Forthcoming in Philosophical StudiesHere is a simple and inviting picture: the semantic values of sentences, relative to contexts, are sets of possible worlds. These are the truth conditions of assertions of those sentences in contexts. They are thus the contents of assertions, or the objects of attitudes we might take towards such contents.There have been many questions raised about the simple picture. For instance, sets of worlds might well be too coarse-grained to capture fully the objects of attitudes, leading to more fine-grained or structured contents. But opting for structure does not conflict with truth conditions being sets of worlds, and so, I shall ignore this sort of question. I shall likewise ignore questions about the nature of possible worlds.I propose to ignore these questions to focus on whether the semantic values of sentences should be sets of something more than possible worlds. For instance, it has frequently been proposed that semantic values should be sets of pairs of worlds and times. The simple picture opts for eternalism: semantic values of sentences are eternal truth conditions. This stand in * Versions of this paper were presented at a symposium on relativism at the Pacific APA, 2006, the 'Cog Lunch' at CSLI, 2006 contrast to temporalism, which holds that semantic values are time-relative truth conditions. Temporalism has been subject to a number of criticisms; from Enç (1984Enç ( , 1986, from Evans (1985), from King (2003), and from Richard (1981Richard ( , 1982. I shall not be particularly concerned to argue against temporalism here, though I find these criticisms persuasive, and I shall be assuming eternalism. The question on which I shall focus here is whether, on the model of temporalism, we should see any other additions to worlds in the semantic values of sentences. Leaving times to one side, we can distinguish two sorts of positions: Semantic value absolutism:The semantic values of sentences are sets of worlds. Semantic value relativism:The semantic values of sentences are sets of tuples of worlds and other parameters, relative to which the truth of a sentence in a context is determined.The particular form of semantic value relativism I shall discuss most in this paper posits that semantic values of sentence are sets of pairs of worlds and judges. The judge assesses certain claims, like what counts as fun.As proponents of such views are clearly aware, this is a form of relativism about truth.We can get no truth value from the content of an assertion until we fix the judge relative to whom it is true. But defenders of this sort of semantic value relativism are quick to point out they are not repeating the mistake, all too common among our undergraduates, of just thinking that truth is 'truth for me, and truth for you'. Rather, they argue, there are semantic phenomena we cannot make sense of without making room for relative truth.Furthermore, they will argue, this semantically motivated relativism is more modest, and more sensible, than our undergraduates' version, and so is no...
This paper argues for the thesis that, roughly put, it is impossible to talk about absolutely everything. To put the thesis more precisely, there is a particular sense in which, as a matter of semantics, quantifiers always range over domains that are in principle extensible, and so cannot count as really being 'absolutely everything'. The paper presents an argument for this thesis, and considers some important objections to the argument and to the formulation of the thesis. The paper also offers an assessment of just how implausible the thesis really is. It argues that the intuitions against the thesis come down to a few special cases, which can be given special treatment. Finally, the paper considers some metaphysical ideas that might surround the thesis. Particularly, it might be maintained that an important variety of realism is incompatible with the thesis. The paper argues that this is not the case.In this paper, I shall attempt to accomplish two things. One is to argue for a thesis that many find implausible. To put it roughly, and bit melodramatically, it is impossible to talk about absolutely everything. To put it more precisely, there is a particular sense in which, as a matter of semantics, quantifiers always range over domains that are in principle extensible, and so cannot count as really being 'absolutely everything'. The second thing I shall try to accomplish is to assess just how implausible my position really is. I shall suggest that the intuitions against it come down to a few special cases, which can be given special treatment. I shall also consider some metaphysical ideas that might surround the view. Particularly, it might be maintained that an important variety of realism is incompatible with my position. I shall argue this is not the case, and examine what the connections between quantification and realism might then be.
One of the great successes of the past fifty or so years of the study of language has been the application of formal methods. This has yielded a flood of results in many areas, both of linguistics and philosophy, and has spawned fruitful research programs with names like 'formal semantics' or 'formal syntax' or 'formal pragmatics'.1 'Formal' here often means the tools and methods of formal logic are used (though other areas of mathematics have played important roles as well). The success of applying logical methods to natural language has led some to see the connection between the two as extremely close. To put the idea somewhat roughly, logic studies various languages, and the only special feature of the study of natural language is its focus on the languages humans happen to speak.This idea, I shall argue, is too much of a good thing. To make my point, I shall focus on consequence relations. Though they hardly constitute the full range of issues, tools, or techniques studied in logic, a consequence relation is the core feature of a logic. Thus, seeing how consequence relations relate to natural language is a good way to measure how closely related logic and natural language are. I shall argue here that what we find in natural language is not really logical consequence. In particular, I shall argue that studying the semantics of a natural language is not to study a genuinely logical consequence relation. There is indeed a lot we can glean * Thanks to Jc Beall for valuable discussions of the topics explored in this paper. Versions of this material were presented at the Conference on the Foundations of Logical Consequence sponsored by Arché, St. Andrews,
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