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Title:
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Issues in the Philosophical Foundations of Lexical Semantics
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Author:
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Brian Ulicny
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Homepage:
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http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/9979
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Degree Awarded:
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Degree Date:
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1993
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
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Director(s):
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James Higginbotham
Noam Chomsky
Robert Stalnaker
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Abstract:
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My dissertation defends and explores the thesis that in order for a speaker to understand a natural language it is not only sufficient but necessary that the speaker tacitly know or 'cognize' the truth-conditional contribution of the words and other sentential elements to the truth-conditions of the whole expression. A speaker's semantic competence is to be explained as the employment of an internally-represented axiomatized truth theory for that speaker's first language.
By providing a theory of truth for a language, the truth of certain sentences follows on the basis of that theory alone. In the first chapter, I develop and defend a notion of analyticity suggested by Noam Chomsky in his {\it Language and Problems of Knowledge} (1986) against skeptical worries due to Quine and Burge. On Chomsky's view, analytic sentences are those sentences of natural languages true in virtue of 'connections' between the semantic elements of the native linguistic endowment. I explain this idea of a semantic connection by way of a truth theory for the speaker's language. In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine argued that not even logical truths are analytic, however, since the seemingly fixed meanings of logical constants are empirically revisable. Quine's worry is the seeming incompatibility of quantum theory with, e.g., the distributive law of classical logic. I argue that the acceptance of quantum theory does not bring about the revision, but rather the clarification, of the meaning of 'and' and 'or'. I contrast my view with those of Hilary Putnam and other writers. Natural language analyticities diverge from those of first order logics because the fixed semantic elements of natural languages and first-order logics differ. Part of the project of natural language semantics, then, is an account of logical form sufficient to expose the analyticity of a sentence. Chomskian analyticities are not coextensive with the sort of 'folk analyticities' Quine targeted. 'All bachelors are unmarried' isn't analytic in this Chomskian sense.
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