Intended audience: graduate students and advanced undergraduates interested in the philosophy of language
Objectives: the aim of this seminar is to address certain foundational issues in the philosophy of language – in particular, to assess whether predicates and sentences have semantic values; to determine accordingly which of the two main competing approaches to semantics – truth theoretic semantics (TTS) and model theoretic semantics (MTS) – provides the best theoretical framework for semantic investigations; to investigate certain problem areas in philosophical semantics; and to establish the value of the distinction between semantics and metasemantics
Topics:
- The Problem of Predication and Truth Theoretic Semantics
- Tarskian Truth Definition, Semantics and Metasemantics
- The Inscrutability of Reference, Realism and Anti-Realism
- Intensional Semantics: Lewis and Kaplan
- Stalnaker’s Pragmatics
- Two-Dimensional Semantics
- Relativism
- Context-Sensitivity, Vagueness, and Unarticulated Constituents
