Online research in philosophy

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but non-singular logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets, we arrive at a Russellian paradox when characterizing the semantics of mass nouns. Likewise, a semantics of mass nouns based upon predicate logic and mereological sums is too weak, since it cannot characterize the “intermediary” construals that sentences containing mass nouns may receive. We then develop an account where mass nouns are treated as non-singular terms, which may refer to several things at once. This semantics is faithful to the intuition that, if there are eight pieces of silverware on a table, the speaker refers to eight things at once when he says: “The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy”. We show that this account provides a satisfactory semantics for a wide range of sentences, including cases often seen as difficult, like “The gold on the table weighs seven ounces” (Bunt 1985) and “All phosphorus is either red or black” (Roeper 1983).

We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language phenomena may become nearly trivial.

This paper concerns the semantics of belief-sentences. I pass over ontologically lavish theories which appeal to impossible worlds, or other points of reference which contain more than possible worlds. I then refute ontologically stingy, quotational theories. My own theory employs the techniques of possible worlds semantics to elaborate a Fregean analysis of belief-sentences. In a belief-sentence, the embedded clause does not have its usual reference, but refers rather to its own semantic structure. I show how this theory can accommodate quantification into belief-contexts. I close with skirmishes against the threat posed by the Liar Paradox.

Average-NPs, such as the one in the title of this paper, have been claimed to be ‘linguistically identical’ to any other definite-NPs but at the same time to be ‘semantically inconsistent’ with these other definite-NPs. To some this is an ironclad proof of the irrelevance of semantics to linguistics. We argue that both of the initial claims are wrong: average-NPs are not ‘linguistically identical’ to other definite-NPs but instead show a number of interesting divergences, and we provide a plausible semantic account for them that is not ‘semantically inconsistent’ with the account afforded other definite-NPs but in fact blends quite nicely with one standard account of the semantics for NPs.

I will try to do three things in this paper. First, I want to situate certain problems in natural language semantics with respect to larger trends in logicism, including: (i) Attempts by positivist philosophers earlier in this century to provide a logical basis for the physical sciences; (ii) Attempts by linguists and logicians to develop a “natural language ontology” (and, presumably, a logical language that is related to this ontology by formally explicit rules) that would serve as a framework for natural language semantics.

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’.

Philosophers who accept tropes generally agree that tropes do play a role in the semantics of natural language, namely as the objects of reference of nominalizations of adjectives, such as 'Socrates’ wisdom' or 'the beauty of the landscape'. In fact, a philosophical discussion of the ontology of tropes can hardly do without the use of such nominalizations. In this paper, I will argue that tropes play a further important role in the semantics of natural language, namely in the semantics of bare demonstratives like 'this' and 'that' in what in linguistics is called identificational sentences.

A celebrated argument for the claim that natural languages are compositional is the learnability argument. Briefly: for it to be possible to learn an entire natural language, which has infinitely many sentences, the language must have a compositional semantics. This argument has two main problems: One of them concerns the difference between compositionality and computability: if the argument is good at all, it only shows that the language must have a computable semantics, which allows speakers to compute the meanings of new sentences. But a semantics may be computable without being compositional (and vice versa). Why would we want the semantics to be compositional over and above being computable? The learnability argument doesn’t tell us.

Call a semantics for singular terms *extensionalist* if it embraces (1) and *classical* if it embraces (2).

1. The meaning of a singular term is exhausted by its reference. 2. The reference of a singular term is an entity that is logically simple.

Call a semantics *adequate* if it distinguishes material identity (a = b) from formal identity (a = a).

Frege reacts to the inadequacy of classical extensionalist semantics by rejecting (1). This he does without a sideways glance at (2), whose background ontology, an "ontology of individuals" (van Heijenoort's term), Frege implicitly accepts.

In contrast, my account of the difference between material and formal identity replaces that background ontology with one whose ground-level objects are ontologically differentiated and logically complex. The semantics I urge for singular terms, while *extensionalist* in the sense of (1), is thus a non-classical semantics in which singular terms take structured individuals, or complexes (as I will say), as their referents. For such individuals, unlike those of Frege's ontology, keep a = b and a = a apart.

A standard view of the semantics of natural language sentences or utterances is that a sentence has a particular logical structure and is assigned truth-conditional content on the basis of that structure. Such a semantics is assumed to be able to capture the logical properties of sentences, including necessary truth, contradiction and valid inference; our knowledge of these properties is taken to be part of our semantic competence as native speakers of the language. The following examples pose a problem for this view of semantics.