Constraint Semantics
I begin by pointing out a tension between the ideology and the practice of semantics: more specifically, between standard accounts of what makes a recursive definition of truth at a context suitable to serve as a theory of meaning, and the widespread practice of positing contextual parameters whose values are not common knowledge between speakers and hearers, even in the most favorable cases. I consider various options for resolving the tension. After giving arguments against several possible approaches (hard-core epistemicism, diagonalization, Bayesian models of communication, supervaluations, and appeals to clouds of propositions), I defend an approach I call "constraint semantics." On this approach, we do not define truth at a context for sentences; instead, we associate sentences with constraints on contextual parameters. The formalism is given a plan-expressivist interpretation: declarative sentences express hybrid mental states with both a practical and a doxastic component. The common ground, too, can be conceived as a hybrid state – not an amalgam of a shared view of the world and a shared plan for the use of words, but a joint constraint on worldview and plan.
I begin by pointing out a tension between the ideology and the practice of semantics: more specifically, between standard accounts of what makes a recursive definition of truth at a context suitable to serve as a theory of meaning, and the widespread practice of positing contextual parameters whose values are not common knowledge between speakers and hearers, even in the most favorable cases. I consider various options for resolving the tension. After giving arguments against several possible approaches (hard-core epistemicism, diagonalization, Bayesian models of communication, supervaluations, and appeals to clouds of propositions), I defend an approach I call "constraint semantics." On this approach, we do not define truth at a context for sentences; instead, we associate sentences with constraints on contextual parameters. The formalism is given a plan-expressivist interpretation: declarative sentences express hybrid mental states with both a practical and a doxastic component. The common ground, too, can be conceived as a hybrid state – not an amalgam of a shared view of the world and a shared plan for the use of words, but a joint constraint on worldview and plan.