Vague Utterances and Context Change

AAAI Fall Symposium - Technical Report

Volumn FS-96-04, Issue , 1996, Pages 92-100

  Kyburg, Alice ^a,b   Morreau, Michael ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN OSHKOSH   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMON KNOWLEDGE;

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE;

EID: 52649112225     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Conference Proceeding    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (15)

1. Compare Donnellan's discussion of the referential use of definite descriptions. Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions", in Philosophical Review, 75, 281-304, Reprinted in A. P. Martinich, editor, The Philosophy of Language, New York, 1985.
2. David Lewis, "Scorekeeping in a Language Game", in Philosophical Papers, Volume I, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 233-250. 3 See Kit Fine, Vagueness, Truth, and Logic, Synthese, 30:265-300, 1975, J. A. W. Kamp, Two Theories About Adjective, in E. Keenan, editor, Formal Semantics of Natural Languages. Cambridge University Press, 1975. For a more recent elaboration, see Manfred Pinkal, Logic and Lexicon, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1985.
3. H. P. Grice, Logic and Conversation, unpublished MS of the William James Lectures, Harvard University, 1967, L. Karttunen & S. Peters, "Conventional Implicature in Montague Grammar", in Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, pp. 266-278
4. L. Kartunnen, "Presuppositions of Compound Sentences", in Linguistic Inquiry, 4, pp. 169-93, L. Karttunen & S. Peters, "Requiem for Presupposition", in Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, pp. 360-371
5. G. Gazdar, Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form, New York, Academic Press, 1979, G. Gazdar, "A Solution to the Projection Problem", in Oh & Dinneen, eds., Syntax and Semantics II: Presupposition, New York: Academic Press, 1979, pp. 57-89.
6. I. Heim, "On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions,"in Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics , Volume 2, 1983, pp. 114-126.
7. Steven C. Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, 1983. 5p. Gardenfors, Knowledge in Flux, MIT Press, Cambridge,1988
8. see Steven Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
9. [Gazdar 1979] and [Kartunnen 1973] address this particular feature of conveyed meanings in their discussions of the projection problem.
10. See Susan Haack's discussion of Bochvar's external connectives in S. Haack, Philosophy of Logics, Cambridge University Press, 1978.
11. Ewan Klein, "A Semantics for Positive and Comparative Adjectives", in Linguistics and Philosophy, 4, 1980, and Muffy Siegal, "Measure Adjectives in Montague Grammar", in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Montague Grammar, S. Davis and M. Mithun, eds., University of Texas Press, 1979.
12. This proposal is closely related to a suggestion of Pinkal: "If a sentence s is uttered in context k and k is inadmissible for s, go to the nearest admissible precisification of k that is admissible for s and use it as the basis of evaluation for s, and as the output context for the next utterance."[Pinkal 1985], p. 320.
13. One difference between our account and Pinkal's is that according to him, if there is no unique (minimal) precisification that makes an utterance true, then the context change resulting from that utterance is undefined. On our account, context change is defined in this case. 1° [Lewis 1983] also observed that it is easier to accommodate by making the sense of a vague adjective more precise than by making it less precise.
14. Consider, for example, "Ask the tall man with the fast car for a ride", where there is a man who is 6'1"standing next to a Porsche 911, a man who is 6'2"standing next to a sporty Honda Prelude, and several other men under 5'10"standing with their Ford Escorts.
15. [Kamp, 1975] for an account of a related notion: the degree to which a vague expression applies to an individual.