Event Detail

Wed Oct 14, 2009
234 Moses Hall
6:10–8 PM
Working Group in the History and Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Science
Adam Sennet (UC Davis)
Propositional Structure and Unarticulated Constituents

One proposal in the debate over the semantics-pragmatics includes positing Unarticulated Constituents, or pragmatically driven additions to the proposition expressed by an utterance of a sentence. Whether or not there are UCs is a continued source of contention. I argue that the definitions of UCs that are on offer are all inadequate and fall prey to easy counterexample given the nature of the phenomenon they are trying to model and characterize and consider how one might improve upon our understanding of the relevant notions in a manner consistent with the general goals of UC theorists.