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").

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Baker and Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense

Iconoclastic assault on all aspects of truth-conditional semantics.

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.

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.

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.