First, note that the fact that semantics is primarily concerned with truth conditions does not mean that it cannot account for speech acts other than assertions. For it may account for them in a derivative way. Here's an example of such a treatment: we may take questions to be a partition of propositions, that is, a collection of equivalence classes of propositions, namely its (conflicting) answers, such that each (conflicting) answer lies in exactly one equivalence class. (I think David Lewis adhered to something like this) So the semantics of questions is derivative to the semantics of its possible answers, which in turn are (generally) assertions. So one may take a term's contribution to the semantics of questions to be its contribution to the truth conditions of its answers. — Nagase
Question
Propositional content:
Any proposition or propositional function.
Preparatory content:
i. S does not know 'the answer', i.e., does not know if the proposition is true, or, in the case of the propositional function, does not know the information needed to complete the proposition truly (but see comment below).
ii. It is not obvious to both S and H that H will provide the information at that time without being asked.
Sincerity condition:
S wants this information.
Essential condition:
Counts as an attempt to elicit this information from H.
Note:
There are two kinds of questions, (a) real questions, (b) exam questions. In real questions S wants to know (find out) the answer; in exam questions, S wants to know if H knows.
This is a tangential discussion from another thread. Nagase and I were discussing whether it's appropriate to account for the reference mechanism in requests - like 'Will you get me some water Jake?' - through an algebra of declaratives with propositional content / assertions that can be associated with the request - equivalence classes of {'I (Jake) will not get you some water'} and {'I (Jake) will get you some water'}. — fdrake
Going back to the discussion, note that the two situations you described are not symmetrical. We have a reasonable well-developed semantic theory for declarative sentences (say, Montague grammar and extensions thereof). But we don't have a well-developed semantic theory for questions (and other "moods") that is independent of truth condition semantics, or of declaratives more generally. So we may hope to extend our analyses of declarative sentences to other types of sentences, but there is little hope of going in the reverse direction, since we don't even know where to start in that case. That's why we try to understand questions in terms of "answerhood" conditions, whereas no one (that I know of!) has tried to formulate a semantics for declarative sentences in terms of "questionhood" conditions. — Nagase
Where does the association between the request and the equivalence relation take place? Does it occur in the use of language? Is it an event? — fdrake
First, the references you asked for: for my general approach to semantic matters, I think the essays by Lewis are invaluable (even if you end up disagreeing with him). In this connection, I recommend especially "Language and Languages" and "General Semantics", which you can find, along with his other papers, in this website; note that the latter essay also contains a discussion about how to reconstruct the other moods in terms of declarative sentences. Since I'm not a semanticist (though I'm largely sympathetic to formal semantics, in particular the tradition stemming through Montague and developed by Barbara Partee), in the specific case of the semantics of questions I just gave a quick glance at the relevant article in the Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics (I can send you a copy of the handbook if you like), just to check that I wasn't misremembering the partition approach. — Nagase
Going back to the discussion, note that the two situations you described are not symmetrical. We have a reasonable well-developed semantic theory for declarative sentences (say, Montague grammar and extensions thereof). But we don't have a well-developed semantic theory for questions (and other "moods") that is independent of truth condition semantics, or of declaratives more generally. So we may hope to extend our analyses of declarative sentences to other types of sentences, but there is little hope of going in the reverse direction, since we don't even know where to start in that case. That's why we try to understand questions in terms of "answerhood" conditions, whereas no one (that I know of!) has tried to formulate a semantics for declarative sentences in terms of "questionhood" conditions. — Nagase
Hard but possible: you can be play-acting, practicing elocution, or impersonating an officer and say 'I command that you be late' falsely, that is, say it without thereby commanding your audience to be late. I claim that those are the very circumstances in which you could falsely say 'Be late!'; otherwise it, like the performative, is truly uttered when and because it is uttered. It is no wonder if the
truth conditions of the sentences embedded in performatives and their nondeclarative paraphrases tend to eclipse the truth conditions of the performatives and non-declaratives themselves.
(1) On the merits of extending formal semantics from declaratives to other speech acts: You say that, in a mathematical setting, fruitfulness is assessed either by the production of more theorems or by the exactness of the modelling activity; if I understood you correctly, you say that neither of these obtain the case of formal semantics. Well, I disagree. Obviously, as you pointed out, I believe that formal semantics is a worthwhile enterprise. And it's simply a fact that the formal semantics of declarative sentences is currently a well-developed research program. So why not extend this approach to other speech acts? In fact, that is precisely what formal semanticists have been doing. I claim that the fruitfulness of this approach can be assessed in the same way as a mathematical research program, in particular, in the exactness of the models produced. I would also add a further dimension, also analogous to mathematics: in many cases, it's less important to prove theorems than to coin new definitions (e.g. Dedekind's ideal theory), which serve to unify phenomena that were previously considered separately (e.g. the behavior of primes in certain number fields and the behavior of curves in function fields). This, explanation by unification, is one particular case of a virtue of a mathematical theory, namely its explanatory power. Now, I want to argue that formal semantics do provide us with added explanatory power. In particular, by showing what is common to apparently distinct speech acts (or moods), it allows us to explain a greater variety of phenomena than we could before. — Nagase
I agree that he gives prides of place to communication here (he is pretty explicit on this), and that there is little room in his account of conventions for the more creative aspects of language use as explored by Austin. But I see this as a reason to modify his account, not to reject it outright, perhaps by emphasizing the non-conventional aspects of language use. — Nagase
That is, there are conventions in place which makes us behave as users of a given language. Given that the coordination problem involved is defined in terms of actions and beliefs, and these can only interact with sentences (or utterances of sentences), it makes sense for him to focus on a very coarsed grained view of languages, which focus on the interpretation of sentences. This also chimes in with the idea that semantics feeds sentences into pragmatics, so to speak. — Nagase
(3) Lewis's account is entirely focused on declaratives: Correct, though he does offer an extension, even in "Languages and Language" (this is one of the objections he answers), which is similar in spirit to the one in "General Semantics". Incidentally, in "General Semantics", the mood of a sentence is not simply associated with the sentence, but it is built in into its structure as one of the nodes in the phrase marker. Given that the performative is actually the root of the phrase marker, one could identify the performative with the whole tree; then the sentence radical will be the root of a subtree of the phrase marker, and will thus be indeed embedded into the performative. So I think Lewis's terminology is apt here. — Nagase
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