22 found
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  1. Epistemic Modals.Seth Yalcin - 2007 - Mind 116 (464):983-1026.
    Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.
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  2. Belief as Question‐Sensitive.Seth Yalcin - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (1):23-47.
  3. Nonfactualism about epistemic modality.Seth Yalcin - 2011 - In Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something whose truth turns on how things are with the weather in the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on how things are with the weatherman’s state of mind in the world. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I (...)
     
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  4. Semantics and metasemantics in the context of generative grammar.Seth Yalcin - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 17-54.
  5. A Counterexample to Modus Tollens.Seth Yalcin - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (6):1001-1024.
    This paper defends a counterexample to Modus Tollens, and uses it to draw some conclusions about the logic and semantics of indicative conditionals and probability operators in natural language. Along the way we investigate some of the interactions of these expressions with 'knows', and we call into question the thesis that all knowledge ascriptions have truth-conditions.
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  6. Probability Operators.Seth Yalcin - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (11):916-37.
    This is a study in the meaning of natural language probability operators, sentential operators such as probably and likely. We ask what sort of formal structure is required to model the logic and semantics of these operators. Along the way we investigate their deep connections to indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, probe their scalar structure, observe their sensitivity to contex- tually salient contrasts, and explore some of their scopal idiosyncrasies.
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  7. Epistemic modals and context: Experimental data.Joshua Knobe & Seth Yalcin - 2014 - Semantics and Pragmatics 7 (10):1-21.
    Recently, a number of theorists (MacFarlane (2003, 2011), Egan et al. (2005), Egan (2007), Stephenson (2007a,b)) have argued that an adequate semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals calls for some technical notion of relativist truth and/or relativist content. Much of this work has relied on an empirical thesis about speaker judgments, namely that competent speakers tend to judge a present-tense bare epistemic possibility claim true only if the prejacent is compatible with their information. Relativists have in particular appealed to judgments (...)
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  8. VI-B ayesian E xpressivism.Seth Yalcin - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2pt2):123-160.
  9. Expressivism by force.Seth Yalcin - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press.
  10. Context Probabilism.Seth Yalcin - 2012 - In M. Aloni (ed.), 18th Amsterdam Colloquium. Springer. pp. 12-21.
    We investigate a basic probabilistic dynamic semantics for a fragment containing conditionals, probability operators, modals, and attitude verbs, with the aim of shedding light on the prospects for adding probabilistic structure to models of the conversational common ground.
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  11. On the Dynamics of Conversation.Daniel Rothschild & Seth Yalcin - 2017 - Noûs 51 (2):24-48.
    There is a longstanding debate in the literature about static versus dynamic approaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of a conversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a (...)
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  12. Epistemic Modality De Re.Seth Yalcin - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2:475-527.
    Focusing on cases which involve binding into epistemic modals with definite descriptions and quantifiers, I raise some new problems for standard approaches to all of these expressions. The difficulties are resolved in a semantic framework that is dynamic in character. I close with a new class of problems about de re readings within the scope of modals.
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  13. (1 other version)Semantics as Model-Based Science.Seth Yalcin - 2018 - In Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.), The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 334-360.
    This paper critiques a number of standard ways of understanding the role of the metalanguage in a semantic theory for natural language, including the idea that disquotation plays a nontrivial role in any explanatory natural language semantics. It then proposes that the best way to understand the role of a semantic metalanguage involves recognizing that semantics is a model-based science. The metalanguage of semantics is language for articulating features of the theorist's model. Models are understood as mediating instruments---idealized structures used (...)
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  14. Three notions of dynamicness in language.Daniel Rothschild & Seth Yalcin - 2016 - Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (4):333-355.
    We distinguish three ways that a theory of linguistic meaning and communication might be considered dynamic in character. We provide some examples of systems which are dynamic in some of these senses but not others. We suggest that separating these notions can help to clarify what is at issue in particular debates about dynamic versus static approaches within natural language semantics and pragmatics.
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  15. Quantifying In from a Fregean Perspective.Seth Yalcin - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (2):207-253.
    As Quine observed, the following sentence has a reading which, if true, would be of special interest to the authorities: Ralph believes that someone is a spy. This is the reading where the quantifier is naturally understood as taking wide scope relative to the attitude verb and as binding a variable within the scope of the attitude verb. This essay is interested in addressing the question what the semantic analysis of this kind of reading should look like from a Fregean (...)
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  16. Actually, Actually.Seth Yalcin - 2015 - Analysis 75 (2):185-191.
    The view that actually has a reading on which it is a two-dimensional indexical modal operator has some problems.
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  17. More on epistemic modals.Seth Yalcin - 2009 - Mind 118 (471):785-793.
    I respond to comments by David Barnett and Roy Sorensen on my paper ‘Epistemic Modals’.
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  18.  53
    Defining common ground.Seth Yalcin - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (6):1045-1070.
    Stalnaker (_Context_, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) defends two ideas about common ground. The first is that the common ground of a conversation is definable in terms of an iterated propositional attitude of _acceptance_, so that _p_ is common ground iff _p_ is commonly accepted. The second is the idea that the “default setting" of conversational acceptance is belief, so that as a default, what is accepted in conversation coincides with what is (commonly) believed. In this paper, I argue that (...)
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  19.  58
    Knowledge and Conditionals: Essays on the Structure of Inquiry, by Robert C. Stalnaker.Seth Yalcin - forthcoming - Mind.
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  20.  34
    Metasemantic Relationism.Seth Yalcin - 2021 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 45:541-560.
    Consider a language incorporating a mirror-image form of assertion, where the norm is to express what you take to be false rather than what you take to be true. Why aren’t ordinary languages like that? Why do we generally assert what we take to be true rather than what we take to be false? If Lewis and Massey are right, there is a sense in which the question is based on a mistake, and in which English could be described either (...)
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  21. Comments on MacFarlane.Seth Yalcin - unknown
    I don’t propose to harp on the question of whether MacFarlane has the data right. Let us just assume, for the sake of argument, that he does. Let us further assume that his interpretation of the data is correct—i.e., that these judgments are assessments of the the whole clause and not simply of the prejacent. Granting all this—maybe a lot—we need a semantics for epistemic modals that will make sense of the judgments in this case, and in relevantly similar cases. (...)
     
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  22. Comments on Mark Schroeder, Being For. [REVIEW]Seth Yalcin - 2012 - Central APA.
     
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