The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature a talk on language semantics by Salvatore Florio, Stewart Shapiro, and Eric Snyder on Friday, September 16, 11:45am. The talk will be in hybrid form.

Semantics and logic; logic and semantics

It is widely (but not universally) held that logical consequence is determined (at least in part) by the meanings of the logical terminology. One might think that this is an empirical claim that can be tested by the usual methods of linguistic semantics. Yet most philosophers who hold views about logic like this do not engage in empirical research to test the main thesis. Sometimes the thesis is just stated, without argument, and sometimes it is argued for on a priori grounds. Moreover, many linguistic studies of words like “or”, the conditional, and the quantifiers run directly contrary to the thesis in question.

From the other direction, much of the work in linguistic semantics uses logical symbols. For example, it is typical for a semanticist to write a biconditional, in a formal language, whose left hand side has a symbol for the meaning of an expression in natural language and whose right hand side is a formula consisting of lambda-terms and other symbols from standard logic works: quantifiers ∀, ∃ and connectives ¬, →, ∧, ∨, ↔. This enterprise thus seems to presuppose that readers already understand the formal logical symbols, and the semanticist uses this understanding to shed light on the meanings of expressions in natural language. This occurs even if the natural language expressions are natural language terms corresponding to the logical ones: “or”, “not”, “forall”, and the like.

The purpose of this talk is to explore the relation between logic and the practice of empirical semantics, hoping to shed light, in some way, on both enterprises.

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, April 1, at 2:30pm will feature Niels Skovgaard-Olsen (University of Göttingen) with a talk on Norm Conflicts and Epistemic Modals. The talk will be held online. See the email announcement or contact Stefan Kaufmann for details.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature Yimei Xiang (Rutgers Linguistics) on Friday, March 11, 2:30-4:00pm. The talk will be held online. For login information, watch the email announcements or contact Stefan Kaufmann.

Relativized Exhaustivity: Mention-Some and Uniqueness

Wh-questions with the modal verb can admit both mention-some (MS) and mention-all (MA) answers. This paper argues that we should treat MS as a grammatical phenomenon, primarily determined by the grammar of the wh-interrogative. I assume that MS and MA answers can be modeled using the same definition of answerhood (Fox 2013) and attribute the MS/MA ambiguity to structural variations within the question nucleus. The variations are: (i) the scope ambiguity of the higher-order wh-trace, and (ii) the absence/presence of an anti-exhaustification operator. However, treating MS answers as complete answers in this way contradicts the widely adopted analysis of uniqueness effects in questions of Dayal 1996, according to which the uniqueness effects of singular which-phrases arise from an exhaustivity presupposition, namely that a question must have a unique exhaustive true answer. To solve this dilemma, I propose that question interpretations presuppose ‘Relativized Exhaustivity’: roughly, the exhaustivity in questions is evaluated relative to the accessible worlds as opposed to the anchor/utterance world. Relativized Exhaustivity preserves the merits of Dayal’s exhaustivity presupposition while permitting MS; moreover, it explains the local-uniqueness effects in modalized singular wh-questions.

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The speaker also has a relevant manuscript on Lingbuzz: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005322

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature Julian Schlöder (UConn Philosophy) on Friday, February 11, 2:30-4:00pm. The talk will be held online. For login information, watch the email announcements or contact Stefan Kaufmann.

Neo-Pragmatist Truth and Supervaliuationism

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially explained in terms of the speech act of rejection. One can implement the deflationist insight in the pragmatist’s theory of content by taking the meaning of the truth predicate to be explained by its inferential relation to assertion. There are two upshots. First, a new diagnosis of the Liar, Revenges and attendant paradoxes: the paradoxes require that truth rules preserve evidence, but they only preserve commitment. Second, one straightforwardly obtains axiomatisations of several supervaluational hierarchies, answering the question of how such theories are to be naturally axiomatised. This is joint work with Luca Incurvati (Amsterdam).

On Thursday, February 10, 12:30-1:30pm, Magda Kaufmann will lead the discussion of the paper “Practical Moore Sentences” by Matthew Mandelkern (Noûs 55:39-61). The meeting will be in person in Oak 338.

On Thursday, February 3, 12:30-1:30pm, we will continue the discussion of the paper “Chasing Hook: Quantified Indicative Conditionals” by Angelika Kratzer (in Lee Walters & John Hawthorne (eds.): Conditionals, Probability, and Paradox: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington, 40-57.) The meeting will be in Oak 338 with an online option. See the email announcement for login information.

On Thursday, January 27, 12:30-1:30pm, Muyi Yang will lead the discussion of the paper “Chasing Hook: Quantified Indicative Conditionals” by Angelika Kratzer (in Lee Walters & John Hawthorne (eds.): Conditionals, Probability, and Paradox: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington, 40-57.) The meeting will be online. See the email announcement for login information.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature Sarah Murray (Linguistics, Cornell) on Friday, November 5, 2:30-4:00pm. The talk will be held online. For login information, watch the email announcements or contact Stefan Kaufmann.

The Logic of Speech Acts: Sentential Force vs Utterance Force

Across languages, sentences are marked for sentence type, or sentential mood, e.g., declarative and interrogative. These sentence types are associated with speech acts: assertions and questions, respectively. However, sentential mood does not determine the force of an utterance of a sentence. We argue that the semantic contribution of sentential mood is a relation that constrains utterance force. This relation takes a proposition as an argument and uses it to affect a component of the context. The semantic constraint together with additional pragmatic factors produce utterance force.

This logic for speech acts involves a semantics for the three main sentence types found cross-linguistically (declarative, interrogative, imperative) as well as a distinction between speaker commitment and discourse reference. In addition to a semantics for sentential mood, this approach provides a framework for a range of phenomena, including evidentials, parentheticals, hedges, and “speech act modifiers”. We conclude by discussing the Linguistic Modification Thesis, the idea that linguistic material can only influence utterance force by influencing sentential force.

This talk is based on joint work with William Starr

The Meaning Group will meet on Friday October 15, 1:15pm–2:15pm), online. We will be talking about Clemens Mayr (2014) “Intervention effects and additivity”, Journal of Semantics 31: 513 – 554.  Muyi Yang will lead the discussion. For online login information, see the email announcement of contact Magdalena Kaufmann.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature Dilip Ninan (Philosophy, Tufts University) on Friday, October 1, 2:30-4:00pm, in ITE 336. Details can be found on the Logic Group website.

An Expressivist Theory of Taste Predicates