Online research in philosophy

0. Abstract In this paper, I argue that although the behavior of adjectives in context poses a serious challenge to the principle of compositionality of content, in the end such considerations do not defeat the principle. The first two sections are devoted to the precise statement of the challenge; the rest of the paper presents a semantic analysis of a large class of adjectives that provides a satisfactory answer to it. In section 1, I formulate the context thesis, according to which the content of a complex expression depends on the context of its utterance only insofar as the contents of its constituents do. If the context thesis is false, the content of some complex expression is not compositionally determined. In section 2, using an example due to Charles Travis, I construct an objection to the context thesis based on the behavior of the adjective ‘green’. In section 3 and 4, I look at some of the difficulties surrounding the semantics of ‘good’, which provide the motivation for the thesis that most adjectives are contextually incomplete one-place predicates. In section 5, I discuss how ‘green’ and other color adjectives can be treated within such a semantic theory. Since this theory is compatible with the context thesis, the objection against the compositionality of content looses its force.

Semantic minimalism is an attempt to answer two questions: ‘what counts as semantic content?’ and ‘what work does semantic content do?’. The answer the theory gives to both these questions is minimal (hence the name): first, semantic content is exhausted by the contributions made by the syntactic constituents of a sentence together with their mode of composition. Second the role played by this kind of content is much more constrained than is often supposed. With respect to the first question, semantic minimalism holds that content is entirely determined by syntax – there is nothing to be had ‘for free’, as it were, at the semantic level. Specifically, minimalism holds that it is not possible for features of the context of utterance to permeate semantic content unless their presence is demanded by something at the syntactic level. Furthermore, the syntactic elements which can trigger pragmatic intrusion are themselves limited to unarguably contextsensitive elements, such as words like ‘here’ and ‘now’. (Thus minimalism is not the thesis that semantic content is context-invariant, but that contextual infiltration of semantics is very limited.) So take utterances of the following sentences.

This essay investigates whether or not we should think that the things we say are identical to the things our sentences mean. It is argued that these theoretical notions should be distinguished, since assertoric content does not respect the compositionality principle. As a paradigmatic example, Kaplan's formal language LD is shown to exemplify a failure of compositionality. It is demonstrated that by respecting the theoretical distinction between the objects of assertion and compositional values certain conflicts between compositionality and contextualism are avoided. This includes the conflict between eternalism and the semantics of tense, the embedding problems for contextualism about epistemic modals and taste claims, and the conflict between direct reference and the semantics of bound pronouns (and monstrous operators). After presenting the theoretical picture which distinguishes assertoric content from compositional semantic value, some objections to the picture are addressed. In so doing, the objection from King (2003) stemming from apparent complications with the interaction of temporal expressions and attitude reports is assessed and shown to be non-threatening.

From the perspective of certain contextualists, the most worrisome theses of Cappelen & Lepore’s Insensitive Semantics would seem to be: T1: The only context sensitive items are the basic and obvious ones, i.e., pronouns, demonstratives, etc.; T2: Once referents are assigned to these basic and obvious items in a (declarative) sentence, that sentence has truth conditions; T3: This truth-conditional content is asserted when the sentence is used; T4: The content of the assertion made is not thereby fixed, however, because speech act content depends upon features beyond the utterance context; T5: The relativized truth conditions are psychologically relevant.

Semantic contextualism is a view about the meanings of utterances. The relevant notion of meaning is that of what is said by an utterance, as it is sometimes put, of the content of the utterance. Semantic contextualism (which I will henceforth simply label “contextualism”) holds that the content of an utterance is shaped in far-reaching and unobvious ways by the circumstances, the context, in which it is uttered. Two utterances of the same sentence might vary in content as a result of differences in their respective contexts that do not map onto any obvious indexical elements in the sentence.

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an utterance as new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way.

I suggest a way of extending Stalnaker’s account of assertion to allow for centered content. In formulating his account, Stalnaker takes the content of assertion to be uncentered propositions: entities that are evaluated for truth at a possible world. I argue that the content of assertion is sometimes centered: the content is evaluated for truth at something within a possible world. I consider Andy Egan’s proposal for extending Stalnaker’s account to allow for assertions with centered content. I argue that Egan’s account does not succeed. Instead, I propose an account on which the contents of assertion are identified with sets of multi-centered worlds. I argue that such a view not only provides a plausible account of how assertions can have centered content, but also preserves Stalnaker’s original insight that successful assertion involves the reduction of shared possibilities.

In Hawthorne and Magidor 2009, we presented an argument against Stalnaker’s meta-semantic framework. In this paper we address two critical responses to our paper: Stalnaker 2009, and Almotahari and Glick 2010. Sections 1–4 are devoted to addressing Stalnaker’s response and sections 5–8 to addressing Almotahari and Glick’s. We pay special attention (Sect. 2) to an interesting argument that Stalnaker offers to bolster the transparency of presupposition (an argument that, if successful, could also form the basis of a defence of the KK principle).

We motivate the idea that presupposition is a transparent attitude. We then explain why epistemic opacity is not a serious problem for Robert Stalnaker's theory of content and conversation. We conclude with critical remarks about John Hawthorne and Ofra Magidor's alternative theory.

Hawthorne and Magidor's criticisms of the model of presupposition and assertion that I have used and defended are all based on a rejection of some transparency or introspection of assumptions about speaker presupposition. This response to those criticisms aims first to clarify, and then to defend, the required transparency assumptions. It is argued, first, that if the assumptions are properly understood, some prima facie problems for them do not apply, second, that rejecting the assumptions has intuitively implausible consequences, and third, that the 'margin of error' argument against the principle of positive introspection has a false premiss. The paper concludes with a response to a criticism of what Hawthorne and Magidor call 'the uniformity principle' that is used in the model to explain some pragmatic phenomena.