Terence Parsons

(? - 2022)

It is tempting to think that Meinong overlooked the "specific/nonspecific" distinction. For example, 'I am looking for a grey horse' may either mean that there is a specific horse I am looking for (e.g. one I lost), or just that I am grey-horse-seeking. The former reading, and not the latter, requires for its truth that there be a grey horse. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether it is defensible to maintain Meinong's theory here: to take nonspecific reading of any verb concerning a possibly non-existent but incomplete object. This requires essential appeal to the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. Included is a discussion of criticisms of Meinong's own theory, and of the Medieval theory of ampliation, according to which psychological discourse can "ampliate" a term such as 'chimera' so as to stand for one or more things that cannot exist, yet are chimeras. The paper concludes inconclusively.

I begin by sketching a theory about the semantics of verbs in event sentences, and the evidence on which that theory is based. In the second section, I discuss the evidence for extending that theory to state sentences, including copulative sentences with adjectives and nouns; the evidence for this extension of the theory is not very good. In the third section, I discuss new evidence based on considerations of talk about time travel; that evidence is apparently quite good. I conclude with a problem about formulating default knowledge

An introductory text in linguistic semantics, uniquely balancing empirical coverage and formalism with development of intuition and methodology. This introductory textbook in linguistic semantics for undergraduates features a unique balance between empirical coverage and formalism on the one hand and development of intuition and methodology on the other. It will equip students to form intuitions about a set of data, explain how well an analysis of the data accords with their intuitions, and extend the analysis or seek an alternative. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. After mastering the material, students will be able to tackle some of the most difficult questions in the field even if they have never taken a linguistics course before. After introducing such concepts as truth conditions and compositionality, the book presents a basic symbolic logic with negation, conjunction, and generalized quantifiers, to serve as the basis for translation throughout the book. It then develops a detailed compositional semantics, covering quantification (scope and binding), adverbial modification, relative clauses, event semantics, tense and aspect, as well as pragmatic phenomena, notably deictic pronouns and narrative progression. A Course in Semantics offers a large and diverse set of exercises, interspersed throughout the text; those labeled “Important practice and looking ahead” prepare students for material to come; those labeled “Thinking about ” invite students to think beyond the content of the book.

This paper follows up a suggestion by Paul Vincent Spade that there were two Medieval theories of the modes of personal supposition. I suggest that early work by Sherwood and others was a study of quantifiers: their semantics and the effects of context on inferences that can be made from quantified terms. Later, in the hands of Burley and others, it changed into a study of something else, a study of what I call global quantificational effect. For example, although the quantifier in ‘¬∀xPx’ is universal, it can be seen globally as having an existential effect; this is because the formula containing it is equivalent to ‘∃x¬Px’. The notion of global effect can be explained in terms of the modern theory of normal forms. I suggest that early authors were studying quantifiers, and the terminology of the theory of personal supposition is a classification of kinds of quantifiers. In this theory, to say that a term has distributive supposition is to say, roughly, that it is quantified by a universal quantifying sign. Later authors turned this into a theory of global quantificational effect. In the later theory, to say that a term has distributive supposition is to say that the overall effect is as if the term were universally quantified with a quantifier taking (relatively) wide scope. The difference between these two approaches is illustrated by the fact that the term ‘man’ is classified as having distributive ("universal") supposition in ‘Not every man is running’ in the earlier theory, whereas in the later theory that term does not have distributive supposition; it has determinate ("existential") supposition. In the paper I explain these options, and I argue from several texts that the earlier and later medieval theories actually worked like this. In an appendix I make further efforts to clarify the obscure early accounts, as well as the nineteenth century "doctrine of distribution". The last section of the paper discusses the "purpose(s)" of supposition theory

This paper arose from an attempt to determine how the very late medieval1 supposition theorists treated anaphoric pronouns, pronouns whose significance is derivative from their antecedents. Modern researches into pronouns were stimulated in part by the problem of "donkey sentences" discussed by Geach 1962 in a section explaining what is wrong with medieval supposition theory. So there is some interest in seeing exactly what the medieval account comes to, especially if it turns out, as I suspect, to work as well as contemporary ones. Besides, finding a good analysis of pronouns has proved to be very difficult, and so we might possibly find some insight in a historically different kind of approach. I discuss a version of supposition theory that aims at producing analyses of sentences containing quantified terms,2 as articulated around 1400 by Paul of Venice, and as further developed by certain logicians such as de Soto and Celaya in the 1400's and early 1500's.3 Much of what I will say also applies indirectly to earlier versions of supposition theory (before 1400)

Frege held various views about language and its relation to non-linguistic things. These views led him to the paradoxical-sounding conclusion that "the concept horse is NOT a concept." A key assumption that led him to say this is the assumption that phrases beginning with the definite article "the" denote objects, not concepts. In sections I-III this issue is explained. In sections IV-V Frege's theory is articulated, and it is shown that he was incorrect in thinking that this theory led to the conclusion that "the concept horse is not a concept." Section VI goes on to show that his strict theory about the functioning of ordinary language is inconsistent. Sections VII-VIII investigate Frege's reasons for thinking that "the concept horse" must denote an object; these reasons are not adequate on Frege's own grounds. Section IX sketches a systematic way to allow such phrases to denote concepts (not objects) within the framework of Frege's main views about language. Section X comments briefly on the consequences of this idea for his logistic program.