Michael Glanzberg

Semanticists will often casually remark that Noam Chomsky rejects semantics. Chomsky has frequently noted how poorly understood some aspects of semantics are, and has shown little inclination to grant the status of reasonably well‐developed science to many parts of semantics. One specific reason Chomsky has often voiced skepticism about semantics is that he saw the wrong kinds of appeals to semantics in the wrong places. The arguments for the autonomy of syntax in Chomsky's early writing have been described as part of an extended argument for the “existence of syntax”. Semantics for Chomsky must be part of I‐language: the part that provides useful information from the Language Faculty to the Conceptual‐Intentional system. There are many traditions in semantics, and many current research programs in sematics are embedded in firmly anti‐Chomskyan views of language in general. Chomsky's skepticism about truth‐conditional semantics has been, and remains strong.

This chapter reviews Davidson's main work on truth. It focuses on the connections between truth, meaning, and interpretation that form the core of Davidson's views, and on the relations of his views to traditional theories of truth. It highlights several key ideas that comprise Davidson's approach to truth: Tarski's work on truth is fundamental to understanding the concept, as is the relation of truth to meaning, and we fail to understand that connection adequately unless we take into account the constraints of radical interpretation. Furthermore, in understanding those connections, we see that truth is not a redundant or trivial concept, but equally, it is not a locus for metaphysical commitments.

Gary Ostertag: Quine and Russell: The chapter provides a selective overview of themes common to Russell and Quine, focusing on Russell's theory of descriptions and the notion of contextual definition. It begins by discussing Russell and Quine on modality, along the way highlighting the following topics: how C.I. Lewis's metalinguistic understanding of the modal operators shaped the subsequent debate about modality – in particular, how it rendered the very idea of de re modality unintelligible; how Quine's inattention to matters of scope led him to conclude, somewhat misleadingly, that he had derived a modal paradox; how the failure of the reductionist program provided the basis for a challenge to a cornerstone of the understanding of modality – the idea of analytic truth. I then turn to Russell and Quine on the semantics of attitude reports, where the issue of scope takes center stage again. A final section discusses Russell's influence in the shaping of Quine's ontological criterion.

This paper revisits a challenge for contextualist approaches to paradoxes such as the Liar paradox and Russell’s paradox. Contextualists argue that these paradoxes are to be resolved by appeal to context dependence. This can offer some nice and effective ways to avoid paradox. But there is a problem. Context dependence is, at least to begin with, a phenomenon in natural language. Is there really such context dependence as the solutions to paradoxes require, and is it really just a familiar linguistic phenomenon at work? Not so clearly. In earlier work, I argued that the required form of context dependence does not look like our most familiar instances of context dependence in natural language. I called this extraordinary context dependence. In this paper, I shall explore, somewhat tentatively, a way that we can see the context dependence needed to address paradoxes as not so extraordinary. Doing so will also allow us to connect thinking about the context dependence of quantifier domains with some interesting ideas about the distinctive semantic properties of certain quantifiers.

This paper reviews the claim that certain predicates, including what are called predicates of personal taste, have a sometimes-hidden element for a judge or experiencer. This claim was advanced in my own earlier work, as well as a number of other papers. My main goal here is to review some of the arguments in favor of this claim, and along the way, to present some of my earlier unpublished work on the matter. In much of the earlier literature, this claim was part of a debate between relativists, contextualists, and others about the semantics of ‘subjective’ or ‘perspectival’ predicates. I shall argue here that these issues are independent. Whether we opt for experiencer or judge parameters is independent of whether we prefer relativist semantics to any other kind.

This chapter introduces readers to the empirical questions at issue in debates over gendered pronouns and assesses the plausibility of various possible answers to these questions. It has two parts. The first is a general introduction to the linguistics and psychology of grammatical gender. The second focuses on the meanings of gendered pronouns in English. It begins with a discussion of some methodological limitations of empirical approaches to the topic and the normative implications of those limitations. It then argues against three simple theories of the semantics of gendered pronouns in English and proposes an alternative that fares better: the Gender-First View. Finally, it discusses the singular use of 'they' and its connection to nonbinary gender identities.

This paper revisits a challenge for contextualist approaches to paradoxes such as the Liar paradox and Russell’s paradox. Contextualists argue that these paradoxes are to be resolved by appeal to context dependence. This can offer some nice and effective ways to avoid paradox. But there is a problem. Context dependence is, at least to begin with, a phenomenon in natural language. Is there really such context dependence as the solutions to paradoxes require, and is it really just a familiar linguistic phenomenon at work? Not so clearly. In earlier work, I argued that the required form of context dependence does not look like our most familiar instances of context dependence in natural language. I called this extraordinary context dependence. In this paper, I shall explore, somewhat tentatively, a way that we can see the context dependence needed to address paradoxes as not so extraordinary. Doing so will also allow us to connect thinking about the context dependence of quantifier domains with some interesting ideas about the distinctive semantic properties of certain quantifiers.

In this paper, we defend a traditional approach to semantics, that holds that the outputs of compositional semantics are propositional, i.e. truth conditions. Though traditional, this view has been challenged on a number of fronts over the years. Since classic work of Lewis, arguments have been offered which purport to show that semantic composition requires values that are relativized, e.g. to times, or other parameters that render them no longer propositional. Focusing in recent variants of these arguments involving quantification and binding, we argue that a correct understanding of how composition works gives no reason to relativize semantic values, and that propositional semantic values are in fact the preferred option. We take our argument to be mainly empirical, but along the way, we defend some more general theses. Simple propositional semantic values are viable in composition, we maintain, because composition is itself a complex phenomenon, involving multiple modes of composition. Furthermore, some composition principles make adjustments to the meanings of constituents in the course of composition. These adjustments are by triggered syntactic environments. We argue such small contributions of meaning from syntactic structure are acceptable.

One of the difficulties surrounding the ancient Paradox of the Liar is that it is unclear what philosophical problem it poses. In this thesis, I offer a diagnosis of the problem, and defend a solution to it. In Chapter I, I argue that the problem posed is one about the relation between a sentence uttered in a context and the proposition expressed. Chapter II supports this conclusion, by arguing against most notions of truth-value gap, and by elaborating on the notion of failing to express a proposition. ;To develop a solution to the problem, I argue in Chapter III that the notion of context must be expanded to take into account structural features of the discourse in which an utterance is made. So understood, a context determines a domain from which the truth conditions available for the construction of propositions expressible in the context must be drawn. ;This theory is applied to the Liar Paradox in Chapter IV. Under my enhanced notion of context, we can see certain inferences as changing a context just by introducing novel words into a conversation. In the Liar Paradox case, the term for the semantic relation of expressing a proposition is introduced. Because such relations have a highly complex local character, this context-change induces a substantial change in the domain of available truth conditions. The result is, I show, that there are effectively more propositions that can be expressed in the new context than there were in the old. Among the new propositions that can be identified in the new context is the one expressed by the Liar Sentence. ;One of the most striking features of a hierarchical account of this kind is the result that any quantification, whether syntactically unrestricted or not, is interpreted as being over some restricted domain. I go on to argue in Chapter V that in fact there are independent reasons for thinking that quantification must behave in this way. ;Finally, I elaborate some of the more general consequences of the theory I develop. First, I claim that the notion of expression I propose undermines any sharp and substantial distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Second, in Chapter VI, I argue that the theory has some consequences for contemporary debates over realism and truth

Cappelen and Hawthorne’s Relativism and Monadic Truth (2009) offers an extended defense of a thesis they call simplicity, which, in brief, holds that propositions are true or false simpliciter. Propositions are cast in their traditional roles as the contents of assertions, and as the semantic values of declarative sentences in contexts. Simplicity stands in sharp contrast to forms of relativism including, for instance, a form that hold that our claims are true or false only relative to a judge. This applies especially to claims of taste, which come out true or false only relative to the judge who finds things tasty (e.g. Glanzberg 2007, Lasersohn 2005). But simplicity also rejects the more widespread temporalist view that propositions are true or false only relative to a time, and it rejects the even more widely held view that propositions are true or false only relative to a world. One reason that has been advanced for temporalism, e.g. by Kaplan (1989), is that our languages seem to contain non-trivial temporal operators. Hence, the argument goes, the semantic values of sentences need to be temporally neutral, i.e. vary for truth or falsehood with time. The same goes for possible worlds and modal operators. Hence, Kaplan and many others think of the semantic values of sentences as sets of world-time pairs. It has been tempting to apply this sort of argument much more widely, to see the semantic values of sentences as varying not just with world and time, but perhaps with location and other parameters as well. Kaplan..

Current theories of context see context as composed of information that is localizable to individual utterances. Current theories of discourse grant that discourses have important global properties that are not so localizable. In this paper, I argue that context, even narrowly construed as whatever combines with a sentence to determine truth conditions, must have a discourse -global component. I identify a context-dependence phenomenon related to the linguistic concepts of topic and focus, isolate the pertinent feature of context, and show that this feature must be discourse -global in nature. I thus argue that context is as complicated as an entire discourse

This paper argues that relativity of truth to a world plays no significant role in empirical semantic theory, even as it is done in the model-theoretic tradition relying on intensional type theory. Some philosophical views of content provide an important notion of truth at a world, but they do not constrain the empirical domain of semantic theory in a way that makes this notion empirically significant. As an application of this conclusion, this paper shows that a potential motivation for relativism based on the relativity of truth to a world fails.

Quantified terms are terms of generality. They are also provide some of our prime examples of the phenomenon of scope. The distinction between singular and general terms, as well as the ways that general terms enter into scope relations, are certainly fundamental to our understanding of language. Yet when we turn to natural language, we encounter a huge and apparently messy collection of general terms; not just every and some, but most, few, between five and ten, and many others. Natural-language sentences also display a complex range of scope phenomena; unlike first-order logic, which clearly and simply demarcates scope in its notation.

This paper argues against minimalism about truth. It does so by way of a comparison of the theory of truth with the theory of sets, and consideration of where paradoxes may arise in each. The paper proceeds by asking two seemingly unrelated questions. First, what is the theory of truth about? Answering this question shows that minimalism bears important similarities to naive set theory. Second, why is there no strengthened version of Russell's paradox, as there is a strengthened Liar paradox? Answering this question shows that like naive set theory, minimalism is unable to make adequate progress in resolving the paradoxes, and must be replaced by a drastically different sort of theory. Such a theory, it is shown, must be fundamentally non-minimalist.

This paper argues against relativism, focusing on relativism based on the semantics of predicates of personal taste. It presents and defends a contextualist semantics for these predicates, derived from current work on gradable adjectives. It then considers metasemantic questions about the kinds of contextual parameters this semantics requires. It argues they are not metasemantically different from those in other gradable adjectives, and that contextual parameters of this sort are widespread in natural language. Furthermore, this paper shows that if such parameters are rejected, it leads to an unacceptably rampant form of relativism, that relativizes truth to an open-ended list of parameters.