Michael Glanzberg (University of California, Davis)

Talk Title:   "Semantics, Truth and Model Theory"

Abstract: This paper explores the place of model theory and other mathematical techniques in the semantics of natural language. It argues that model theory plays an important but limited role, even in so-called `model-theoretic semantics'. Model-theoretic techniques are among many mathematical tools that can be fruitfully applied in semantics. The paper then turns to the topic of where semantic theories get their explanatory force. It observes that most all semantic theories wind up appealing to disquotation-like principles at key points, which offer little explanatory value. Where semantic theories are the most richly explanatory appears to be just where mathematical techniques are fruitfully applied. The paper concludes by exploring, in a somewhat speculative way, what this tells us about the nature of meaning and its place in language.  It suggests there are limits to how much of truth-conditional content is encoded by language proper (i.e. the language faculty), and that truth conditions might be the result of contributions both from language and wider conceptual abilities.