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- Jaroslav Peregrin, Constructions and Concepts.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’.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: mind.oxfordjournals.org rci.rutgers.edu semanticsarchive.net | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: mind.oxfordjournals.org rci.rutgers.edu semanticsarchive.net | Scholar | More.. Sentences attributing beliefs, doubts, wants, and the like (propositional attitudes, in Russell's terminology) have posed a major problem for semantics. Recently the pragmatic description of language has become more systematic. I shall discuss the formalization of pragmatics, and propose an analysis of belief attribution that avoids some main problems apparently inherent in the semantic approach.
For the sentences of languages that contain operators that express the concepts of definiteness and indefiniteness, there is an unavoidable tension between a truth-theoretic semantics that delivers truth conditions for those sentences that capture their propositional contents and any model-theoretic semantics that has a story to tell about how indetifiniteness in a constituent affects the semantic value of sentences which imbed it. But semantic theories of both kinds play essential roles, so the tension needs to be resolved. I argue that (...)
