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IS-MOBIL-Mobilitetsprogr.f.utl.Ph.D-stu

Meaning Beyond Truth-Conditions: From Vagueness to Linguistic Interpretation

Awarded: NOK 0.14 mill.

Project Manager:

Project Number:

211249

Project Period:

2011 - 2012

In formal semantics, the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions. But that is not uncontroversial. There is a vast recent literature on what could be called the underdeterminacy thesis, which basically says that meaning underdetermines truth-conditi ons. And there are individual areas of research that take the idea of underdeterminacy seriously and investigate aspects of meaning that go beyond truth-conditions (witness cognitive pragmatics, and particularly relevance theory, or the more philosophical approach branded truth-conditional pragmatics). I think that vague expressions raise a series of problems to the truth-conditional theory of meaning and it is the purpose of my research to investigate how serious these initial intuitions are and what kin d of theoretical reconsiderations would they require. It is my conviction that a theory of vagueness and of how vague expressions are interpreted should make justice to language use and actual reasoning practices. The main aim of my proposed research proj ect is to offer a language use informed account of vagueness and to evaluate its significance for a general semantic-pragmatic theory. The idea is to bring insights from semantics and pragmatics, and general cognitive science, into the philosophical discu ssion about vagueness. Two directions are followed: first, how vagueness and the way we interpret vague expressions interact with reasoning; and second, what reconsiderations regarding the semantic-pragmatic framework are required in order to accommodate vagueness and its specificities. Under the first direction, a novel approach to the Sorites is offered, and an understanding of borderline cases that goes beyond truth-values is proposed. Under the second one, issues like the role of context and (pragmati c) reasoning in interpretation, cognitive vs. formal aspects of meaning, compositionality, contextualism and relativism are discussed with regard to vague expressions.

Funding scheme:

IS-MOBIL-Mobilitetsprogr.f.utl.Ph.D-stu