Special double-session in connection with the Rolf Schock Prize 2024: 

10.00-12.00 Craige Roberts (Ohio State/Barnard College, NY): Attitudes de re: Semantics and dynamic pragmatics

13.30-15.30 Barbara Partee (UMass, Amherst): Language and Logic: Ideas and Controversies in the History of Formal Semantics

Map Venue

ABSTRACTS

Attitudes de re: Semantics and dynamic pragmatics

I argue that de re interpretations arise quite regularly as a result of two types of presuppositions associated with utterances wherein a definite NP (pronoun, definite or demonstrative description, or proper name) occurs in the complement of an attitude predicate or some other intensional context. The first (similar to that in Maier 2019) is an anaphoric presupposition triggered by the use of the definite NP (Heim 1982, 1983, 1992). Though the NP remains in situ in the embedded clause, non-local satisfaction of this presupposition results in truth conditional effects akin to those that would result from giving the NP semantic wide scope over the attitude: presuppositionally triggered wide pseudo-scope. In the resulting interpretation, the triggering definite’s contribution to semantic content is simply the res which is the actual denotation of the wider scope antecedent of the definite, yielding interpretation de re without syntactically unmotivated NP movement at LF (Keshet & Schwarz 2019) or structured propositions (von Stechow & Cresswell 1982). The second presupposition is a background condition entailed by any de re attitude attribution: Epistemically limited humans can never know a res directly or completely, but only under some guise or other with which they are acquainted. So an agent can only hold an attitude toward a res under some guise reflecting their acquaintance. This captures the acquaintance requirement of Kaplan (1986), but here arises as an ontological precondition on the existence of a de re attitude, a non-anaphoric presupposition (Roberts & Simons 2024). Thus, acquaintance under a guise is an entailment of the triggering attitude in conjunction with the wide pseudo-scope of the definite, arising from our world knowledge of the corresponding type of situation. To model it, there is no need to stipulate silent existential operators or concept generators at LF, avoiding Lederman’s (2021) problems for Percus & Sauerland (2003).

This account is straightforwardly realized using independently motivated tools in a dynamic pragmatics: presuppositionally triggered pseudo-scope for definites (including names), and the notion of presuppositional background content. Drawing on Aloní (2001), the notion of a guise is modeled as an individual concept in a conceptual cover, thereby inheriting her account’s advantages over previous accounts of the de re. In a de re attribution, the nature of the guise under which the agent is acquainted with the res is not semantically specified; the semantic content of the attitude report merely entails that there is some counterpart relation that maps the actual res to entities in the agent’s belief worlds which have the properties predicated of the embedded definite NP. But the nature of the entailed guise is often pragmatically evident from context, or even explicitly given by an appositive (Soames 2002). When this is the case, we can contextually enrich the meaning of the utterance by adding the presumption that the entailed guise of acquaintance is the particular contextually retrieved guise. Unlike with Aloní’s perspective shifting operator ℘ or Stalnaker’s (1979) diagonalization, on the present account we needn’t shift the NP’s semantic interpretation (Gluer & Pagin 2006, 2012); context merely pragmatically enriches that interpretation to make the presupposed guise more specific.

All this sheds new light on a number of classic problems pertaining to the de re (Frege 1892; Quine 1956,1961; Geach 1967, etc.). Moreover, with the addition of centered worlds (Lewis 1979), the theory straightforwardly extends to account for de se interpretations, while avoiding problems of the de se, pointed out by Ninan (2016), for the classical doctrine of propositions.

Language and Logic: Ideas and Controversies in the History of Formal Semantics

The history of formal semantics and pragmatics over the last 50+ years is a story of collaboration among linguists, logicians, and philosophers. Since this talk is for a seminar on the history of philosophy, and I’m a linguist, I’ll emphasize aspects of the pre-history and history of formal semantics that concern the relation between language and logic, not presupposing knowledge of linguistics. 
Logicians have often been concerned with language in a “negative” way: the development of formal logical languages has often been motivated by perceived inadequacies in natural language for purposes of argumentation. Russell and Strawson, who had many disagreements about language, did express agreement on the statement that “natural language has no logic.” But logicians and philosophers of language, even those who regarded natural languages as “illogical” in various ways, made crucial advances in semantic analysis that paved the way for contemporary formal semantics. 
Chomsky, from a very different angle, considered the invented languages of logic to be so different from any natural language that he doubted that logicians’ work on the formal syntax and semantics of logical languages could possibly be of any interest or usefulness for linguistics, and he therefore rejected Bar-Hillel’s exhortation in the early 1950’s for greater cooperation between logicians and linguists in syntax and semantics.

It was the logician and philosopher Richard Montague, a student of Tarski’s, who had the greatest direct impact on the development of contemporary formal semantics, with his theory of “universal grammar” that encompassed both formal and natural languages, constructed in part on the basis of his own typed intensional logic. From his seminal works in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, as well as work by philosophers David Lewis, Terry Parsons, Richmond Thomason, Max Cresswell, and linguists Partee, Lauri Karttunen, Ed Keenan, David Dowty, Emmon Bach and others, interdisciplinary collaboration led to a rapid expansion of the field.
In this talk I’ll review some of this background and reflect on key ideas and controversies in the development of formal semantics. I’ll talk about some of the pivotal contributions by logicians as formal semantics and pragmatics developed after Montague’s untimely death in 1971, and I’ll also discuss the “naturalizing” influence that linguists have had on the field as it has become more and more a branch of linguistics.

Rolf Schock Prize 2024