Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TRUST (Truth and Semantics)
Período documentado: 2021-10-01 hasta 2023-03-31
This implementation runs into major problems with respect to, e.g. the semantics for natural language conditionals, belief ascriptions and, more generally so-called hyperintensional semantics. The principal focus of the first period of the project was devoted to developing theories of truth for such semantics. In particular, studies on theories of truth in hyperintensional languages have been produced and are ongoing. Similarly, a semantics for truth in belief contexts has been produced and studies on combining natural language conditionals and theories of truth are ongoing. By the end of the project an even richer toolkit for combining theories of truth with various semantics for fragments of natural language will be available and amount to an important step towards a satisfactory handling of self-referential sentences within natural language semantics.
The research is of a highly abstract and foundational nature, so pointing toward any immediate importance for society, which goes beyond the scientific importance of the project for understanding key philosophical notions such as truth and belief, natural language semantics, and self-reference, is a difficult task. However, handling self-reference is also one of the major challenges and stumbling blocks of the research on artificial intelligence and, albeit in a very indirect way, our research may raise awareness and improve our understanding of the challenges to come.
Concerning Part A the most important achievements to date are:
- Development of montone semantics for conditionals and generalized quantification.
- Development of theories of truth for hyperintensional semantics. In particular, Kripke's theory of has been applied to doxastic possible world semantics. This yields an intutively adequate semantics for truth an belief contexts that incorporates ideas from contextualist theories of attitude reports and awareness semantics.
Concerning Part A the most important achievements to date are:
- An in depth analysis of the natural language truth predicate has provided focusing on the questions of whether 'is true' is ambiguous, context-sensitive, vague or gradable?
- A conceptual study of whether the logical notion of truth and the semantic notion of truth can be reconciled, that is, a stufy of whether deflationism is compatible with Tarskian or compositional truth.
- An in depth study of a particular theory of truth, that is the theory Kripke-Feferman, which has led to a number of important technical results. The theory is arguably the best candidate truth theory for developing axiomatic semantics and the research clarifies the prospects and limitiations of such an endeavor.