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A relativized version of Tarski's T-scheme is introduced as a new principle of the truth predicate. Under the relativized T-scheme, the paradoxical objects, such as the Liarsentence and Jourdain's card sequence, are found to have certain relative contradictoriness. That is, they are contradictory only in some frames in the sense that any valuation admissible for them in these frames will lead to a contradiction. It is proved that for any positive integer n, the n-jump liarsentence is (...) contradictory in and only in those frames containing at least an n-jump odd cycle. In particular, the Liarsentence is contradictory in and only in those frames containing at least an odd cycle. The Liarsentence is also proved to be less contradictory than Jourdain's card sequence: the latter must be contradictory in those frames where the former is so, but not vice versa. Generally, the relative contradictoriness is the common characteristic of the paradoxical objects, but different paradoxical objects may have different relative contradictoriness. (shrink)

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In dynamic epistemic logic and other fields, it is natural to considerrelativization as an operator taking sentences to sentences. When using the ideas and methods of dynamic logic, one would like to iterate operators. This leads to iteratedrelativization. We are also concerned with the transitive closure operation, due to its connection to common knowledge. We show that for three fragments of the logic of iteratedrelativization and transitive closure, the satisfiability problems are fi1 11–complete. Two (...) of these fragments do not include transitive closure. We also show that the question of whether asentence in these fragments has a finite (tree) model is fi0 01–complete. These results go via reduction to problems concerning domino systems. (shrink)

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Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. UnderGrillo’s (2009)Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and thesentence processing system. Specifically, intervention of the subject DP in the movement dependency is expected to generate a minimality violation whenever processing limitations render the moved object underspecified, resulting in compromised comprehension. In the present study, assuming Generalized Minimality, we compared (...) the processing of object relatives with the processing of subject control in ditransitives, which, like object relatives, instantiates a syntactic dependency across an intervening DP. This comparison is justified by the current debate on whether Control should be analyzed as movement: if control involves movement of the controller DP, as proposed byHornstein (1999), a parallel between the processing of object relatives and subject control in ditransitives may be anticipated on the basis of intervention. In addition, we explored whether general cognitive factors contribute to complexity effects ascribed to movement across a DP. Sixty-nine adult speakers of European Portuguese read sentences and answered comprehension probes in a self-paced reading task with moving-window display, comprising four experimental conditions:Subject Relatives;Object Relatives;Subject Control;Object Control. Furthermore, participants performed four supplementary tasks, serving as measures of resistance to interference, lexical knowledge, working memory capacity and lexical access ability. The results from the reading task showed that whereas object relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, subject control was not harder to process than object control, arguing against recent movement accounts of control. Furthermore, we found that whereas object relative complexity effects assessed by response times to comprehension probes interacted with Reading Span, object relative complexity effects assessed by comprehension accuracy and reading times did not interact with any of the supplementary tasks. We discuss these results in light of Generalized Minimality and the hypothesis of modularity in syntactic processing (Caplan and Waters, 1999). (shrink)

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Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like 'right' and 'wrong'. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizessentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. However, I argue that a version of moral contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizingsentence (...) truth to contexts of assessment. This version of moral contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds. (shrink)

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I provide a compact reformulation of Carnap’s conditions of adequacy for the analytic and the synthetic component of a theory and show that, contrary to arguments by Winnie and Demopoulos, Carnap’s conditions of adequacy need not be supplemented by another condition. This has immediate implications for the analytic component of reduction sentences.

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Relativism offers an ingenious way of accommodating most of our intuitions about 'know': the truth-value of sentences containing 'know' is a function of parameters determined by a context of use and a context of assessment. This sort of double-indexing provides a more adequate account of the linguistic data involving 'know' than does standard contextualism. However, relativism has come under recent attack: it supposedly cannot account for the factivity of 'know', and it entails, counterintuitively, that circumstances of evaluation have features that (...) cannot be shifted by any intensional operator. I offer replies to these objections on behalf of the relativist. I then argue that a version of contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizingsentence truth to contexts of assessment. This version of contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds. (shrink)

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This chapter contains sections titled: Allergy to absolute truth Provisionality and truth Truth versus verification Truth and fixity Transparency, Tarski, and Carnap Truth and certainty Sentences as truth candidates Theoretical terms Varieties of instrumentalism Pragmatism and instrumentalism Systems, simplicity, reduction Crises in science Reduction and expansion.

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Puzzles about sentences containing expressions of certain sorts, such as predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and ‘know’, have spawned families of views that go by the names of Contextualism and Relativism. In the case of predicates of personal taste, which I will be focusing on, contextualist views say that the contents of sentences like “Uni is delicious” and “The Aristocrats is hilarious” vary somehow with the context of utterance. Such asentence semantically expresses different propositions in different contexts, (...) depending on what standard or perspective (or whose standard or perspective) is implicitly adverted to. According to relativist views, the propositional content of such asentence is fixed, but what it takes for that proposition to be true varies somehow with the context, depending on the relevant standard or perspective. I will argue that such views are neither well supported by the data nor well motivated by the puzzles themselves. Even so, there is an element of truth in each. I will sketch an alternative view, dubbed Radical Invariantism, according to which the appearance of context sensitivity is illusory. Rather than impute either kind of context sensitivity to these sentences or to their contents, Radical Invariantism says that these sentences are distinguished by what they don’t do. Because they are not explicitly relativized, they leave a certain semantic slack. They fall short of fully expressing a proposition, instead expressing merely a “propositional radical.” We can explain away the appearance of semantic context sensitivity pragmatically, by taking into account facts about how, and under what conditions, speakers who use or encounter these sentences manage to pick up the slack. This can occur in either of two ways. Speakers either take a certain standard or perspective as understood, or else they treat thesentence as if it expresses a standard- or perspective-independent proposition even though it does not.. (shrink)

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Information‐theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences and observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These expectations can be viewed as syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this expectation‐based view is not limited to syntactic information alone. The present study combines structural and non‐structural information in unified models of word‐by‐wordsentence processing difficulty. Using probabilistic minimalist grammars (Stabler, 1997), we extend expectation‐based models to (...) include frequency information about noun phrase animacy. Entropy reductions derived from these grammars faithfully reflect the asymmetry between subject and object relatives (Staub, 2010; Staub, Dillon, & Clifton, 2017), as well as the effect of animacy on the measured difficulty profile (Lowder & Gordon, 2012; Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002). Visualizing probability distributions on the remaining alternatives at particular parser states allows us to explore new, linguistically plausible interpretations for the observed processing asymmetries, including the way that expectations about the relativized argument influence the processing of particular types of relative clauses (Wagers & Pendleton, 2016). (shrink)

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According to relativized transcendentalism, the meaning of expressions, consisting in their intension and extension, is provided by a set of (syntactical, semantical and pragmatical) rules which prescribe their correct use in a context. We interpret a linguistic system by fixing a domain (of the values of the variables) and by assigning exactly one object to each individual constant and n-tuples of objects to predicates. The theory says that proper names have a purely referential role and that their meaning is therefore (...) limited to the individual they designate. Since all singular terms must refer to exactly one referent there are no so-called empty names. A proper name is defined as a syntactically unstructured term in a language L used in a context C such that the truth condition for asentence (Φα in L and C consists in the fact that, in accord with the rule which maps items from the set of individual constants into the set of objects, a refers to an object x and x satisfies Φ. It is shown how - by using this theory - puzzling problems concerning Frege's morning star and evening star, allegedly empty names, changes of name etc. can easily be solved. (shrink)

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In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law’s experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational (...) and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that ‘law makes its facts.’ Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what ‘law is’ but also on ‘how’ it unwinds through, and _in spite of_, environmental and semantic transformations. (shrink)

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This book contains a selection of papers on issues of current interest in syntax and morpho-syntax. Most topics pertain to the question of the relation between word order and syntactic structure. The discussion starts with a proposal of extending the theory ofrelativization to reason clauses. It continues with the analysis of the realization of focus in Basque and the discussion of current views on the syntax of cleft constructions. Next, an inquiry into the rigidity ofsentence left-periphery (...) is offered in a cross-linguistic perspective. The two final contributions discuss feature-free derivations in syntax applied to a single morpho-syntactic problem, and the question of gradient acceptability of Polish sentences featuring possessive items in the context of the competition between their reflexive and pronominal forms. (shrink)

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According to relativized transcendentalism, the meaning of expressions, consisting in their intension and extension, is provided by a set of (syntactical, semantical and pragmatical) rules which prescribe their correct use in a context. We interpret a linguistic system by fixing a domain (of the values of the variables) and by assigning exactly one object to each individual constant and n-tuples of objects to predicates. The theory says that proper names have a purely referential role and that their meaning is therefore (...) limited to the individual they designate. Since all singular terms must refer to exactly one referent there are no so-called empty names. A proper name is defined as a syntactically unstructured term in a language L used in a context C such that the truth condition for asentence (Φα in L and C consists in the fact that, in accord with the rule which maps items from the set of individual constants into the set of objects, a refers to an object x and x satisfies Φ. It is shown how - by using this theory - puzzling problems concerning Frege's morning star and evening star, allegedly empty names, changes of name etc. can easily be solved. (shrink)

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How does deductive logic constrain probability? This question is difficult for subjectivistic approaches, according to which probability is just strength of (prudent) partial belief, for this presumes logical omniscience. This paper proposes that the way in which probability lies always between possibility and necessity can be made precise by exploiting a minor theorem of de Finetti: In any finite set of propositions the expected number of truths is the sum of the probabilities over the set. This is generalized to apply (...) to denumerable languages. It entails that the sum of probabilities can neither exceed nor be exceeded by the cardinalities of all consistent and closed (within the set) subsets. In general any numerical function on sentences is said to be logically coherent if it satisfies this condition. Logical coherence allows therelativization of necessity: A function p on a language is coherent with respect to the concept T of necessity iff there is no set of sentences on which the sum of p exceeds or is exceeded by the cardinality of every T-consistent and T-closed (within the set) subset of the set. Coherence is easily applied as well to sets on which the sum of p does not converge. Probability should also be relativized by necessity: A T-probability assigns one to every T-necessarysentence and is additive over disjunctions of pairwise T-incompatible sentences. Logical T-coherence is then equivalent to T-probability: All and only T-coherent functions are T-probabilities. (shrink)

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The aim of this paper is to argue for a revised and precisified version of the infamous Verifiability Criterion for the meaningfulness of declarative sentences. The argument is based on independently plausible premises concerning probabilistic confirmation and meaning as context-change potential, it is shown to be logically valid, and its ramifications for potential applications of the criterion are being discussed. Although the paper is not historical but systematic, the criterion thus vindicated will resemble the original one(s) in some important ways. (...) At the same time, it will also be more modest insofar as meaningfulness will turn out to be relativized linguistically and probabilistically, and different choices of the linguistic and probabilistic parameters may lead to different verdicts on meaningfulness. (shrink)

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Tarski avoids the liar paradox by relativizing truth and falsehood to particular languages and forbidding the predication to sentences in a language of truth or falsehood by any sentences belonging to the same language. The Tarski truth-schemata stratify an object-language and indefinitely ascending hierarchy of meta-languages in which the truth or falsehood of sentences in a language can only be asserted or denied in a higher-order meta-language. However, Tarski’s statement of the truth-schemata themselves involve general truth functions, and in particular (...) the biconditional, defined in terms of truth conditions involving truth values standardly displayed in a truth table. Consistently with his semantic program, all such truth values should also be relativized to particular languages for Tarski. The objection thus points toward the more interesting problem of Tarski’s concept of the exact status of truth predications in a general logic of sentential connectives. Tarski’s three-part solution to the circularity objection which he anticipates is discussed and refuted in detail. (shrink)

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A substitutional account of logical validity for formal first‐order languages is developed and defended against competing accounts such as the model‐theoretic definition of validity. Roughly, a substitution instance of asentence is defined as the result of uniformly substituting nonlogical expressions in thesentence with expressions of the same grammatical category and possibly relativizing quantifiers. In particular, predicate symbols can be replaced with formulae possibly containing additional free variables. Asentence is defined to be logically true iff (...) all its substitution instances are satisfied by all variable assignments. Logical consequence is defined analogously. Satisfaction is taken to be a primitive notion and axiomatized.For every set‐theoretic model in the sense of model theory there exists a corresponding substitutional interpretation in a sense to be specified. Conversely, however, there are substitutional interpretations – in particular the ‘intended’ interpretation – that lack a model‐theoretic counterpart. The substitutional definition of logical validity overcomes the weaknesses of more restrictive accounts of substitutional validity; unlike model‐theoretic logical consequence, the substitutional notion is trivially and provably truth preserving. In Kreisel's squeezing argument the formal notion of substitutional validity naturally slots into the place of intuitive validity. (shrink)

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In the past few years, a number of philosophers ; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt 2004) have maintained the following three theses: there is a distinctive sort of phenomenology characteristic of conscious thought, as opposed to other sorts of conscious mental states; different conscious thoughts have different phenomenologies; and thoughts with the same phenomenology have the same intentional content. The last of these three claims is open to at least two different interpretations. It might mean that the phenomenology of a (...) thought expresses its intentional content, where intentional content is understood as propositional, and propositions are understood as mind-and language-independent abstract entities. And it might mean that the phenomenology of a thought is its intentional content—that is, that the phenomenology of a thought, like the phenomenology of a sensation, constitutes its content. The second sort of view is a kind of psychologism. Psychologistic views hold that one or another sort of thing—numbers, sentences, propositions, etc.—that we can think or know about is in fact a kind of mental thing. Since Frege, psychologism has been in bad repute among analytic philosophers. It is widely held that Frege showed that such views are untenable, since, among other things, they subjectivize what is in fact objective, and, hence, relativize such things as consistency and truth to the peculiarities of human psychology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of the thesis that intentional mental content is phenomenological and to try to reach a conclusion about whether it yields a tenable view of mind, thought and meaning. I believe the thesis is not so obviously wrong as it will strike many philosophers of mind and language. In fact, it can be defended against the standard objections to psychologism, and it can provide the basis for a novel and interesting account of mentality. (shrink)

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Commonsense ontology contains both continuants and occurrents, but are continuants necessary? I argue that they are neither occurrents nor easily replaceable by them. The worst problem for continuants is the question in virtue of what a given continuant exists at a given time. For such truthmakers we must have recourse to occurrents, those vital to the continuant at that time. Continuants are, like abstract objects, invariants under equivalences over occurrents. But they are not abstract, and their being invariants enables us (...) to infer both their lack of temporal parts and that non-invariant predications about them must be relativized to times. \\\ [Joseph Melia] In this paper I try to eliminate occurrents from our ontology. I argue against Simons' position that occurrents are needed to supply truthmakers for existential claims about continuants. Nevertheless, those who would eliminate occurrents still need some account of our willingness to assert sentences that logically entail their existence. Though it turns out to be impossible to paraphrase away our reference to occurrents, I show that the truthmakers for such sentences are facts that involve only continuants. This is enough to allow us to regard our ordinary talk about occurrents as fictional. Finally, I argue that a proper conception of the underlying temporal facts about continuants can both avoid the problematic tensed theory of time and the problem of temporary intrinsics. (shrink)

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This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, or Licorice is tasty. Standard semantic theories explain the meanings of sentences by specifying the conditions under which they are true; here, Peter Lasersohn asks how we can account for sentences that are concerned with matters of opinion rather than matters of fact. He argues that a truth-theoretic semantic theory is appropriate even for sentences like these, but that for such sentences, (...) truth and falsity must be assigned relative to perspectives, rather than absolutely. The book provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar, working out the implications of this conception of truth both for simple sentences and for reports of mental attitude. The semantic analysis is paired with a pragmatic theory explaining what it means to assert asentence which is true or false only relativistically, and with a speculative account of the functional motivation for a relativized notion of truth. (shrink)

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According to a dominant approach in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, the main task of semantic theory is to provide a recursive definition of truth at points of evaluation for the declarative sentences that make up the language under examination. A specific type of theory of truth (the definition of truth originally proposed by Alfred Tarski) is reinterpreted here as a theory of meaning. The idea of using definitions of truth to explain the meaning of linguistic expressions has its (...) origin in the works of Donald Davidson, which exemplarily develop the connection between the Tarskian point of view and the concept of meaning. More recent developments in truth-condition semantics have come to reject Davidson’s extensionalist restrictions, specifying semantic content in terms of truth relativized to actual and counterfactual circumstances of evaluation. The present work aims to provide an evaluative perspective of the argumentative path that led from the Tarskian theory of truth to the Davidsonian theory of meaning and then to contemporary intensional semantics. (shrink)

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In this paper I consider two paradoxes that arise in connection with the concept of demonstrability, or absolute provability. I assume—for the sake of the argument—that there is an intuitive notion of demonstrability, which should not be conflated with the concept of formal deducibility in a (formal) system or the relativized concept of provability from certain axioms. Demonstrability is an epistemic concept: the rough idea is that asentence is demonstrable if it is provable from knowable basic (“self-evident”) premises (...) by means of simple logical steps. A statement that is demonstrable is also knowable and a statement that is actually demonstrated is known to be true. By casting doubt upon apparently central principles governing the concept of demonstrability, the paradoxes of demonstrability presented here tend to undermine the concept itself—or at least our understanding of it. As long as we cannot find a diagnosis and a cure for the paradoxes, it seems that the coherence of the concepts of demonstrability and demonstrable knowledge are put in question. There are of course ways of putting the paradoxes in quarantine, for example by imposing a hierarchy of languages a` la Tarski, or a ramified hierarchy of propositions and propositional functions a` la Russell. These measures, however, helpful as they may be in avoiding contradictions, do not seem to solve the underlying conceptual problems. Although structurally similar to the semantic paradoxes, the paradoxes discussed in this paper involve epistemic notions: “demonstrability”, “knowability”, “knowledge”... These notions are “factive” (e.g., if A is demonstrable, then A is true), but similar paradoxes arise in connection with “nonfactive” notions like “believes”, “says”, “asserts”.3 There is no consensus in the literature concerning the analysis of the notions involved—often referred to as “propositional attitudes”—or concerning the treatment of the paradoxes they give rise to. (shrink)

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This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of “personal taste” such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. Thisrelativization is of truth value only, and does not involve arelativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). A formal (...) semantic theory is presented which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. The context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals. (shrink)

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In Chapter One it is argued that three famous epistemologies, labeled foundationalism, radical skepticism and mitigated skepticism, all presuppose metaphysical realism, or the ontological division between mind and world . Then it is argued that each of these three epistemologies is false and that metaphysical realism cannot be made comprehensible apart from one or the other of them. If this is true then it follows that truth cannot be a matter of correspondence between sentences, statements, propositions, judgments, etc. and some (...) absolutely independent reality. This, however, leaves the author with the task in Chapter Two of developing the basics of a new epistemology--one that does not presuppose metaphysical realism, yet which allows for the possibility of a genuine truth and knowledge that are in a particular way dependent on conceptualization. The phrase "genuine truth and knowledge" is crucial because part of the task is to present a view that does not reduce truth and knowledge to mere belief by relativizing them to conceptual schemes. In Chapter Three it is argued that a unique form of metaphysical realism, which I call the objectification of ideas, is present in the philosophies of Descartes, Hume and Kant, simultaneously creating for them a need to account both for the external world and personal identity, and making them impotent to do so. (shrink)

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In response to Kripke's modal argument contemporary descriptivists suggest that referring terms, e.g., ‘water’, are synonymous with actually-rigidified definite descriptions, e.g., ‘the actual watery stuff’. Following Scott Soames, this strategy has the counterintuitive consequence that possible speakers on Perfect Earth cannot be ascribed water-beliefs without beliefs about the actual world. Co-indexing the actuality and possibility operators has the equally untoward result that possible speakers on Twin Earth are ascribed water-beliefs. So, Soames's dilemma is that the descriptivist can account for either (...) Twin Earth or Perfect Earth but not both. In response, this paper argues that since ‘actual’ is an indexical, the content of water-beliefs is egocentric, and so if the descriptivist avails herself of relativized propositions as the content of such beliefs, she is able to account for both Twin Earth and Perfect Earth. The lesson is that we have to tread carefully when making inferences about the contents of beliefs from the semantics of belief-reporting sentences that contain actually-rigidified expressions. (shrink)

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Stephen Schiffer introduced the “meaning-intention problem” as an argument against certain semantic analyses that invoke hidden indexical expressions. According to the argument, such analyses are incompatible with a Gricean view of speaker’s meaning, for they require speakers to refer to things about which they are ignorant, such as modes of presentation. Stephen Neale argues that a complementary problem arises due to the fact that speakers may also be ignorant of the very existence of such aphonic expressions. In this paper, I (...) attempt to articulate the assumptions that support the meaning-intention problem. I argue that these assumptions are incompatible with some basic linguistic data. For instance, a speaker could have used asentence like “The book weighs five pounds” to mean that the book weighs five pounds on Earth, even before anyone knew that weight was a relativized property. The existence of such “extrinsic parameters” undermines the force of the meaning-intention problem. However, since the meaning-intention problem arises naturally from a Gricean view of speaker’s meaning and speaker’s reference, the failure of the argument raises problems for the Gricean. I argue that the analysis of referring-with offered by Schiffer, and defended by Neale, is defective. (shrink)

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Contextualist theories of truth appeal to context to solve the liar paradox: different stages of reasoning occur in different contexts, and so the contradiction is dispelled. The word ‘true’ is relativized by the contextualists to contexts of use. This paper shows that contextualist approaches to the liar are committed to a form of semantic relativism: that the truth value of some sentences depends on the context of assessment, as well as the context of use. In particular, it is shown how (...) Simmons’s and Glanzberg’s contextualist approaches entail relativism. In both cases, the liarsentence gets different semantic evaluations as uttered in a fixed context of use but assessed from different contexts. Shift in context of use alone cannot provide the full explanation of the liar. These contextualist approaches, as originally presented, were thus mischaracterised and they should be re-evaluated according to their full implications. (shrink)

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As part of her argument that relativism and contextualism are nothing but notational variants of each other, Stojanovic holds that contextualism is flexible enough to achieve whatever relativism might do if the matter is what truth-value is assigned to each pair ofsentence and context. In this paper, I reply to this statement by arguing that contextualism cannot be made as flexible as relativism without in fact turning it into a version of relativism. The key to my response to (...) Stojanovic is that, while relativism relativizes utterance truth, contextualism does not, so parameters that are not fixed at the context of utterance will be accessible for the relativist, but not for the contextualist. Although the relativity of utterance truth follows as soon as propositional truth is relativized to contexts of assessment, as the relativist does, it is easy to lose sight of this fact if we identify the context of assessment with the assessor’s context. Hence, the point of this paper is that the difference between relativism and contextualism is not one as to whose parameters play a role in determining thesentence’s truth-value. If it were, contextualism could indeed be made just as flexible as relativism. (shrink)

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Some philosophers hold that „ought‟ is ambiguous between a sense expressing a propositional operator and a sense expressing a relation between an agent and an action. We defend the opposing view that „ought‟ always expresses a propositional operator against Mark Schroeder‟s recent objections that it cannot adequately accommodate an ambiguity in „ought‟ sentences between evaluative and deliberative readings, predicting readings of sentences that are not actually available. We show how adopting an independently well-motivated contrastivist semantics for „ought‟, according to which (...) „ought‟ is always relativized to a contrast set of relevant alternatives, enables us to explain the evaluative-deliberative ambiguity and why the availability of these readings depends on sentential grammar. (shrink)

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Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that thisrelativization is not relative enough: `might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and—the new wrinkle—points of assessment (hence, CIA). Here we argue against such "relativist" semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them. Then we (...) catalogue central problems that any such theory faces. We end by outlining an alternative story. (shrink)

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[Peter Simons] Commonsense ontology contains both continuants and occurrents, but are continuants necessary? I argue that they are neither occurrents nor easily replaceable by them. The worst problem for continuants is the question in virtue of what a given continuant exists at a given time. For such truthmakers we must have recourse to occurrents, those vital to the continuant at that time. Continuants are, like abstract objects, invariants under equivalences over occurrents. But they are not abstract, and their being invariants (...) enables us to infer both their lack of temporal parts and that non-invariant predications about them must be relativized to times. \\\ [Joseph Melia] In this paper I try to eliminate occurrents from our ontology. I argue against Simons' position that occurrents are needed to supply truthmakers for existential claims about continuants. Nevertheless, those who would eliminate occurrents still need some account of our willingness to assert sentences that logically entail their existence. Though it turns out to be impossible to paraphrase away our reference to occurrents, I show that the truthmakers for such sentences are facts that involve only continuants. This is enough to allow us to regard our ordinary talk about occurrents as fictional. Finally, I argue that a proper conception of the underlying temporal facts about continuants can both avoid the problematic tensed theory of time and the problem of temporary intrinsics. (shrink)

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This dissertation provides a model-theoretic semantics for English sentences atttributing a property or action to a group of objects, either collectively or distributively. It is shown that certain adverbial expressions select for collective predicates; therefore collective and distibutive predicates must be distinguishable. This finding is problematic for recent accounts of distributive predicates which analyze such predicates as taking group-level arguments, and hence as not distinguishable from collective predicates. ;A group-level treatment of distributives is possible, however, if predicate denotations are relativized (...) to a set of events for which a part/whole relation is defined. An event in which a group performs an action distributively will have subevents in which each of the group's members perform the same action; an event in which the group performs the action collectively will not. ;This analysis also makes possible an account of the fact that adverbials expressing collective action commonly have an additional use expressing spatial proximity, both in English and cross-linguistically. . A spatial "trace" function on the set of events allows formal definitions for the spatial uses of such adverbials to exactly parallel the definitions for the collectivizing uses. ;The dissertation also provides arguments for a set-theoretic model for plurality, in which the group membership relation is distinct from the subgroup relation. ;Certain quantifiers are shown sensitive to distinction between different sorts of group-level event. To accommodate this fact, it is suggested that verbal denotations provide, for each event, both an "inclusion set" and an "exclusion set"--corresponding roughly to positive and negative denotations. If the inclusion and exclusion sets are allowed under certain circumstances not to complement each other, correct results obtain. ;The splitting of verbal denotations into inclusion and exclusion sets also allows the solution of certain problems in previous accounts of the semantics of subject-verb agreement for number. The dissertation closes with a defense of the hypothesis that agreement is conditioned primarily by the semantics. (shrink)

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A number of philosophers have argued that the key to understanding the semantic paradoxes is to recognize that truth is essentially relative to context. All of these philosophers have been motivated by the idea that once a liarsentence has been uttered we can 'step back' and, from the point of view of a different context, judge that the liarsentence is true. This paper argues that this 'stepping back' idea is a mistake that results from failing to (...) relativize truth to context in the first place. Moreover, context-relative liar sentences, such as 'Thissentence is not true in any context' present a paradox even after truth has been relativized to context. Nonetheless, therelativization of truth to context may offer us the means to avoid paradox, if we can justifiably deny that asentence about a context can be true in the very context it is about. (shrink)

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Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the (...) puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events. (shrink)

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The first section (§1) of this essay defends reliance on truth values against those who, on nominalistic grounds, would uniformly substitute a truth predicate. I rehearse some practical, Carnapian advantages of working with truth values in logic. In the second section (§2), after introducing the key idea of auxiliary parameters (§2.1), I look at several cases in which logics involve, as part of their semantics, an extra auxiliary parameter to which truth is relativized, a parameter that caters to special kinds (...) of sentences. In many cases, this facility is said to produce truth values for sentences that on the face of it seem neither true nor false. Often enough, in this situation appeal is made to the method of supervaluations, which operate by “quantifying out” auxiliary parameters, and thereby produce something like a truth value. Logics of this kind exhibit striking differences. I first consider the role that Tarski gives to supervaluation in first order logic (§2.2), and then, after an interlude that asks whether neither-true-nor-false is itself a truth value (§2.3), I consider sentences with non-denoting terms (§2.4), vague sentences (§2.5), ambiguous sentences (§2.6), paradoxical sentences (§2.7), and future-tensed sentences in indeterministic tense logic (§2.8). I conclude my survey with a look at alethic modal logic considered as a cousin (§2.9), and finish with a few sentences of “advice to supervaluationists” (2.10), advice that is largely negative. The case for supervaluations as a road to truth is strong only when the auxiliary parameter that is “quantified out” is in fact irrelevant to the sentences of interest—as in Tarski’s definition of truth for classical logic. In all other cases, the best policy when reporting the results of supervaluation is to use only explicit phrases such as “settled true” or “determinately true,” never dropping the qualification. (shrink)

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A person of average height would assert a truth by the conditional ‘if I were seven feet tall, I would be taller than I am,’ in which an indicative clause ‘I am’ is embedded in a subjunctive conditional. By contrast, no one would assert a truth by ‘if I were seven feet tall, I would be taller than I would be’ or ‘if I am seven feet tall, I am taller than I am’. These examples exemplify the fact that whether (...) asentence's evaluation remains at the actual world in the scope of a modal or conditional depends on the combination of mood in the embedded and matrix clauses rather than, as is commonly thought, just on the presence of an operator ‘actually’. This essay argues that this phenomenon provides evidence that mood admits of bound and free readings along the lines of tenses and pronouns. It therefore favors the hypothesis that natural language contains variables and quantifiers for possible worlds in the object language. This, in turn, requires that the truth of a semantic value of asentence (or whatever structure is embedded in a modal) be relativized to a sequence of worlds rather than to an individual world, and thus be distinguished from a proposition in the traditional sense. The essay also compares the framework defended with an alternative account of similar phenomena by Kai Wehmeier. (shrink)

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We give a new characterization of the strict $$\forall {\Sigma^b_j}$$ sentences provable using $${\Sigma^b_k}$$ induction, for 1 ≤ j ≤ k. As a small application we show that, in a certain sense, Buss’s witnessing theorem for strict $${\Sigma^b_k}$$ formulas already holds over the relatively weak theory PV. We exhibit a combinatorial principle with the property that a lower bound for it in constant-depth Frege would imply that the narrow CNFs with short depth j Frege refutations form a strict hierarchy with (...) j, and hence that the relativized bounded arithmetic hierarchy can be separated by a family of $$\forall {\Sigma^b_1}$$ sentences. (shrink)

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Metaphysics and language: Quine, W. V. O. On the individuation of attributes. Körner, S. On some relations between logic and metaphysics. Marcus, R. B. Does the principle of substitutivity rest on a mistake? Van Fraassen, B. C. Platonism's pyrrhic victory. Martin, R. M. On some prepositional relations. Kearns, J. T. Sentences and propositions.--Basic and combinatorial logic: Orgass, R. J. Extended basic logic and ordinal numbers. Curry, H. B. Representation of Markov algorithms by combinators.--Implication and consistency: Anderson, A. R. Fitch on (...) consistency. Belnap, N. D., Jr. Grammatical propaedeutic. Thomason, R. H. Decidability in the logic of conditionals. Myhill, J. Levels of implication.--Deontic, epistemic, and erotetic logic: Bacon, J. Belief as relative knowledge. Wu, K. J. Believing and disbelieving. Kordig, C. R. Relativized deontic modalities. Harrah, D. A system for erotetic sentences. (shrink)

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I. Vague Properties and the Problem of Vagueness The philosophical problem of vagueness is to say what vagueness is in a way that helps to resolve the sorites paradox. Saying what vagueness is requires saying what kinds of things can be vague and in what the vagueness of each kind consists. Philosophers dispute whether things of this, that, or the other kind can be vague, but no one disputes that there are vague linguistic expressions. Among vague expressions, predicates hold a (...) special place in the problem of vagueness, for it’s their vagueness that is soritesgenerating. That puts the vagueness of predicates at the hub of the problem of vagueness, and there can be little doubt that we’ll be a short step from home if we can account for it. Any account of vagueness will of course require commitment to theses that are themselves foci of philosophical debate, but one can’t expect to get anywhere without taking on some as working hypotheses and then striving to say something that will be plausible if those hypotheses are plausible. One of the working hypotheses of this paper is that propositional attitudes and propositional speech acts are relations to propositions of some stripe or other, in the generic sense in which a proposition is an abstract, mind- and language-independent entity that has a truth condition, and has that truth condition both essentially and absolutely (i.e. withoutrelativization to anything).1 The existence of propositions requires the existence of properties, in the generic sense in which a property is an abstract, mind- and language-independent entity that has an instantiation condition, and has that instantiation condition both essentially and absolutely. For present purposes it will be harmless to pretend that the propositions we believe and assert are Russellian propositions---structured entities whose basic constituents are the objects and properties our beliefs and speech acts are about. When a propositionalist speaks in loosey-goosey mode, she is apt to say that asentence token is true just in case the proposition expressed in its utterance is true. (shrink)

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The theories Si1 and Ti1 are the analogues of Buss' relativized bounded arithmetic theories in the language where every term is bounded by a polynomial, and thus all definable functions grow linearly in length. For every i, a Σbi+1-formula TOPi, which expresses a form of the total ordering principle, is exhibited that is provable in Si+11 , but unprovable in Ti1. This is in contrast with the classical situation, where Si+12 is conservative over Ti2 w. r. t. Σbi+1-sentences. The independence (...) results are proved by translations into propositional logic, and using lower bounds for corresponding propositional proof systems. (shrink)

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Logical form is thought to be discovered by keeping fixed the logical constants and allowing the non-logical content in thesentence to vary. The problem of logical constants is the problem of defining what counts as a logical constant. In this paper, I will argue that the concept ’logical constant’ is vague. I demonstrate the vagueness of logical constancy by providing a sorites argument, thereby showing the sorites-susceptibility of the concept. Many prior papers in the literature on logical constants (...) hint at this vagueness, but do not explore how theories of vagueness apply to logical constants. In the second half of this paper, I do just this. I consider approaches to logical constants that resemble nihilism about vagueness and more recent theories that relativize truth to precisifications. Finally, I argue that approaches that accept the potential indeterminate status of putative logical constants are preferable to nihilism or relativism about logical constancy. (shrink)

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Epistemic possibilities are relative to bodies of information, or perspectives. To claim that something is epistemically possible is typically to claim that it is possible relative one’s own current perspective. We generally do this by using bare, unqualified epistemic possibility (EP) sentences, ones that don’t mention our perspective. The fact that epistemic possibilities are relative to perspectives suggests that these bare EP sentences fall short of fully expressing propositions, contrary to what both contextualists and relativists take for granted. Although they (...) rightly reject propositional invariantism, the implausible view that a bare EPsentence expresses the same classical (absolutely true or absolutely false) proposition in any context, they maintain that a change in perspective shifts either thesentence’s propositional content (to a proposition involving a different perspective) or its truth-value (the same perspectivally neutral proposition now evaluated from a different perspective). I deny that the semantic contents of bare EP sentences shift at all. But I also deny that these contents have truth-values. Rather, according to the radical invariantism I defend, these contents are not full-fledged propositions but merely propositional radicals. Only explicitly relativized EP sentences manage fully to express propositions, and these perspective-involving propositions are the only EP propositions there are. Nevertheless, bare EP sentences are perfectly capable of being used to assert EP propositions, because utterances of them implicitly allude to the relevant perspective. Various problem cases challenge radical invariantism to explain pragmatically which perspective is read into the utterance of a given bare EPsentence. Unlike contextualism and relativism, it can do this without having to resort to any semantic bells and whistles.. (shrink)

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Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the (...) puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events. (shrink)

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We characterize the modal logics of elementary classes of Kripke frames as precisely those modal logics that are axiomatized by modal axioms synthesized in a certain effective way from "quasi-positive" sentences of hybrid logic. These are pure positive hybrid sentences with arbitrary existential and relativized universal quantification over nominals. The proof has three steps. The first step is to use the known result that the modal logic of any elementary class of Kripke frames is also the modal logic of the (...) closure of this class under disjoint unions, generated subframes, bounded morphic images, and ultraroots. This latter class can be defined by the first-order sentences of a special syntactic form (called pseudo-equations by Goldblatt) that are valid in the former class. The second step is to translate these pseudo-equations into equivalent quasi-positive hybrid sentences. In the third and main step, we show that any quasi-positivesentence S generates an infinite set of modal formulas called "approximants," which together axiomatize a canonical modal logic that is sound and complete for the class of frames validating S. The proof is analogous to standard proofs of Sahlqvist's theorem. It generalizes to sets of quasi-positive sentences. The main result now follows. (shrink)

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Though the title is a bit misleading, this is a splendid collection of essays, five of which are insightful philosophical commentaries on specific American philosophers and one an exercise in philosophical analysis by a distinguished living American philosopher. W. V. Quine maintains that philosophical inquiry should begin with "clear words" rather than "clear ideas" and it would seem that it also ends with words. In an essay remarkable for both its economy and clarity, Quine charts a path which begins with (...) "observation sentences" and the "primacy of bodies," passes through a "brave new ontology" in which bodies disappear and ends with a nonreductionist linguistic physicalism. Quine states that the "physicalist does not insist on an exclusively corporeal ontology. He is content to declare bodies to be fundamental to nature in somewhat this sense: There is no difference in the world without a difference in the position of states of bodies." The crucial question, as Quine readily acknowledges, is "what to count as states of bodies." Physics seems to point in the direction of a "field theory" in which "bodies themselves go by the board" leaving us with a "brave new ontology"—"the purely abstract ontology of set theory, pure mathematics." To which Quine’s response seems to be that this is so much the worse for ontology. Having earlier stressed that "all entities are theoretical," Quine now asserts that "sentences, in their truth and falsity, are what runs deep; ontology is by the way." While his physicalism is admittedly unfinished and incomplete, the direction is set—to reformulate physicalism "by reference not to physical objects but to physical vocabulary." Roland A. Delattre explores "the political implications and resonances" of Edwards’s metaphysics of beauty. Inasmuch as "beauty" is central to the Edwardean vision, Delattre contends that it must have a bearing upon politics. Admittedly going beyond "anything explicitly offered by Edwards," Delattre convincingly argues that "the logic of this vision of reality is to relativize the claim that the political order is to be understood religiously as the scene for a movement through history towards the kingdom of God." A. Robert Caponigri argues quite persuasively that transcendentalism, as expressed by Emerson and Thoreau, affirms an individualism which allows for the state only as a necessary evil. Brownson, however, rescues transcendentalism by distinguishing "civil society" from both the government and the abstract individual and showing how it serves to mediate "the claim and obligation" between state and citizen. In a delightful and informative essay, Max H. Fisch traces pragmatism backwards and forwards from James’s 1898 address to the Philosophical Union of the University of California. It was in this address that the word "pragmatism" was first used publicly but Fisch supplies compelling evidence that the structure of Peirce’s pragmatism was in print as early as 1868. In sketching the development of "pragmatism from Peirce to C. I. Lewis, Fisch gives us perceptive indications of the varieties of pragmatism. Santayana, according to Frederick A. Olafson makes some telling points against a rationalism which isolates reason from its natural conditions and continuities. But Olafson forcefully argues that Santayana jeopardizes the autonomy and significance of reason by reducing it to an esthetic epiphenomenon. Peter Fuss continues his incisive and controversial interpretation of Royce. Centering on Royce’s analysis of Hegel, Fuss maintains that while Royce occasionally flirts with the "correct" understanding of Hegel’s Absolute, he finally surrenders the view of the Absolute as an all-inclusive unity of a community of finite selves in favor of the outmoded view of the Absolute as a transcendent entity. In an unusually clear and focused introduction, the editors have provided useful mini-versions of each essay.—E.F. (shrink)

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Much recent analytic philosophy has dealt with the problem presented to realism by the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes: is it possible to know the world in contrasting, if not contradictory, ways and not thereby rule out the possibility of knowing an independent reality? Lynch argues that pluralism and realism are compatible and proposes what he calls a “relativized Kantianism.” We do not know the world the way it is in itself, but only by means of some conceptual scheme. The (...) model of a conceptual scheme employed is not Kantian, however, which allows for no alternatives, is identified by its foundationally structured categorical concepts, and involves a commitment to the analytic/ synthetic distinction. Nor is it Quinean, where the basic components are sentences accepted as true, the structure is holistic, the analytic/ synthetic distinction is abandoned, and the alternatives are untranslatable. Instead, a “Wittgensteinian” model is proposed. Composed of concepts, the alternatives share contextually basic but not nonbasic concepts. Fuzzy distinctions, like the analytic/synthetic, are usable. (shrink)

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Two questions are raised about Quine's view of truth. He has recently said that ontology is relative to a translation manual: is this the same as relativizing it to a language? The same question may be asked about truth. Should we think there is one concept of truth which is relative to a language, or is there a separate concept for each language (or speaker)? The second question concerns Quine's repeated endorsements of the ?disquotational? account of truth. Does he think (...) this account limits a truth predicate to application to a single language, or can translation (or Tarski's methods) allow us to apply a truth predicate in one language to sentences in other languages? If the latter, can Quine still contend that the disquotational account is a ?full? account of the concept of truth? The answer would tell us whether Quine can be counted among those who would deflate the concept of truth. (shrink)

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According to the philosophical tradition, translation is successful when one has substituted words and sentences from one language with those from another by cross-linguistic synonymy. Moreover, according to the orthodox view, the meaning of expressions and sentences of languages are determined by their basic or systematic role in a language. This makes translating normative and evaluative discourse puzzling for two reasons. First, as languages are syntactically and semantically different because of their peculiar cultural and historical influences, and as values and (...) norms differ across cultures, it is unlikely that languages will have synonymous evaluative and normative expressions. If translation is only successful by cross-linguistic synonymy, it would seem that we will not be able to translate the value theoretic claims of persons from radically different cultures. But it is with such persons that dialogue on evaluative matters is imperative, to resolve ethical and axiological differences that could be the root of conflict. Second, as the orthodox account of meaning renders it linguistically relative, it is unlikely that expressions across languages will be cross-linguistically synonymous. Thus, on the Orthodox account of translation, translation is indeterminate (as W.V.O. Quine has argued) or impossible (as Jacques Derrida has argued). In this dissertation I argue for a novel theory of meaning and translation based on innovations in the translation studies literature and my prior work in cross cultural research, which I call Text-Type Semantics or TTS. TTS explains how translation is successful while affirming radical cultural and linguistic diversity. It treats disciplinary concerns as the neutral criteria to calibrate translation. On the basis of TTS I argue that we need what I call the “Quasi-Indexical” account of thick and thin concepts (or QI) to translate normative and evaluative discourse. I argue that QI and TTS succeed where competing accounts in the moral semantics literature (such as Non-Analytic Naturalism and Expressivism) fail. The argument also shows that therelativization of truth (in philosophy and beyond) to languages and cultures is mistaken. (shrink)

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Suppose that a physical duplicate of me, right down to the arrangements of subatomic particles, comes into existence at the time at which I finish thissentence. Suppose that it comes into existence by chance, or at least by a causal process entirely unconnected with me. It might be so situated that it, too, is seated in front of a computer, and finishes this paragraph and paper, or a corresponding one, just as I do. (i) Would it have the (...) same thoughts I do? (ii) Would it speak my language? (iii) Would my duplicate have any thoughts or (iv) speak any language at all? To fix the interpretation of these questions, I will take ‘thought’ to cover any mental state which has a representational content, where ‘representational content’ is intended to be neutral with respect to psychological mode. By 'psychological mode' I mean what distinguishes kinds of thoughts, such as belief, visual perceptual experience, desire, etc. Representational content, or thought content, as I will also say, determines the conditions under which a thought is true or false, veridical or non-veridical, or, more broadly, is satisfied or fails to be satisfied, independently ofrelativization to circumstances, possible worlds, or the like. Beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, and perceptual experiences will all count as thoughts on this usage. The question whether one person has the same (type of) thought as another is the question whether both have a mental state with the same representational content in the same psychological mode. I will not count epistemic verbs, however, as picking out or expressing a (pure) psychological mode. Thus, although knowing that the time is ripe, seeing that there is a goldfinch in the garden, and remembering that my wife’s birthday is next Tuesday are all thoughts, they do not pick out the thoughts by using a verb that expresses a psychological mode. Therefore knowing, seeing or remembering the same things is not a requirement on having the same thoughts.. (shrink)

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In this paper, we deal with the problem of putting together modal worlds that operate in different logic systems. When evaluating a modalsentence $\Box \varphi $, we argue that it is not sufficient to inspect the truth of $\varphi $ in accessed worlds (possibly in different logics). Instead, ways of transferring more subtle semantic information between logical systems must be established. Thus, we will introduce modal structures that accommodate communication between logic systems by fixing a common lattice $L$ (...) that contains as sublattices the semantics operating in each world. The value of a formula $\Box \varphi $ in a world with lattice $L^{\prime}$ will be defined in terms of the values of $\varphi $ in accessible worlds relativized to $L^{\prime}$ using the common order of $L$. We will investigate natural instances where formulas $\varphi $ can be said to be necessary/possible even though all the accessible world falsify $\varphi $. Further, we will discuss frames that characterize dynamic relations between logic systems: classically increasing, classically decreasing and dialectic frames. Finally, we formalize the semantics of considering worlds operating in classical logic or logic of paradox, exemplifying the kind of issue one should face in this kind of formalization. (shrink)

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