Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Arguably the assertoric content of utterances is a sort of diagonal proposition which hedges our imperfect knowledge of the utterance contexts. It may be different than the truth-conditions of the same utterance. And it is determined post-semantically – on the basis of the semantic value of the sentence that has been uttered and of what we know of the context (Stalnaker 2014, Lewis 1980). Again arguably compositional accounts of attitude reporting sentences and of sentences with epistemic modals require us to assign to sentences and their denoting constituents semantic values the output of which is radically variable relative to variation in certain indices (Santorio 2012, Cumming 2008). These two points reinforce one another and if they are found compelling they suggest that both the semantic values of sentences and of their denoting constituents can be very ‘thin’. Can this thinness be an argument against these points that lead to it or is it manageable?