Tense, Modality, and Semantic Values

Abstract

Section 1: IntroductionHere is a rough sketch of what I take to be an attractive, albeit naı¨ve, picture (its attractiveness I take to be obvious; its naivete´, though perhaps also obvious, will be discussed shortly). A primary purpose of a semantics for a natural language is to compositionally assign to sentences semantic values that determine whether the sentences are true or false. Since natural languages contain contextually sensitive expressions, semantic values must be assigned to sentences relative to contexts. These semantic values are propositions. Sentence types may also be associated with higher level semantic values that are or determine functions from contexts to propositions (something like what David Kaplan calls ''character''). 1 Propositions are the primary bearers of truth and falsity. 2 Propositions are also the objects of our attitudes: they are things we doubt, believe, and think. Further, sentences that contain verbs of propositional attitude, such as 1. Julia believes that Squaw Valley is a skier's paradise.assert that an individual stands in a certain cognitive relation to a proposition. In addition, there are various expressions that embed sentences, which I shall call sentence operators, that are such that the truth values of sentences containing them (relative to a context) depend in part on the propositions expressed by the sentences they embed (relative to the context). 3 I shall put this by saying that the sentence operators in question operate on the propositions expressed by the sentences they embed. For example, the truth-value of a sentence (relative to a context) like: 2. Necessarily, a skier is an athlete. depends in part on the proposition expressed by the embedded sentence (relative to the context) (and not merely on the truth value of the embedded sentence (relative to the context)).

Relativism, Vagueness and What is Said

“…There are important syntactical and semantic issues, on which the question whether temporal expressions behave like standard quantifiers or rather like operators truly depends (which King (2003) also interestingly invokes in the bulk of his paper). Just after providing the characterization of the goal of a good grammar that I approvingly quoted at the outset, Lewis (1980: 24) goes on to disparage more ambitious goals, such as ''that a good grammar should be suited to fit into a psycholinguistic theory that goes beyond our common knowledge and explains the inner mechanisms that make our practice possible''.…”

“…by Lewis for de se attitudes, functions from pairs of worlds and times to truth-values; King (2003), following Higginbotham (1995) and others, argues for the quantifier view.…”

Context, content, and relativism

“…This stand in * Versions of this paper were presented at a symposium on relativism at the Pacific APA, 2006, the 'Cog Lunch' at CSLI, 2006 contrast to temporalism, which holds that semantic values are time-relative truth conditions. Temporalism has been subject to a number of criticisms; from Enç (1984Enç ( , 1986, from Evans (1985), from King (2003), and from Richard (1981Richard ( , 1982. I shall not be particularly concerned to argue against temporalism here, though I find these criticisms persuasive, and I shall be assuming eternalism.…”

Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths

“…In FCRT, I followed Prior, Thomason, Kaplan, and Belnap in treating tem-poral modifiers as sentential operators. This approach has now fallen out of favor among semanticists of natural language (see King (2003)). Here, I will use a more orthodox semantic framework, treating temporal modifiers as referring terms and quantifiers rather than operators.…”