2nd UCL Leverhulme Lecture - Truthmakers for what we say

Angelika Kratzer (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Any semantic theory worth its money needs to connect (1) to (4): 

1. A tile from my neighbor’s roof hit my car.
2. That tile’s hitting my car made a big dent.  
3. I heard a tile from my neighbor’s roof hit my car. 
4. Every time a tile from my neighbor’s roof hits my car, her insurance pays me £100. 

Here is one way of making the connection. My saying (1) picks out a set of possible situations, parts of a world, that is. Among those are situations that are small enough to contain nothing that does not contribute to the truth of (1). Those situations may cause dents, may be heard, and may be quantified over. They are truthmakers for (1).

The lectures will make a case that it pays to connect (1) to (4) in this way. It may help with understanding counterfactual reasoning, knowledge ascriptions, and the semantics of tense and modality. It may help with explaining mistakes we make with conditionals and quantifiers, and it may help with explaining our preference for exhaustive interpretations.  

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- Slides will be uplodaded here some hours before the lecture:

https://umass.box.com/v/kratzer-leverhulme

- A video of the first lecture can be found here:

https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Play/17706

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