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This paper presents an account of notional belief attributions, that is, belief attributions where the belief content is fully specified. The proposal combines a Hintikka style possible-worlds semantics for the belief operator and a structured meanings approach for giving a structured mode of presentation of the belief content. The semantics is not standard compositional, but it satisfies a more general notion of compositionality, explained in the paper. This notion, general compositionality, allows semantic switching : the semantic function relevant for an embedded term is distinct from that which applies to the term in which it is embedded. The general relation between compositionality and hyperintensional contexts is discussed in detail. In the first section, it is argued that we need to combine structured and unstructured meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantics in the Montagovian tradition combine two basic tenets. One tenet is that semantic value of a sentence is an intension, a function from points of evaluations into truth-values. The other tenet is that the semantic value of a composite expression is the result of applying the function denoted by one component to arguments denoted by the other components. Many philosophers object to intensional semantics on the grounds that intensionally equivalent sentences do not substitute salva veritate into attitude ascriptions. They propose instead that the semantic values of sentences must be structured propositions. In rejecting intensional semantics, philosophers who endorse structured propositions also usually reject functional compositionality. Undermining both tenets of the Montagovian programme. I defend a semantic theory that incorporates both structured propositions and functional compositionality. I argue that this semantic theory can preserve many explanatory benefits of Montague semantics. Finally, I show how treating composition functional application can resolve core problems internal to a theory of structured propositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iterated reflection principles have been employed extensively to unfold epistemic commitments that are incurred by accepting a mathematical theory. Recently this has been applied to theories of truth. The idea is to start with a collection of Tarskibiconditionals and arrive by iterated reflection at strong compositional truth theories. In the context of classical logic, it is incoherent to adopt an initial truth theory in which A and 'A is true' are inter-derivable. In this article, we show how in the context of a weaker logic, which we call Basic De Morgan Logic, we can coherently start with such a fully disquotational truth theory and arrive at a strong compositional truth theory by applying a natural uniform reflection principle a finite number of times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages, an indefinite determiner or numeral may be inflected to indicate that the value of the indefinite DP depends on another DP in the sentence or in context. Most semantic analyses of dependent indefinites formalize a similar insight: dependent indefinites contribute a variation condition: the value of the variable introduced by the indefinite must vary with respect to the value of another variable in the sentence or in context. The specific implementation of this insight varies in significant ways, notably on the following two fundamental architectural questions: (1). Are dependent indefinites anaphoric to their licensor? (2). Do dependent indefinites themselves contribute distributive quantification? In this article, I argue the following: (1) dependent indefinites have an anaphoric component; (2) they are themselves distributive. I argue that new data involving spatial agreement in American Sign Language gives insight into these questions, but that the answers have theoretical and empirical ramifications beyond sign language. An analysis is presented within the framework of Plural Compositional DRT (Brasoveanu 2006, i.a.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The copy of Piers Plowman in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 851, the socalled 'Z text', has recently attracted renewed attention as a scribal version of considerable intrinsic interest. I here reexamine Z alongside another notorious scribal version, the ABC splice in Huntington Library, MS HM 114 (Ht). The promulgation of Piers Plowman in multiple versions encouraged the scribal redactors of both manuscripts to reimagine the poem in creative ways. While the Ht redactor enhanced the role of Piers Plowman at the expense of the dreamer Will, the Z redactor offered a more sentimentalized version of Piers and often expanded the 'I' of the dreamer. By inserting himself into the 'I' of the dream vision, the Z redactor authorized his own compositions while simultaneously enhancing those 'monologic' moments at which the dreamer offers apparently authoritative interpretation of his visions. Z's most notable textual omission, which concludes the poem just before the tearing of the pardon, belongs to a consistent pattern in which the redactor eliminates moments of debate and opposition and expands passages of monologic commentary. Rather than an authorial draft as sometimes argued, the Z text represents an intriguing scribal misapprehension of the original poet's 'contentious' compositional style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the traditional forms of disquotationalism and outlines how compositionality follows from disquotational theories and modulo reflection principles. Topics include comparison of views the researchers proposal that seek somehow to derive the compositional nature of truth from disquotational principle and a discussion of epistemological account of the notion of implicit commitment to reflection principles.

A formal semantics for low-level perceptual aspects of meaning is presented, tying these together with the logical-inferential aspects of meaning traditionally studied in formal semantics. The key idea is to model perceptual meanings as classifiers of perceptual input. Furthermore, we show how perceptual aspects of meaning can be updated as a result of observing language use in interaction, thereby enabling fine-grained semantic plasticity and semantic coordination. This requires a framework where intensions are (i) represented independently of extensions, and (ii) structured objects which can be modified as a result of learning. We use Type Theory with Records (TTR), a formal semantics framework that starts from the idea that information and meaning is founded on our ability to perceive and classify the world, i.e. to perceive objects and situations as being of types. As an example of our approach, we show how a simple classifier of spatial information based on the Perceptron can be cast in TTR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of papers, Eli Hirsch develops a deflationary account of certain ontological debates, specifically those regarding the composition and persistence of physical objects. He argues that these debates are merely verbal disputes between philosophers who fail to correctly express themselves in a common language. To establish the truth in plain English about these issues, Hirsch contends, we need only listen to the assertions of ordinary speakers and interpret them charitably. In this paper, I argue that Hirsch's conclusions rest on a deficient understanding of the principle of charity. On a proper understanding of this principle, we can see that philosophical disagreement on these issues is not merely verbal. Further, it is no serious violation of charity to interpret ordinary assertions on these matters as false, for the beliefs they express can be explained as reasonable mistakes. Throughout I focus on the debate on composition; but my arguments should carry over to the debate on persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a new solution to the problems for orthodox decision theory posed by the Pasadena game and its relatives. I argue that a key question raised by consideration of these gambles is whether evaluative compositionality (as I term it) is a requirement of rationality: is the value that an ideally rational agent places on a gamble determined by the values that she places on its possible outcomes, together with their mode of composition into the gamble (i.e. the probabilities assigned to them)? The paper first outlines a certain simple response to the Pasadena game and identifies two problems with this response, the second of which is that it leads to a wholesale violation of evaluative compositionality. I then argue that rationality does not require decision makers to factor in outcomes of arbitrarily low probability. A method for making decisions which flows from this basic idea is then developed, and it is shown that this decision method (Truncation) leads to a limited — as opposed to wholesale — violation of evaluative compositionality. The paper then argues that the truncation method yields solutions to the problems posed by the Pasadena game and its relatives that are both attractive in themselves and superior to those yielded by alternative proposals in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of this paper is to investigate a case in which certain features have been argued to sometimes play a role in the interpretation of an expression and sometimes not—in particular, the case of gender and person features on pronouns.1 That these are in certain configurations only agreement features which have no semantic content has been explored in numerous places; for an especially detailed study, see Kratzer (1998, 2008); see also Heim (2008), von Stechow (2003) and others. I argue here that the view that these are ‘uninterpretable’ is incorrect; they do in fact play the normal role in the semantic composition and their appearance of uninterpretability comes from the particular role they play in the interpretation of focus.2 In a nutshell, the proposal is that these features make no contribution to the focus value of an expression (i.e., they play no role in the computation of a set of alternatives in the sense of Rooth 1984), but they are always fully interpreted in the regular semantic value of an expression. The ‘punchline’ of this paper centres on the interaction of these features with paycheck pronouns—I will show that this interaction provides striking confirmation for the proposal here and presents a serious challenge to the agreement solution. But before turning to the details of the analysis and the paycheck evidence, let me step back to discuss just what is at stake in broader terms. The agreement hypothesis maintains that in certain cases these features play the expected role in the interpretation while in other cases they are only agreement features and play no role in the semantic computation. As will be documented below, this view—if correct—would pose a very real threat to the hypothesis of direct compositionality. Thus, the case of features on pronouns is not just a small and isolated piece of grammatical investigation, but one with quite striking implications for the organization of the grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely held that hearers grasp an utterance's truth conditions by assigning contents to the linguistic expressions used, and combining these contents according to semantic composition rules. To preserve compositionality of truth-conditional content while accounting for context-sensitivity that is not traceable to overt linguistic form, semanticists posit covert linguistic structure. The strongest justification for this approach is the allegedly unconstrained nature of the alternative, whereby a process of ‘free pragmatic enrichment’ supplies constituents of content that are not traceable to (overt or covert) encoded meaning. This paper argues that free enrichment is tightly constrained by purely pragmatic factors, thus undermining the motivation for semantic compositionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principle of semantic compositionality, as Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have emphasized, imposes constraints on theories of meaning that it is hard to meet with psychological or epistemic accounts. Here, I argue that this general tendency is exemplified in Michael Dummett's account of meaning. On that account, the so-called manifestability requirement has the effect that the speaker who understands a sentence s must be able to tell whether or not s satisfies central semantic conditions. This requirement is not met by truth-conditional accounts of meaning. On Dummett's view, it is met by a proof conditional account: understanding amounts to knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence. A speaker is supposed always to be capable of deciding whether or not a given object is a proof of a given sentence she understands. This requirement comes into conflict with compositionality. If meaning is compositionally determined, then all you need for understanding a sentence is what you get from combining your understanding of the parts according to the mode of composition. But that knowledge is not always sufficient for recognizing any proof at all of a given sentence. Dummett's proof-theoretic argument to the contrary is mistaken. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wittgenstein's‘Prototractatus’ raises difficult textual questions concerning both its structure and the date of its composition. I provide an account of the structure of the‘Prototractatus’ by investigating the hitherto unexplored connections between it and other early Wittgenstein manuscripts. I then consider the two most influential proposals on its date of composition, made by von Wright and McGuinness, and argue that neither of them stands up to scrutiny. I make an alternative suggestion, and discuss its implications for the significance of the‘Prototractatus’ in the study of Wittgenstein's early philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reprise questions are a common dialogue device allowing a conversational participant to request clarification of the meaning intended by a speaker when uttering a word or phrase. As such they can act as semantic probes, providing us with information about what meaning can be associated with word and phrase types and thus helping to sharpen the principle of compositionality. This paper discusses the evidence provided by reprise questions concerning the meaning of nouns, noun phrases and determiners. Our central claim is that reprise questions strongly suggest that quantified noun phrases denote (situation‐dependent) individuals—or sets of individuals—rather than sets of sets, or properties of properties. We outline a resulting analysis within the HPSG framework, and discuss its extension to such phenomena as quantifier scope, anaphora and monotone decreasing quantifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Questions the gist of J. Fodor's argument regarding compositionality and epistemic possession conditions, namely that nothing can be essential to or constitutive of a concept unless it composes. Assumptions to account for Fodor's productivity and systematicity.

Proponents of deflationism about meaning often claim that the principle of compositionality, when properly understood, places no constraint whatsoever on the nature of lexical meaning. This deflationary thesis admits of both strong and weak readings. On the strong reading, the principle does not rule out any theory of lexical meaning either alone or in conjunction with other independently plausible semantic assumptions. On the weak reading, the principle alone does not rule out any such theory. I argue that, though weak deflationism about compositionality has better initial prospects than strong, neither version of the thesis is credible. In particular, weak deflationism cannot be maintained in conformity with the deflationist commitment to explaining facts about phrase meanings in compositional terms, that is, by appeal to facts about the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]