I investigate the semantics of conditionals with proposition-taking attitude expressions in their consequents. I defend a “face-value” interpretation of non-doxastic versions, arguing that everyone is committed to the truth of such interpretations in circumstances that would otherwise prompt theorists to interpret them in other ways. I do this by arguing from the obvious acceptability of attitude ascriptions with ‘ever’ free relatives. Doxastic conditionals require complicating my account somewhat; I show how to demarcate the class, and then argue that we aren’t (...) committed to the truth of a face-value interpretation of such conditionals. I then provide the details of all the relevant interpretations; one main benefit of my account is that it requires little or no semantic novelty, despite the difficulty of the data I attempt to account for. (shrink)

There is a peculiar class of degree modifiers, represented by _very_ in English, that can occur in definite descriptions with no apparent gradable property, such as _the very man we saw yesterday_. These modifiers are commonly assumed to have the same mechanism of modification as regular degree modifiers, like _really_ and _extremely_. This paper argues that this assumption is fallacious. Modification by _very_ and its kin involves a special mechanism that crucially relies on the availability of a context shift of (...) a particular kind. This special mechanism explains the appearance of _very_ in definite descriptions with no gradable properties and also accounts for a number of additional facts about the distribution of _very_. (shrink)

Predicates within many conceptual classes are intuited as mutually exclusive. Based on these predicates’ interaction with logical vocabulary like _and_ or _also_, however, this paper argues that they are in fact underlyingly consistent; the strong intuited meanings arise from semantic exhaustification. In addition to demonstrating that exhaustification is more widespread than previously believed, this paper also shows that this particular exhaustification effect behaves in a hitherto undescribed manner. Indeed, a predicate’s exhaustification is always computed locally at the level of the (...) predicate, rather than the clause or sentence containing it. (shrink)

The paper formalizes a change of camera angle on the classic Stalnakerian account of assertion, foregrounding that the speaker is presenting herself as though she knows the sentence she’s uttered to be true, and deriving context update from a proposal that the context set be modified so as to become a member of the same property of epistemic states as the speaker’s. The resulting formalization is one on which often, but crucially not always, an assertion serves to propose that the (...) context set be intersected with the denotation of the sentence that has been uttered. Rather than assigning ad hoc update effects to epistemic modals, exceptional updates for epistemic modals fall out of the interaction between the speaker-oriented epistemicity of epistemic modals and the speaker-oriented epistemicity of assertion. This circumvents arguments that disagreement over epistemic modals is fatal to a solipsistic contextualist account of their semantics. The model builds a bridge from truth-conditional semantics to expressivist update effects via a uniform conception of assertive update, and shows how relativist effects can be derived using a relativist illocutionary machinery, rather than a relativist semantic machinery. (shrink)

The dominant model of linguistic communication in current philosophy of language, semantics and formal pragmatics is centered around the idea that communication involves interlocutors coordinating with respect to a single body of information, the common ground. This body of information is understood to serve two central roles: it is the target of speech acts, and constitutes the information available to interlocutors for planning and interpreting utterances. In this paper, I provide a series of examples which show that, contra the dominant (...) model, the information available to interlocutors cannot be modeled as common ground information. The examples involve interpreters making use of background information which cannot become common ground either because the interpreter refuses to accept it, or because the communicative situation is what Harris (2020) calls _publicity averse_. I consider and disarm a variety of responses that might be offered on behalf of the common ground view, including alternative construals of acceptance and of publicity. I demonstrate that a model of communication in which interlocutors maintain separate representations of their own and their interlocutors' information states easily accommodates these cases, taking as an example the model due to Heller and Brown-Schmidt (2023). I end the paper with the observation that my conclusions do not pose any threat to formal models of dynamic semantics/pragmatics, as these can be, and in some cases already are, interpreted as modelling the evolution of individual information states. (shrink)