Semantic content and compositional context-sensitivity

  1. Esther Romero 1
  2. Belén Soria 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Granada
    info

    Universidad de Granada

    Granada, España

    ROR https://ror.org/04njjy449

Revue:
Theoria: an international journal for theory, history and foundations of science

ISSN: 0495-4548

Année de publication: 2019

Volumen: 34

Número: 1

Pages: 51-71

Type: Article

DOI: 10.1387/THEORIA.17683 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

D'autres publications dans: Theoria: an international journal for theory, history and foundations of science

Objetivos de desarrollo sostenible

Résumé

A variety of theorists have recently argued against the explanation of the semantic content of a sentence as a minimal proposition claiming that intentional aspects of the context are often needed to obtain a minimal proposition. Minimalists such as Borg, however, still defend intention-insensitive minimal propositions for sentences in a narrow context and provide solutions or dissolutions against incompleteness objections. In this paper, we show that these putative defences of propositionalism do not serve to avoid some additional genuine objections which arise from compositional context-sensitivity. We aim to show that there are complex expressions which compositionally demand intention-sensitive pragmatic effects in a mandatory way and, for that reason, they provide us with evidence against the type of propositionalism that substantiates the defence of semantic minimalism

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Information sur le financement

& research for this paper was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, EX-CELENCIA program, project FFI2016-79317-P. We are very grateful to John Keating for suggestions on an earlier draft and to the anonymous reviewers for the valuable and insightful comments to a pre-vious version that significantly improved the quality of our work.

Financeurs

    • FFI2016-79317-P

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