Abstract not found

For any sentence of a natural language, we can ask the following questions: what is its meaning; what is its syntactic structure; and how is its meaning related to its syntactic structure? Attending to these questions, as they apply to sentences that provide evidence for Davidsonian event analyses, suggests that we reconsider some traditional views about how the syntax of a natural sentence is related to its meaning. Many theorists have held, at least as an idealization, that every phrase–and in particular, every verb phrase–consists of (i) an expression semantically associated with some function, and (ii) an expression semantically associated with some element in the domain of that function. On this view, which makes it comfortable to speak of both verbs and functions as taking arguments, each phrase is semantically associated with the value of the relevant function given the relevant argument(s); the semantic contribution of natural language syntax is function-application, as in a Fregean Begriffschrift; and the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of ’s constituents, in the way that the sum of two numbers is determined by those numbers and the addition function. I want to urge a different conception of natural language semantics.

This thesis is concerned with the challenge truth-value gaps pose to the principle of bivalence. The central question addressed is: are truth-value gaps counterexamples to bivalence and is the supposition of counterexamples coherent? My aim is to examine putative cases of truth-value gaps against an argument by Timothy Williamson, which shows that the supposition of counterexamples to bivalence is contradictory. The upshot of his argument is that either problematic utterances say nothing, or they cannot be neither true nor false. I start by identifying truth-bearers: an utterance, for instance, is a truth-bearer if it says that something is the case. Truth-bearers are evaluable items, with truth- and falsityconditions statable in corresponding instances of schemas for truth and falsehood. A genuine case of a truth-value gap should be an utterance that is neither true nor false but says something to be the case. But it is inconsistent to accept the schemas for truth and falsehood and the existence of genuine cases of truth-value gaps. Secondly, I expound Williamson’s argument, which explores this inconsistency, and I identify two kinds of strategy to disarm

The received view in the philosophy of language and formal semantics is that 'that'clauses in English are singular terms, and in particular, that the complementizer ‘that ’ is a termforming operator that turns meaningful sentences of the language into complex singular terms.

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Abstract not found