Philosophy
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Item NEW PERSPECTIVES ON INQUISITIVE SEMANTICS(2022) Zhang, Yichi; Pacuit, Eric E.; Santorio, Paolo P.; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Inquisitive semantics offers a unified analysis of declarative and interrogative sentences by construing information exchange as a process of raising and resolving issues. In this dissertation, I apply and extend inquisitive semantics in various new ways. On the one hand, I build upon the theoretical insight of inquisitive semantics and explore the prospect of incorporating other types of content into our conception of information exchange. On the other hand, the logical framework underlying inquisitive semantics is also of great interest in itself as it enjoys certain unique properties and is thus worth further investigation. In the first paper, I provide an account of live possibilities and model the dynamics of bringing a possibility to salience using inquisitive semantics. This account gives rise to a new dynamic analysis of conditionals, which is capable of capturing what I call the Extended Sobel Inference. In the second paper, drawing on the fact that disjunction in inquisitive semantics is understood as introducing a set of alternative answers to a question, I propose a Questions-Under-Discussion-based account of informational redundancy to tackle various Hurford sentences. In the third paper, I explore the prospect of cashing out the theoretical intuition behind inquisitive semantics using a non-bivalent framework. I develop a new logic which invalidates the Law of Excluded Middle just like inquisitive logic, but unlike inquisitive logic, it employs a negation that vindicates Double Negation Elimination.Item Philosophy and Translatability(2021) Enos, Casey; Rey, Georges R; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Can anything that can be said in one language be translated, without loss of meaning, into any other? Katz, inspired by Frege and others, argued for an affirmative answer to this question and proposed a Principle of Translatability. Since then, this alleged principle has come under scrutiny from linguists, who have proposed a number of counterexamples. While the consequences for Katz’s exact formulation of his principle are severe, the interpretation of the empirical data is often difficult and it is unclear whether slightly weaker principles may obtain. In my dissertation, I examine the literature discussing translatability and argue that it has suffered from a lack of precision regarding key terms, especially meaning and language. I propose that putting the question of translatability in terms of what Chomsky called I-languages allows better theoretical traction, although the exact question that we end up with looks very different from the one that we started with.