Seth Yalcin

There is the sort of context-sensitivity that is hard-wired into particular lexical items, Kaplan-style; and then there is the sort of context-sensitivity that can enter into a sentence in virtue of the way that index parameters are ‘initialized’ by context. Call the former sort of context-sensitivity _indexical_, and the latter _parametric_. Philosophical thinking about context-sensitivity is dominated by a focus on the indexical variety. Indeed, ‘context-sensitive’ is often defined in ways that would make all context-sensitivity indexical. Yet parametric context-sensitivity is arguably the more pervasive phenomenon. Drawing together some themes in recent work by Dilip Ninan, Brian Rabern, and Paolo Santorio, this chapter offers a study of parametric context-sensitivity. Attention to it is important for thinking straight about the relation between compositionality and content, about monsters, and about what it takes to motivate the context parameter of Kaplan’s two-dimensional semantics.

One path into the semantics of the deontic modals _ought_ and _should_ approaches them indirectly, by starting with an investigation of the non-deontic, seemingly epistemic reading of these modals. Seth Yalcin’s chapter embarks down that path. It has two main objectives. First, a case is made against the idea that _ought_ and _should_ are susceptible to true epistemic readings. These modals admit of a certain reading distinct from, but easily confused with, the epistemic flavor of modality. It is suggested that this “pseudo-epistemic” reading suffices to explain the data that have prompted theorists to suppose that there is a true epistemic reading of these modals. The second objective of this chapter is to explore the nature of the pseudo-epistemic reading, including its relation to normality and the connections between these modals and default reasoning.

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about static versus dynamic approaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem (1986, 1996) is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of a conversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a generalization of the class of systems that van Benthem's result concerns. These are the strongly static conversation systems. The second class is broader, and allows for a certain commonly recognized form of context sensitivity. These are the weakly static conversation systems. In the vein of van Benthem's result, we supply representation theorems which independently characterize these two varieties of conversation system. We observe that some canonically dynamic semantic systems correspond to weakly static conversation systems. We close by discussing some hazards that arise in trying to bring our formal results to bear on natural language phenomena, and on the debate about whether the compositional semantics for natural language should take a dynamic shape.

Stalnaker (_Context_, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) defends two ideas about common ground. The first is that the common ground of a conversation is definable in terms of an iterated propositional attitude of _acceptance_, so that _p_ is common ground iff _p_ is commonly accepted. The second is the idea that the “default setting" of conversational acceptance is belief, so that as a default, what is accepted in conversation coincides with what is (commonly) believed. In this paper, I argue that we should favor a pair of contrasting theses instead. First, I argue that we should identify the common ground with what is common knowledge about what is accepted, so that _p_ is common ground iff it is common knowledge that _p_ is accepted. Thus the attitude that is iterated in the definition of common ground is not acceptance but knowledge. Second, I argue that the “default setting" for conversational acceptance is not belief, but knowledge.

Consider a language incorporating a mirror-image form of assertion, where the norm is to express what you take to be false rather than what you take to be true. Why aren’t ordinary languages like that? Why do we generally assert what we take to be true rather than what we take to be false? If Lewis and Massey are right, there is a sense in which the question is based on a mistake, and in which English could be described either way. I explore that idea, which centers on the role of duality in language. One of the main questions in the air is whether the symmetry of duality can be used as a guide to ‘real structure’ in semantics and pragmatics. I try to think through it with an analogy to relationism about space.

This paper critiques a number of standard ways of understanding the role of the metalanguage in a semantic theory for natural language, including the idea that disquotation plays a nontrivial role in any explanatory natural language semantics. It then proposes that the best way to understand the role of a semantic metalanguage involves recognizing that semantics is a model-based science. The metalanguage of semantics is language for articulating features of the theorist's model. Models are understood as mediating instruments---idealized structures used to represent select aspects of the world, aspects the theorist is seeking some theoretical understanding of. The aspect of reality we are seeking some understanding of in semantics is a dimension of human linguistic competence---informally, knowledge of meaning.

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

As Quine observed, the following sentence has a reading which, if true, would be of special interest to the authorities: Ralph believes that someone is a spy. This is the reading where the quantifier is naturally understood as taking wide scope relative to the attitude verb and as binding a variable within the scope of the attitude verb. This essay is interested in addressing the question what the semantic analysis of this kind of reading should look like from a Fregean perspective—a perspective according to which attitude states are generally relations to structured Fregean thoughts composed of senses. The Fregean view faces a challenge of compositionality here. This essay describes the challenge and offers a response on the Fregean's behalf

Recently, a number of theorists (MacFarlane (2003, 2011), Egan et al. (2005), Egan (2007), Stephenson (2007a,b)) have argued that an adequate semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals calls for some technical notion of relativist truth and/or relativist content. Much of this work has relied on an empirical thesis about speaker judgments, namely that competent speakers tend to judge a present-tense bare epistemic possibility claim true only if the prejacent is compatible with their information. Relativists have in particular appealed to judgments elicited in so-called eavesdropping and retraction cases to support this empirical thesis. But opposing theorists have denied the judgments, and at present there is no consensus in the literature about how the speaker judgments in fact pattern. Consequently there is little agreement on what exactly a semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals should predict about the pattern of judgments in these cases. Further theorizing requires greater clarity on the data to be explained. To clarify the data, we subjected eavesdropping and retraction cases to experimental evaluation. Our data provide evidence against the claim that competent speakers tend to judge a present-tense bare epistemic possibility claim true only if the prejacent is compatible with their information. Theories designed to predict this result are accordingly undermined.

I don’t propose to harp on the question of whether MacFarlane has the data right. Let us just assume, for the sake of argument, that he does. Let us further assume that his interpretation of the data is correct—i.e., that these judgments are assessments of the the whole clause and not simply of the prejacent. Granting all this—maybe a lot—we need a semantics for epistemic modals that will make sense of the judgments in this case, and in relevantly similar cases. Mac- Farlane argues that contextualism about epistemic modals cannot make sense of the judgments. His central worry is that it can only get the truth-value judgments of speakers right by making the truth-conditions of epistemic modal claims outrageously strong—too strong to be assertable in cases where they are, in fact, assertable. We might call it the contextualist’s dilemma: either our semantics systematically fails to capture the truth-value judgments that people actually make, or it captures these judgments but turns users of epistemic modal sentences into irrational asserters.

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about static versus dynamic approaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of a conversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a generalization of the class of systems that van Benthem's result concerns. These are the strongly static conversation systems. The second class is broader, and allows for a certain commonly recognized form of context sensitivity. These are the weakly static conversation systems. In the vein of van Benthem's result, we supply representation theorems which independently characterize these two varieties of conversation system. We observe that some canonically dynamic semantic systems correspond to weakly static conversation systems. We close by discussing some hazards that arise in trying to bring our formal results to bear on natural language phenomena, and on the debate about whether the compositional semantics for natural language should take a dynamic shape.

There is on the one hand the traditional speech act-theoretic notion of illocutionary force, and there is on the other hand the kind of notion of force we have in mind when we are theorizing in formal pragmatics about conversational states and their characteristic modes of update. These notions are different, and occur at different levels of abstraction.They are not helpfully viewed as in competition.The expressivist idea that normative language is distinctive in force can be developed in two sorts of directions, depending on which of the two senses of ’force’ is emphasized. I suggest expressivists do better to take the path stressing conversational update: they do better to start with the idea that normative discourse is distinctive in respect of its dynamic effect on the state of the conversation.