There is no consensus as to whether a Liar sentence is meaningful or not. Still, a widespread conviction with respect to Liar sentences (and other ungrounded sentences) is that, whether or not they are meaningful, they are useless . The philosophical contribution of this paper is to put this conviction into question. Using the framework of assertoric semantics , which is a semantic valuation method for languages of self-referential truth that has been developed by the author, we show (...) that certain computational problems, called query structures , can be solved more efficiently by an agent who has self-referential resources (amongst which are Liar sentences) than by an agent who has only classical resources; we establish the computational power of self-referential truth . The paper concludes with some thoughts on the implications of the established result for deflationary accounts of truth. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

I compare Stalnaker’s early take on assertoric content with the one expressed in his recent book (2014). I discern in the latter some striking implications about the semantics of proper names and assertoric content’s relation to semantics.

How does Aristotle think about sentences like ‘Every x is y’ in the Prior Analytics? A recently popular answer conceives of these sentences as expressing a mereological relationship between x and y: the sentence is true just in case x is, in some sense, a part of y. I argue that the motivations for this interpretation have so far not been compelling. I provide a new justification for the mereological interpretation. First, I prove a very general algebraic soundness and completeness (...) result that unifies the most important soundness and completeness results to date. Then I argue that this result vindicates the mereological interpretation. In contrast to previous interpretations, this argument shows how Aristotle’s conception of predication in mereological terms can do important logical work. (shrink)

The paper argues that colouring is a conventional ingredient of literal meaning characterized by a considerable degree of semantic under-determination and a high degree of context-sensitivity. The positive, though tentative, suggestion made in the paper is that whereas in the case of words such as "but" and "damn" we are dealing with words lacking in specificity, in the case of pejoratives in general, and racist jargon in particular, we are dealing with words that express concepts that purport to describe the (...) world as being in a certain way. The circumstance that in certain contexts of utterance colouring can be cancelled out, does not show that it forms a detachable part of a word's literal meaning. It only shows that to account for the interplay between context, literal meaning and assertoric content is much trickier than meets the eye. (shrink)

This thesis argues for two main points concerning the philosophy of natural language semantics. Firstly, that the objects of assertion are distinct from the entities appealed to in the compositional rules of natural language semantics. Secondly, natural languages contain context-shifting operators known as "monsters". In fact, it will be shown that these theses are simply two sides of the same coin.

The Rigidity Thesis states that no rigid term can have the same semantic content as a nonrigid one. Drawing on Dummett (1973; 1991), Evans (1979; 1982), and Lewis (1980), Stanley (1997a; 1997b; 2002) rejects the thesis since it relies on an illicit identification of compositional semantic content and the content of assertion (henceforth, assertoric content). I argue that Stanley’s critique of the Rigidity Thesis fails since it places constraints on assertoric content that cannot be satisfied by any plausible (...) notion of content appropriately related to compositional semantic content. For similar reasons, I also challenge a recent two-dimensionalist defense of Stanley by Ninan (2012). The moral is far-reaching: any theory that invokes a distinction between semantic and assertoric contents is unsatisfactory unless it can plausibly explain the connection between them. (shrink)

Speech act theory is one of the more lasting products of the linguistic movement in philosophy of the mid−Twentieth century. Within philosophy itself the movement's products did not in general prove so durable. Particularly striking in this respect is the perceived fate of what was one of the most characteristic applications of the linguistic turn in philosophy, namely the view that many traditional philosophical problems are such as to yield to an understanding of the distinctive function of a particular part (...) of language. Most typically, the crucial insight was held to be that despite appearances, the function of the part of language in question is not assertoric, or descriptive, and that the traditional problems arose at least in part from a failure to appreciate this point. Thus problems in moral philosophy were thought to yield to an appreciation that moral discourse is expressive rather than descriptive, problems in the philosophy of mind to an understanding of distinctive r×le of psychological ascriptions, and so on. The philosophical journals of the 1950s are rich with views like these. (No general term for this approach seems to have become widely accepted at the time. I shall call it "non−factualism", for what it denies, most characteristically, is the fact−stating r×le of language of a certain kind.). (shrink)

A common view relating compositional semantics and the objects of assertion holds the following: Sentences φ and ψ expresses the same proposition iff φ and ψ have the same modal profile. Following Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley argues that this view is fundamentally mistaken. According to Dummett, we must distinguish the semantic contribution a sentence makes to more complex expressions in which it occurs from its assertoric content. Stojnić insists that views which distinguish the roles of content and (...) semantic value must nevertheless ensure a tight connection between the two. But, she contends, there is a crucial disanalogy between the views that follow Lewis and the views that follow Dummett. Stanley’s Dummettian view is argued to contain a fatal flaw: On such views, there is no way to secure an appropriate connection between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. I will review the background issues from Dummett, Evans, Lewis, and Stanley, and provide a principled way of bridging the gap between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend a traditional approach to semantics, that holds that the outputs of compositional semantics are propositional, i.e. truth conditions. Though traditional, this view has been challenged on a number of fronts over the years. Since classic work of Lewis, arguments have been offered which purport to show that semantic composition requires values that are relativized, e.g. to times, or other parameters that render them no longer propositional. Focusing in recent variants of these arguments involving (...) quantification and binding, we argue that a correct understanding of how composition works gives no reason to relativize semantic values, and that propositional semantic values are in fact the preferred option. We take our argument to be mainly empirical, but along the way, we defend some more general theses. Simple propositional semantic values are viable in composition, we maintain, because composition is itself a complex phenomenon, involving multiple modes of composition. Furthermore, some composition principles make adjustments to the meanings of constituents in the course of composition. These adjustments are by triggered syntactic environments. We argue such small contributions of meaning from syntactic structure are acceptable. (shrink)

We show how a semantics based on Aristotle’s texts and ecthetic proofs can be reconstructed. All truth conditions are given by means of set inclusion. Perfect syllogisms reveal to be valid arguments that deserve a validity proof. It turns out of these proofs that transitivity of set inclusion is the necessary and sufficient condition for the validity and perfection of a syllogism. The proofs of validity for imperfect syllogisms are direct proofs without conversion in a calculus of natural deduction. (...) Transitivity of set inclusion turns out to be a necessary condition for the validity of imperfect syllogisms. As a consequence, it can be established what the main metalogical difference between a perfect and an imperfect syllogism is. The validity of the laws of conversion is also obtained by direct proofs. Finally, it is shown that and explained why some imperfect syllogisms satisfy the definition of a perfect syllogism. (shrink)

We give a simple definition of validity for syllogisms involving necessary and assertoric premises which validates all and only the Aristotelian apodeictic syllogisms.

I show that in the context of proof-theoretic semantics, Dummett’s distinction between the assertoric meaning of a sentence and its ingredient sense can be seen as a distinction between two proof-theoretic meanings of a sentence: 1.Meaning as a conclusion of an introduction rule in a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof system. 2.Meaning as a premise of an introduction rule in a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof system. The effect of this distinction on compositionality of proof-theoretic meaning is discussed.

In this paper I argue against a sharp separation of semantics from pragmatics. While it may be useful to consider semantics independently of pragmatics, in some cases this strategy may lead us astray. First, I make a methodological point. Competing semantic analyses are often presented as supported by competing semantic intuitions of native speakers. Functional considerations are pragmatic considerations which should affect our choice of semantics. These are inferences from the linguistic goals the speakers actually achieve to (...) the meanings their expressions must therefore have. Second, there are linguistic expressions whose semantic meaning is a function of their pragmatic uses. I consider two examples. First, the logicians' debate over the universal analysis of conditionals in natural language. The participants in the debate all ignore conditional forms other than the assertoric and subjunctive. In particular they ignore the conditional speech-act reading. The meaning of the conditional is related to its function: to restrict the commitment of a given speech-act to special conditions. A functional proof of the existence of such conditionals is given, thus showing that the different semantics account only for part of the relevant facts. The second example concerns vague terms. I claim that one of their main uses is to help us identify objects by reference not to their absolute properties but relative to their background. This function cannot be performed by the use of non-vague terms. Vague terms are context dependent and may in some contexts be used non-vaguely and refer to distinct objects in the discourse domain. In a way, what these terms end up denoting is a function of the use of predicates to partition a given domain. (shrink)

The Operator Argument against eternalism holds that having non-vacuous tense operators in the language is incompatible with the claim that every proposition has its truth-value eternally. Assuming that (1) there are non-vacuous tense operators, (2) tense operators operate on propositions and (3) tense operators which operate on eternal entities are vacuous, it may be argued that eternalism is false. In this paper, I examine the Operator Argument. The goal is threefold. First, I want to present some aspects of the debate (...) in a more elaborate way, especially those concerning formal matters. Secondly, I will argue that eternalism can escape the Operator Argument. There are two main strategies for handling the Operator Argument. The first one is based on replacing temporal operators with object-language quantifiers. The second rejects the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content. My third goal is to show that none of them is as good as the strategy that adopts Timestamp Semantics (Fritz in Philosl Stud 176:2933–2959, 2019). I am going to argue that the quantificational treatment of tenses is compatible with temporalism and that the arguments for rejecting the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content provide, in fact, a motivation for the temporalist position. At the end, I will develop Timestamp Semantics by providing a novel formalization of it, and defend it against three potential counter-arguments. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of Kant's theory of judgment-forms. It argues that it is not true in Kant's logic that assertoric or apodeictic judgments imply problematic ones, in the manner in which necessity and truth imply possibility in even the weakest systems of modern modal logic. The chapter then discusses theories of judgment-form after Kant, the theory of quantification, Frege's Begriffsschrift, C. I. Lewis and the beginnings of modern modal logic, the proof-theoretic approach to modal logic, possible (...) world semantics, correspondence theory, and modality and quantification. (shrink)

There are various reasons one might think that the semantic content of occurrences of sentences does not coincide with assertoric content –content of belief and assertion– corresponding to those sentences. But if a semantic theory exploiting such distinction is to play a role in explaining communication, there needs to be a tight connection between the two types of content. Drawing upon the considerations of McDowell and Evans concerning rigidity, Stanley proposes to extend Lewis’ argument for the distinction between the (...) two types of content –an argument concerning behavior of certain English language operators– to argue that modals do not operate on assertoric, but merely on semantic contents of sentences they embed. I argue that the Dummett-Evans-Stanley line of argument fails due to its inability to explain the connection between semantic and assertoric content. Unable to provide a plausible way of recovering assertoric content from semantic content, the theory renders successful communication mysterious. The moral of its failure is far-reaching –any theory that appeals to the distinction between these two types of content remains less than fully satisfactory unless the challenge of accounting for their connection is met. (shrink)

It is argued that propositions cannot be the compositional semantic values of sentences (in context) simply due to issues stemming from the compositional semantics of modal operators (or modal quantifiers). In particular, the fact that the arguments for double indexing generalize to multiple indexing exposes a fundamental tension in the default philosophical conception of semantic theory. This provides further motivation for making a distinction between two sentential semantic contents—what (Dummett 1973) called “ingredient sense” and “assertoric content”.

Assertoric sentences are sentences which admit of truth or falsity. Non-assertoric sentences, imperatives and interrogatives, have long been a source of difficulty for the view that a theory of truth for a natural language can serve as the core of a theory of meaning. The trouble for truth-theoretic semantics posed by non-assertoric sentences is that, prima facie, it does not make sense to say that imperatives, such as 'Cut your hair', or interrogatives such as 'What time (...) is it?', are truth or false. Thus, the vehicle for giving the meaning of a sentence by using an interpretive truth theory, the T-sentence, is apparently unavailable for non-assertoric sentences. This paper shows how to incorporate non-assertoric sentences into a theory of meaning that gives central place to an interpretive truth theory for the language, without, however, reducing the non-assertorics to assertorics, or treating their utterances as semantically equivalent to one or more utterances of assertoric sentences. Four proposals for how to incorporate non-assertoric sentences into a broadly truth-theoretic semantics are reviewed. The proposals fall into two classes, those that attempt to explain the meaning of non-assertoric sentences solely by appeal to truth conditions, and those that attempt to explain the meaning of non-assertroic sentences by appeal to compliance conditions, which can be treated as one variety of fulfillment conditions for sentences of which truth conditions are another variety. The paper argues that none of the extant approaches is successful, but develops a version of the generalized fulfillment approach which avoids the difficulties of previous approaches and still exhibits a truth theory as the central component of a compositional meaning theory for all sentences of natural language. (shrink)

We discuss four distinct semantic consequence relations which are based on Strong Kleene theories of truth and which generalize the notion of classical consequence to 3-valued logics. Then we set up a uniform signed tableau calculus, which we show to be sound and complete with respect to each of the four semantic consequence relations. The signs employed by our calculus are,, and, which indicate a strict assertion, strict denial, tolerant assertion and tolerant denial respectively. Recently, Ripley applied the strict–tolerant account (...) of assertion and denial to develop a new approach to truth and alethic paradox, which we call the Strict–Tolerant Conceptionof Truth. The paper aims to contribute to our understanding of STCT in at least three ways. First, by developing the strict–tolerant calculus.Second, by developing a semantic version of the strict–tolerant calculus, which informs us about the assertoric possibilities relative to a fixed ground model. Third, by showing that the strict–tolerant calculus and assertoric semantics jointly suggest that STCT's claim that the strict and tolerant can be understood in terms of one another has to be reconsidered. (shrink)