A remarkable thing about natural language is that we can use it to share our beliefs
and thoughts about the world with other speakers of our language. In cases of
successful communication, beliefs seem to be transferred from speakers to hearers
by means of the hearer recovering the contents of the speaker’s utterances. This is
so natural to us that we take it for granted in our everyday life, and rarely stop to
think about how it's is possible. Nevertheless, it's a phenomenon that calls for
expl…
Read moreA remarkable thing about natural language is that we can use it to share our beliefs
and thoughts about the world with other speakers of our language. In cases of
successful communication, beliefs seem to be transferred from speakers to hearers
by means of the hearer recovering the contents of the speaker’s utterances. This is
so natural to us that we take it for granted in our everyday life, and rarely stop to
think about how it's is possible. Nevertheless, it's a phenomenon that calls for
explanation. It is natural to expect that natural language semantics has a key
explanatory role to play here. In order to understand this role, we must relate the
semantic values assigned to sentences by semantic theory with the content of our
speech acts. The simplest possible relation would be identity; the meaning of a
sentence is simply the belief expressed by an assertion of the sentence in a given
context of utterance. However, a number of problem cases in the literature suggest
that this cannot be the case. This dissertation offers a critical assessment of the
arguments for distinguishing the semantic value of a sentence from it's so called
assertoric content, focusing on problems arising from the analysis of tense and
temporal expressions. I conclude that they are indeed distinct, and offer a
constructive account of how they must be related in order to allow for an
explanation of communicative success.