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From contexts to circumstances of evaluation: is the trade-off always innocuous?

Authors :
Kissine, Mikhail
Source :
Synthese; Jan2012, Vol. 184 Issue 2, p199-216, 18p
Publication Year :
2012

Abstract

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance-each token being thus associated with a distinct intension-circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain 'point of view'. The main difference between the two approaches is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
00397857
Volume :
184
Issue :
2
Database :
Complementary Index
Journal :
Synthese
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
69601056
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9732-4