Coping With Fine Grain

Daniel Nolan (University of Notre Dame)

Natural languages have hyperintensional semantics. That is, expressions which display necessary equivalence need to be assigned distinct semantic values. One salient example of this is where a sentence or clause expresses a complete proposition that is necessary or impossible; we cannot treat all impossibilities the same, or all necessary truths as interchangeable. Once we use more fine grained semantic values, however, we face a well known challenge: how fine grained are the semantic values do we need? Can we stop before assigning each distinct sentence type a different semantic value, for example?

Once we look at the full range of constructions available in English, it becomes hard to keep semantic values coarse. Some semantic frameworks, including impossible worlds frameworks, give us all the flexibility we need. A natural concern is that we purchase this flexibility just by reproducing the phenomena rather than explaining them. This paper explores a pluralist approach where we adopt different models, of the same overall kind, for modelling different semantic phenomena. While this approach does have challenges and drawbacks, it may be the best response to the variety of semantic phenomena we face.

LINK:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87649813438