On Thursday, February 17, 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.

There will be no meeting of the Meaning Group on Thursday, February 10.

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.

On Thursday, Nov 18, Eva (Linghui) Gan will be presenting her on-going work Question-Answer Constructions in Hong Kong Sign Language. The meeting will be held remotely (webex) from 11am to noon.

On Monday, November 15, Frank Sode (Frankfurt University) will give a guest lecture (remotely) on “Desire reports and conditionals” in Magdalena Kaufmann’s semantics seminar (1:30pm–4:30pm). — Everyone is welcome, please contact Magdalena Kaufmann for the link if you would like to participate but don’t have access via HuskyCT.

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The Meaning Group will meet on Thursday, November 11, 11:00am – noon (online). Yusuke Yagi and Xuetong Yuan will present on-going work on concessive conditionals in Japanese and Mandarin.

For online participation consult email announcements or contact Magdalena Kaufmann.

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