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Arguing About Dynamic Meaning

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Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics

Part of the book series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic ((OCTR,volume 5))

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Abstract

Whether, and if so in what sense, dynamic semantics establishes the need to move away from standard truth-conditional semantics, is a question that has been discussed in the literature on and off. This paper does not attempt to answer it, it merely wants to draw attention to an aspect that has hitherto received little attention in the discussion, viz., the question what role we assign to the use of formal systems in doing natural language semantics.

Martin Stokhof would like to thank Johan van Benthem and the editors for their comments and their patience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Of course, the content of an assertion itself is a context-dependent entity, in many cases, but that does not turn it into a dynamic one.

  2. 2.

    Cf. Groenendijk and Stokhof [15, Sect. 5.2].

  3. 3.

    Among others, [2, 3], and the papers collected in [4].

  4. 4.

    For natural language semantics we should mention, among others, Vermeulen [34], Visser [35]. Cf. also [10] for a computational perspective on deduction in dynamic semantics, and [7] for a more recent overview.

  5. 5.

    In van Benthem [1].

  6. 6.

    It is a testimony to the impact of the generative tradition, though, that even today many authors would seem to work with a more or less principled distinction between ‘language-as-a-system’ and ‘language-as-use’, which echoes the competence—performance distinction that Chomsky used to define the proper domain of linguistics as a scientific endeavour. Cf. [30] for further discussion.

  7. 7.

    And we would do well to note that it is not that even if we accept the semiotic characterisation of semantics as a neutral starting point: what ‘the world’ is, is left underspecified in that characterisation, and there seems to be no a priori way of ruling out that information states of language users are part of ‘the world’.

  8. 8.

    Beside the older literature that has been referred to above, cf. e.g. the more recent [8, 11, 21, 24]; and [22] (already mentioned).

  9. 9.

    As was already mentioned earlier, compositionality played a key role in that discussion, and it is interesting to note that there are indeed good arguments that compositionality is not an empirical issue, but a methodological principle. Cf. [16] for more discussion.

  10. 10.

    Similar considerations apply to formal systems in other domains, e.g., in the kind of naturalistic philosophical analysis that is exemplified in dynamic epistemic logic. We can not go into these matters here, but cf. e.g. [6] for discussion.

  11. 11.

    Another explanation is that in the early days of generative grammar, natural languages were primarily studied from a syntactic point of view, often in terms of structural properties familiar from the theory of formal languages.

  12. 12.

    Of course, there are many differences as well, but these are not relevant for the main point that is at stake here.

  13. 13.

    Or ‘show’; cf. [28] for an extensive analysis of how the universalism of Wittgenstein’s early work, with its associated distinction between ‘saying’ and ‘showing’, is connected with the two conceptions of the role of formal systems in natural language analysis outlined here.

  14. 14.

    In van Benthem [5].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ILLC/Department of Philosophy, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Martin Stokhof

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Correspondence to Martin Stokhof .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Amsterdam Inst Logic,Language & Computation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Alexandru Baltag

  2. Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Sonja Smets

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Stokhof, M. (2014). Arguing About Dynamic Meaning. In: Baltag, A., Smets, S. (eds) Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06025-5_28

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