Subjectivity and Perspective in Truth-Theoretic Semantics

Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-957368-4
Verlag: OUP UK

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 528 g

This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, or Licorice is tasty. Standard semantic theories explain the meanings of sentences by specifying the conditions under which they are true; here, Peter Lasersohn asks how we can account for sentences that are concerned with matters of opinion rather than matters of fact. He argues that a truth-theoretic semantic theory is appropriate even for sentences like these, but that for such sentences, truth and falsity must be assigned relative to perspectives, rather than absolutely. The book provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar, working out the implications of this conception of truth both for simple sentences and for reports of mental attitude. The semantic analysis is paired with a pragmatic theory explaining what it means to assert a sentence which is true or false only relativistically, and with a speculative account of the functional motivation for a relativized notion of truth.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lasersohn, Peter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sprachphilosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Sprachphilosophie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Preface

- List of abbreviations

- 1: Subjectivity, disagreement, and content

- 2: Dismissing the easy alternatives

- 3: Setting the syntactic and semantic stage

- 4: Notes on the grammar of time and space

- 5: Basic relativist semantics

- 6: "Hidden" and "disguised" elements

- 7: Pragmatics of truth assessment

- 8: Attitude predicates in relativist semantics

- 9: Assertion and other speech acts

- 10: Between fact and opinion

- 11: Reliability, imagination, and the functional motivation for relativism

- References

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Peter Lasersohn is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Ohio State University in 1988, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Rochester before his appointment at Illinois in 1996. He is the author of two previous books, A Semantics for Groups and Events (Garland, 1990), and Plurality, Conjunction and Events (Kluwer, 1995); and of shorter articles in journals including Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Semantics, Natural Language Semantics, Synthese, and Inquiry.