Truth & Linguistic Structure: In Defence of a Structuralist Conception of Truth-Conditional Semantics

Kimberley, Adam (2018) Truth & Linguistic Structure: In Defence of a Structuralist Conception of Truth-Conditional Semantics. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

The principle aim of this thesis is to articulate and defend a novel conception of truth-conditional semantics (TCS): what I shall call the “structuralist conception”. According to this conception, the truth-conditions entailed by adequate TCS theories need not specify determinate ways the world might be and, therefore, need not fix the truth-values of their respective object-language sentences relative to contexts and world of evaluation. Rather, on the structuralist view, the purpose of a TCS theory is to recursively characterize the compositionally determined and linguistically licensed structural constraints on what can be said with our sentences. One major consequence of the structuralist conception of TCS, I shall argue, is that it is entirely compatible with even a radical form of the thesis of semantic underdetermination (SU): the thesis that some/most/all sentence-types lack linguistically licensed truth-values relative to contexts and worlds of evaluation. Thus, if it is possible to demonstrate that the structuralist conception offers both a plausible and useful conception of TCS, this will have the liberating TCS from the debate concerning the status of SU.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	12 Mar 2024 11:31
Last Modified:	12 Mar 2024 11:31
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94645
DOI:

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