Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express a determinate truth conditional content. Standard examples include e.g. 'Tipper is ready' and 'Steel is strong enough'. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning ('what is said') using the notion of a question under discussion. This account (i) explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined (yet seem truth conditionally incomplete), (ii) provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences (in general) can come to have enriched meanings in context, and (iii) shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis relies on a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and refrains from making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions.