Intention-sensitive semantics

Intention-sensitive semantics

A number of authors have argued that the fact that certain indexicals depend for their reference-determination on the speaker’s referential intentions demonstrates the inadequacy of associating such expressions with functions from contexts to referents (characters). By distinguishing between different uses to which the notion of context is put in these argument, I show that this line of argumen...

Notes on Intention-Based Semantics

The objective of intention-based semantics (henceforth, IBS) is to explain the notion of meaning and all other semantic properties and relations in a two stage process. In the first stage, speaker-meaning is explained reductively (without recourse to semantic vocabulary) in terms of the speaker’s acting with the intention of producing a belief or action in an audience. Thus, the first stage wil...

A Semantics for Context-Sensitive Reduction Semantics

This paper explores the semantics of the meta-notation used in the style of operational semantics introduced by Felleisen and Hieb. Specifically, it defines a formal system that gives precise meanings to the notions of contexts, decomposition, and plugging (recomposition) left implicit in most expositions. This semantics is not naturally algorithmic, so the paper also provides an algorithm and ...

Occasion-Sensitive Semantics

In this paper we provide a formal model for occasion-sensitive semantics motivated by so called ‘Travis cases’ (Travis 1978, 2000, 2008, 2009). We suggest that understanding of an utterance of φ (knowing its truth conditions) can be modelled as a twofold partitioning of worlds in logical space, where the initial partition is induced by the contextinvariant meaning of the sentence uttered and th...

Moderately Sensitive Semantics