What it means to be true

One (or the) central goal of mainstream formal semantics in linguistics aims at explaining how the truth conditions that speakers intuitively associate with sentences can be predicted from the meanings associated with their components and the way in which they are combined. In this course, we will investigate a series of choice points, puzzles, and challenges that this truth-conditional enterprise has encountered.

Leaving some flexibility to adjust to participants’ backgrounds and interests, I will initially propose the following roadmap: first, we will explore the role of model theory, which relates to the distinction of logical vs. non-logical vocabulary, the nature of lexical semantics, as well as questions about the overall goals of linguistic building theories; second, we will investigate the contribution of truth-conditional semantics at its interface with pragmatics. This includes questions about the presumed points of evaluation for truth (worlds, times, individuals, information states,…), the study of non-declarative sentences, and speech acts; finally, we will explore in more detail how strengths and weaknesses of the truth-conditional enterprise function specifically in the investigation of prioritizing modality and conditional clauses.