Sensitive Semantics: On the Clash Between the Naive Theory and Intuition

The Naive Theory is one the dominant accounts amongst philosophers of language. This theory has much to offer, however it does not in all cases bode well with intuitions. Two puzzles are raised and investigated here. The first is a puzzle regarding certain simple sentences. The Naive Theory does not recognize semantic differences amongst simple sentences which are cognitively very different. The second is a puzzle regarding attitude ascriptions. The truth-values the Naive Theory assigns to an important subset of such ascriptions disagree with the pretheoretical intuitions of ordinary language users. The first and second chapters examine some of the ways that Naive Theorists have attempted to resolve the puzzle and finds them insufficient. In the first chapter modifications to the Naive Theory are proposed which aim to preserve the referentialist core of the theory while accommodating intuitions regarding cognitive significance. The second chapter discusses the extension of the Naive Theory to attitude ascribing sentences, presents the truth-value discrepancy problem and evaluates the pragmatic and psychological-explanatory accounts that have been developed in response. The third chapter examines two standard contextualist accounts of attitude ascriptions that aim to bring referentialist semantics in line with the truth-value assignments of ordinary speakers. It is argued that, while standard versions of contextualism can respect truth-value intuitions to a large extent, these accounts make overly demanding claims about what it is that speakers represent with their reports. The fourth chapter explores a more radical version of contextualism that has been recently developed by Stefano Predelli and John MacFarlane. The account developed there takes the truth-value of attitude ascriptions to be sensitive to the explanatory projects of those who ascribe them. The non-standard version of contextualism advanced takes the word choice in attitude ascriptions to make a semantic difference relative to the explanatory contexts to which the ascriptions are meant to contribute. Employing Kit Fine's relationist semantics, the semantic difference is cashed out in terms of coordination relations that hold between the ascriptions and the set of statements which comprise the contextually salient explanation.