Drafts Available Upon Request
Keeping Count of Copredications - This is about the puzzle of copredication, the quest to find plausible semantic values for sentences like The book will weigh five pounds if it's ever published, where the predicates appear to apply to different things (e.g. a copy of a book will weigh five pounds but some ). Some approaches argue one thing Approaches that reject the underlying metaphysics, though attractive, have difficulty making the right predictions about counting sentences. For example, if three copies of War and Peace are on a shelf, one can say either one book or two books are on the shelf, depending on how you count. I argue that to accommodate the counting data, we need to deny that we count individual books. Instead, I argue counting is always counting equivalence classes of books.
Composing Copredications - Also about the puzzle of copredication. I observe copredications exhibit striking failures of the substitutivity of identicals. I draw out two consequences: i) that copredications pose no special problem for truth-conditional semantics, contrary to what is previously assumed and ii) that the substitution failures are best explained by revising the compositional semantics for copredications. I then propose a theory where copredication-supporting nouns denote n-tuples of individuals, and predicates are type-shifted to predicates of individuals by means of a silent predication operator in logical form.
In Preparation
Retraction is Contraction! - When a speaker retracts something they said, what are they doing? Most extent theories say retractions are higher order speech acts: they operate first and foremost on assertions and askings, and not on their contents. I observe cases of where a speaker retracts implicatures and presuppositions without retracting the assertoric content of her utterance, which are unexpected for higher-order views. I then propose that to retract p is just proposing to add the closest ¬p-worlds to the context-set (an operation confusingly dubbed contraction by the literature on formal belief-revision). Finally, I observe that retractions of indicative conditionals like If Justin is watching a movie, then he's watching the movie at the Brattle. Wait, I take it back! are ambiguous between a reading where the speaker is retracting a conditional and a reading where a speaker is merely retracting the consequent. I argue this ambiguity is problem for certain theories of presupposition projection.
Truth-Conditional Semantics Tells No Lies (joint work with Kenneth Black) - in recent years, some authors have repurposed the liar paradox into an objection to truth-conditional semantic theories (we call the objection The Liar Challenge). The idea is that liar sentences (e.g. "this sentence is not true"), have inconsistent T-sentences (e.g. ""This sentence is not true" is true iff this sentence is not true") and therefore truth-conditional theories are false (since they derive T-sentences as theorems). We argue the Liar Challenge is mistaken: first, we point to analagous problems for the Liar for non-truth-conditional theories. Second, the challenge assumes the truth-predicate used in the metalanguage of semantic theorising is the meaning of ordinay language "true"; and we argue this is an empirical hypothesis that's fully detachable from truth-conditional theories.
The Liar Paradox as Presupposition Failure (joint with Kenneth Black) - we argue on the basis of sentences like `The Bible is true' that natural-language true and other aletheic predicates applies not to sentences or propositions but to objects first and foremost to objects, and not sentences or propositions in English. We then sketch a new semantics for `true' where it's a presupposition trigger, and explain how it diagnoses liar sentences suffering as suffering from presupposition failure without where liars suffer presupposition failure. We conclude by suggesting that the problematic notion underpinning the paradox is not truth as such, but of an entity's possessing content, echoing recent work by Bacon and Goodman.