind terms like ‘gold,’ and ‘tiger’ (Devitt forthcoming).

“The expression ‘free logic’ is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘free of existence assumptions with respect to its terms, general and singular’.”1 Classical quantification theory is not a free logic in this sense, as its standard formulations commonly assume that every singular term in every model is assigned a referent, an element of the universe of discourse. Indeed, since singular terms include not only singular constants, but also variables2, standard quantification theory may be regarded as involving even the assumption of the existence of the values of its variables, in accordance with Quine’s famous dictum: “to be is to be the value of a variable”.

As a class of terms and mental representations, proper names and mental names possess an important function that outstrips their semantic and psycho-semantic functions as common, rigid devices of direct reference and singular mental representations of their referents, respectively. They also function as abstract linguistic markers that signal and underscore their referents' individuality. I promote this thesis to explain why we give proper names to certain particulars, but not others; to account for the transfer of singular thought via communication with proper names; and, more generally, to support a cognitivist, not acquaintance or instrumentalist, theory of singular thought.