Papers
Review of Meaning Diminished by Kenneth A. Taylor (with Derek Ball; Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
Tense, Modality, and Natural Language Syntax (revise & resubmit)
Semantic Instrumentalism and Singular Thought (in progress)
Context Two Ways: Epistemic and Metaphysical (in progress)
Indexicality and Action Explanation (in progress)
Speaker Intentions and the Role of Context in Formal Semantics (in progress)
Dissertation Abstract
David Lewis articulated minimal constraints on a formal theory of natural language
semantics that have been widely adopted by subsequent theorists: compositionality
and sentence truth in a given context. In the process, Lewis distinguished between the
compositional semantic value of an expression and its propositional content relative
to a context. This dissertation consists of a series of essays in which I address several
questions that arise from this distinction, including how we should understand semantic
values, how we should understand propositional content, and how we should understand
the relation between them.
Related to this, I explore and address a number of interesting and unresolved
methodological issues that arise in relation to context-sensitivity, and provide an
account of the role of speaker intentions in a formal theory of natural language
semantics. Additionally, I provide a detailed analysis of the role of context in a theory
of natural language semantics and its connection to various aspects of language use and
communication. I also motivate coherence with syntactic structure (in the tradition of
generative grammar) as an additional constraint on a formal theory of natural language
semantics and assess its import for how we theorize about tense and modality and
issues related to the syntax-semantics interface, including covert structure and logical
form.
In broad strokes, this dissertation addresses issues concerning the aims, scope and
criteria of a theory of natural language semantics. I approach these issues from the
perspective of generative grammar, a theoretical framework that aims to characterize
our understanding of natural language independent of its use. These essays help to
clarify what should be expected of a formal theory of natural language semantics and
its contribution to theories of speech acts and communication.