Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Semantic Under-determinacy  The thesis of semantic under-determinacy (SU) states that the meaning of sentences like “The leaves are green”, “Jill is ready” or “It's raining” fails to determine the truth-conditions of their utterances. What does this mean exactly? There can be two readings of (SU). The first reading has it that meaning under-determines truth-conditions because meaning itself is indeterminate. The second reading has it that sentence meaning is determined, even though it doesn't determine the content-in-context of utterances. I argue that, on the one hand, the first reading is incompatible with standard truth-conditional semantics while, on the other hand, the second reading is too generic, for it covers also phenomena like indexicality. I then propose a notion of semantic under-determinacy as sentence under-articulation. The idea is that the meaning of sentences under-determines the truth-conditions of utterances because sentences like “The leaves are green”, “It's raining” etc. do not articulate enough linguistic material in order for them to give the truth-conditions of their utterances. The view I propose is both compatible with truth-conditional semantics (with some adjustments) and it sets semantic under-determinacy neatly apart from indexicality.