Showing posts with label truth conditions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label truth conditions. Show all posts
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Charles Travis, Thought's Footing, Chapter 1
The truth conditional content of a sentence is determined by the role of the sentence in a language game (this can be put as the slogan: "content is inseparable from point").
Labels:
content,
contextualism,
point,
Travis,
truth conditions
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
John Perry, "Reflexivity, Indexicality and Names"
There is not a single propreitary notion of content or truth conditions; there are many different notions that are useful for different purposes.
Labels:
content,
contextualism,
explanation,
Perry,
truth conditions
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Ian Rumfitt, "Truth Conditions and Communication"
Neither communication-intention nor truth-conditional semantic approaches to understanding meaning are sufficient; adopting a hybrid account that incorporates elements of both traditions is essential to giving an account of the basic act of putting a thought forward, or understanding a thought expressed by a declarative utterance.
Labels:
communication,
Grice,
intention,
Rumfitt,
Strawson,
truth conditions
Friday, September 29, 2006
Siobhan Chapman, "In Defense of a Code: Linguistic Meaning and Propositionality in Verbal Communication"
Criticisizes unclarity in standard accounts of the domain of semantics; recommends a minimalist approach to truth conditions, where minimal truth conditions are encoded by linguistic meaning, and these very broad truth conditions constrain the truth conditions of what is expressed in an utterance of a sentence by requiring the truth conditions of the uttered sentence to be a subset of the worlds in which the linguistically encoded proposition is true.
Labels:
Chapman,
communication,
minimalism,
truth conditions
Paul M. Pietroski, "The Character of Natural Language Semantics"
Natural language semantics should give up the assumption that it is to provide truth conditions for sentences, because the truth of a sentence is a massive interaction effect of sentence meaning and a host of worldly factors. Travis is right that predicates aren't functions to extensions, and there are other, Chomskyish reasons to doubt that the truth conditions of sentences are compositional. NLS should be a purely internal, non-truth-involving theory.
Labels:
Chomsky,
Pietroski,
semantics,
truth conditions
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Baker and Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense
Iconoclastic assault on all aspects of truth-conditional semantics.
Labels:
Baker,
Hacker,
semantics,
truth conditions,
Wittgenstein
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Scott Soames, "Semantics and Semantic Competence"
Knowledge of truth conditions, in the sense of knowing the theorems of a semantic theory for a language, is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding a language.
Labels:
semantics,
Soames,
truth conditions,
understanding
Monday, September 25, 2006
Jason Stanley, "Context and Logical Form"
Everything that context contributes to truth conditions (except metonymy, and Travis/Searle type context-sensitivity) must be represented at the level of logical form.
Labels:
context,
logical form,
Stanley,
truth conditions
John Searle, "Literal Meaning"
The received view that the literal meaning of a sentence is its context-free truth conditions (once ambiguity, indexicality, etc. have been settled) is mistaken; sentences have meanings (truth conditions) only against a background of assumptions; variations in background assumptions produce variations in truth conditions.
Charles Travis, The True and the False: The Domain of the Pragmatic, Chapter 5
The predicate "is true" is characterized by the same kind of occasion-sensitivity as other predicates, like "is green".
Charles Travis, The True and the False: The Domain of the Pragmatic, Chapters 1-2
Examines reasons for rejecting "translational" theories of meaning; argues that semantics should concern meaning, and meaning does not involve truth conditions.
Labels:
meaning,
translation,
Travis,
truth conditions
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)