Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Locations, Binding and the Variadic Functions Approach

03 November 2010  |  15:00  |  Seminari de Filosofia UB

Abstract

The general problem tackled in this talk is how to semantically model implicit communication and the implicit contents that it is accomplished with. The focus will be on the specific case of locations. Thus, imagine that someone utters a sentence like "It is raining" with the recognized purpose of communicating that it is raining in a certain place. The question I'm interested in is: how is this particular place to be represented in our semantics? According to one popular view, the location must be represented by means of a variable in the syntax of such sentences. The main argument for this conclusion (put forward by Jason Stanley) has been the Binding Argument: basically, an inference from the existence of bound readings of quantified sentences (plus a few semantic assumptions) to there being a variable in the syntax of the simple sentence the quantifier operates on. In the talk I survey 4 ways to avoid this conclusion, all based on the idea of replacing quantification over locations with quantification over more encompassing entities such as contexts, indices, situations and events. After mentioning some problems with these answers to the Binding Argument, I present François Recanati's solution which consists in appealing to "variadic functions". I explain how these work and then offer my own variant of the view, pointing out the ways in which it departs from Recanati's. In the last part I briefly show how the account can be extended to block other forms of the Binding Argument involving expressions such as predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, knowledge atributions, etc.