This book presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. Heather Burnett proposes a new formal reasoning system called DelTCS in which she sets out a completely new theory of gradable linguistic constructions.
This volume is the first to focus specifically on experimental studies of the semantics of gradability, scale structure and vagueness. It presents support for and challenges to current formal analyses of these phenomena in view of experimentally collected data, highlighting the ways semantic and pragmatic theory can benefit from experimental methodologies. The papers in the volume contribute to an explicit and detailed account of the use, representation, and online processing of gradable and vague expressions using various kinds of controlled speaker judgment tasks, eye tracking, and ERP. The aim is to strengthen the foundations of experimental semantics and promote interaction between linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, and philosophers who are interested in the semantics of natural language. Using data representing different languages and a variety of nominal and adjectival constructions, including degree modification and comparatives, the contributions address scale-based classifications of gradable predicates, such as the absolute vs. relative distinction; the nature of the standards for applicability of gradable expressions and the ways in which standards are determined; the nature of dimensions and multidimensionality in the meaning of scalar expressions; and the role of embodiment, subjectivity, and sociolinguistic considerations in the use and understanding of gradable expressions.
Brill's Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages offers an accessible yet engaging coverage of medieval European history and culture, c. 500-c. 1500, in a series of themed articles, taking an interdisciplinary and comparative approach.
The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. The main focus of ESSLLI is on the interface between linguistics, logic and computation. ESSLLI offers foundational, introductory and advanced courses, as well as workshops, covering a wide variety of topics within the three areas of interest: Language and Computation, Language and Logic, and Logic and Computation. The 16 papers presented in this volume have been selected among 44 papers presented by talks or posters at the Student Sessions of the 24th and 25th editions of ESSLLI, held in 2012 in Opole, Poland, and 2013 in Düsseldorf, Germany. The papers are extended versions of the versions presented, and have all been subjected to a second round of blind peer review.
This book presents the state of the art in the fields of formal logic pioneered by Graham Priest. It includes advanced technical work on the model and proof theories of paraconsistent logic, in contributions from top scholars in the field. Graham Priest’s research has had a considerable influence on the field of philosophical logic, especially with respect to the themes of dialetheism—the thesis that there exist true but inconsistent sentences—and paraconsistency—an account of deduction in which contradictory premises do not entail the truth of arbitrary sentences. Priest’s work has regularly challenged researchers to reappraise many assumptions about rationality, ontology, and truth. This book collects original research by some of the most esteemed scholars working in philosophical logic, whose contributions explore and appraise Priest’s work on logical approaches to problems in philosophy, linguistics, computation, and mathematics. They provide fresh analyses, critiques, and applications of Priest’s work and attest to its continued relevance and topicality. The book also includes Priest’s responses to the contributors, providing a further layer to the development of these themes .
The aim of this volume is to open up new perspectives and to raise new research questions about a unified approach to truth, modalities, and propositional attitudes. The volume’s essays are grouped thematically around different research questions. The first theme concerns the tension between the theoretical role of the truth predicate in semantics and its expressive function in language. The second theme of the volume concerns the interaction of truth with modal and doxastic notions. The third theme covers higher-order solutions to the semantic and modal paradoxes, providing an alternative to first-order solutions embraced in the first two themes. This book will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and semantics. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language ("CR-expressions")-exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.
Abstract objects have been a central topic in philosophy since antiquity. Philosophers have defended various views about abstract objects by appealing to metaphysical considerations, considerations regarding mathematics or science, and, not infrequently, intuitions about natural language. This book pursues the question of how and whether natural language allows for reference to abstract objects in a fully systematic way. By making full use of contemporary linguistic semantics, it presents a much greater range of linguistic generalizations than has previously been taken into consideration in philosophical discussions, and it argues for an ontological picture is very different from that generally taken for granted by philosophers and semanticists alike. Reference to abstract objects such as properties, numbers, propositions, and degrees is considerably more marginal than generally held. Instead, natural language is rather generous in allowing reference to particularized properties (tropes), the use of nonreferential expressions in apparent referential position, and the use of 'nominalizing expressions', such as quantifiers like 'something'. Reference to abstract objects is achieved generally only by the use of 'reifying terms', such as 'the number eight'.
Knowledge and Presuppositions develops a novel account of epistemic contextualism based on the idea that pragmatic presuppositions play a central role in the semantics of knowledge attributions. According to Blome-Tillmann, knowledge attributions are sensitive to what is pragmatically presupposed at the context of ascription. The resulting theory—Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism (PEC)—is simple and straightforward, yet powerful enough to have far-reaching and important consequences for a variety of hotly debated issues in epistemology and philosophy of language. In this book, Blome-Tillmann first develops Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism and then explores its ability to resolve various sceptical paradoxes and puzzles. Blome-Tillmann also defends PEC against familiar and widely discussed philosophical and linguistic objections to contextualism. In the final chapters of the book PEC is employed to illuminate a variety of concerns central to contemporary discussions of epistemological issues, such as Gettier cases, Moorean reasoning, the nature of evidence, and other current problems and puzzles.