I will consider a class of cases sometimes said to exemplify the open texture of language. They resemble some cases familiar from the mid-20th century. Consider J. L. Austin’s famous example of a bird that, for all the world, looks like a goldfinch, and then blows up like a grenade. Is it a goldfinch? A more realistic case involves the word “book” as used around 2000: were utterances such as eBooks are books true around this time? Hard to say. We can imagine a separation, where British speakers affirmed such sentences, and Americans denied them, without either appearing to misapply “book.” Is this kind of open texture a more well-studied linguistic phenomenon? I argue, first, that such cases resist both metaphysical and epistemic explanations. Then I argue that openness cannot be identified with partial definition, vagueness, non-vagueness indeterminacy, or underdetermination. This provides reason to think that, if there is any such thing as open texture, it is sui generis and worthy of its own theory.
A well-known problem facing Lasersohn’s (1999) theory of pragmatic halos is that it fails to predict that the loose contents of negated maximal standard absolute adjectives (e.g. “not straight”) and minimal standard absolute adjectives (e.g. “bent”) are stronger than their literal contents. Recently, Dinges (2024) argues that Klecha’s (2018) optimality-based theory is faced with the same strengthening problem and proposes to solve it by using Hoek’s (2018) theory of conversational exculpature. This paper argues that the strengthening problem can be better solved by combining Lasersohn’s and Klecha’s theories after revising each theory slightly: Pace Lasersohn, we do not identify the loose content of a sentence with the disjunction of the values in the sentence’s halo. Pace Klecha, we do not hold that the question under discussion (QUD) of a conversation can coarsen the contents of sentences. Once these modifications are made to Lasersohn’s and Klecha’s theories, the relevant loose content of a sentence can be determined by an optimality-based reasoning about the halos of the speaker’s utterance and its alternatives.
In “How I see Philosophy,” Friedrich Waismann outlined his vision of language strata: layers in natural language that are identified by logico-semantic features (Waismann, 1968). In this paper I propose that this brief, cryptic work contains the foundations of a novel approach to the metaphysics of natural language. I draw out an antirealism that stands to show us how we can preserve the plurality of apparent ontological commitments in the language sciences without resorting to metaphysical pluralism.
One reason for interest in a formal theory of linguistic context is the possibility of what Pagin and Westerståhl (2010) call general compositionality. Yet the most sophisticated formal treatment of linguistic contexts currently available, due to Pagin and Westerståhl, both violates compelling intuitions about linguistic contexts and, as a result, does not recognize the discourse contexts of the dynamic Tarskian semantics due to Pickel and Rabern (2016). Thus general compositionality is undefined for any semantics using such contexts. In this paper, I present an alternative treatment of linguistic contexts and general compositionality adequate for understanding the contexts of Pickel and Rabern’s dynamic Tarskian semantics. Further justification for the present approach to compositionality and the semantics for variables is pursued elsewhere.
In this paper, we focus on the cross-linguistic incompatibility between the temporal adverbial ⌜then⌝ and the present tense. We show that the pattern holds in both matrix and embedded environments, across an array of languages (including Modern Greek, Modern Hebrew, Russian and Japanese) each behaving differently with respect to tense shift. To account for this incompatibility, we propose that the interpretation of tenses is sensitive to a perspective parameter. Tense shift occurs thanks to a perspective-shifting operator, similar to operator-based analyses of indexical shift (Anand and Nevins in Semantics and Linguistic Theory 14: 20, 2004; Anand in Ph.D. thesis Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, 2006; Deal in A Theory of Indexical Shift: Meaning, Grammar, and Crosslinguistic Variation, 2020). The main advantage of this account over alternative theories of tense shift, such as relative tense (Ogihara in Tense, Attitudes, and Scope. Vol. 58 of Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Springer, Dordrecht, 1996; Ogihara in Journal of Semantics 39: 581–616, 2022) or tense deletion (Ogihara and Sharvit in Embedded Tenses, Oxford University Press, 2012), is that we are able to distinguish between shifted and deleted tense. This is needed to explain the incompatibility of ⌜then⌝ with the shifted present but not with deleted past. Finally, we argue that the newly introduced perspective parameter needs to be separate from the speech context and the evaluation index.
