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From Language to Thought: On the Logical Foundations of Semantic Theory

Sbardolini, Giorgio
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155307880402531

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Philosophy.
Sentences have meanings: the things we say, and the things we believe. Semantics is the theory of meaning, and thoughts, or the meanings of sentences, are among the objects of semantic theory. But what are meanings? What is the place of meaning in the natural world? In the discussion below, I shall motivate formal constraints on the logical and metaphysical foundations of semantic theory. Some philosophers have suggested that semantics is a piece of modal metaphysics. The modal approach to meaning covers a lot of empirical and conceptual ground, but ultimately fails, since the mechanism invoked to recombine the metaphysical and the epistemic dimension leads to inconsistency by paradoxical reasoning. The lesson is that sameness of meaning is a hyperintensional notion. Other paradoxes follow more generally from assuming that thoughts can be individuated to a more or less precise degree, e.g. as the only thoughts having a certain property. These assumptions are often very plausible. Some contemporary accounts of the intensional paradoxes save consistency at the cost of rejecting these plausible assumptions. This puzzling situation leads naturally to wonder about the conditions for referring to thoughts: how do we individuate them? Reference to abstract objects may be established by abstraction. On this proposal, sameness of meaning is equated with hyperintensional equivalence. Such notion cannot be as fine-grained as contemporary accounts of structured propositions take it to be, on pain of ruling out a compelling pragmatic account of redundancy in the use of language. Any plausible hyperintensional notion of equivalence faces, in higher-order logic, the Russell-Myhill paradox. However, consistency can be restored by a dynamic understanding of abstraction. On the resulting picture, thoughts are “shadows of sentences”, to use an image of W. V. O. Quine, and quantification over thoughts is understood predicatively. This is the logic and metaphysics for the foundations of semantics.
Stewart Shapiro (Advisor)
175 p.
Linguistics; Logic; Philosophy
Propositions; Though; Semantic; Higher-order logic; Hyperintensionality; Reference; Two-dimensional semantics; Communication; Emergence; Paradox; Intensionality; Modality

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Citations

  • Sbardolini, G. (2019). From Language to Thought: On the Logical Foundations of Semantic Theory [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155307880402531

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sbardolini, Giorgio. From Language to Thought: On the Logical Foundations of Semantic Theory. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155307880402531.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sbardolini, Giorgio. "From Language to Thought: On the Logical Foundations of Semantic Theory." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155307880402531

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu155307880402531
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.