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    Sentences containing negation and definite descriptions m... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Sentences containing negation and definite descriptions may be sense-general rather than genuinely ambiguous between multiple scopal readings

    Philosophy of Language
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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The ellipsis test on 'John thinks that the King of France is not bald and Bob thinks so too' shows the sentence accepts both readings without infelicity
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    • 2.If the sentence were genuinely ambiguous between two distinct scopal readings, ellipsis would freeze one reading and render the other inaccessible
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    • 3.Availability of both readings under ellipsis suggests the sentence is not ambiguous but sense-general
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Ellipsis resolution is governed by syntactic identity conditions (Sag 1976; Williams 1977), not semantic scope, so ellipsis parallelism cannot distinguish ambiguity from sense-generality.
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    • 2.If the antecedent clause itself is ambiguous, ellipsis can inherit either resolution via a 'sloppy' reading, making both scopal readings accessible even under genuine ambiguity.
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    • 3.The ellipsis test therefore underdetermines the ambiguity/generality distinction, since it produces identical behavior under both hypotheses.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Russell's analysis of definite descriptions as quantifiers (On Denoting, 1905) entails that scope interactions with negation are logically real distinctions with different truth conditions, not mere pragmatic resolutions of a single underspecified content.
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    • 2.Sentences with genuinely distinct truth conditions across contexts—e.g., 'The King of France is not bald' being true when there is no King versus false—cannot be unified under a single sense-general proposition without violating compositionality.
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    • 3.Sense-generality requires a single semantic value that subsumes all readings, but no such value can simultaneously encode both existential commitment and its absence without collapsing the distinction Russell's analysis was designed to capture.
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    Topics

    Philosophy of Language

    Related

    Availability of both readings under ellipsis suggests the sentence is not ambigu...Ellipsis resolution is governed by syntactic identity conditions (Sag 1976; Will...If the antecedent clause itself is ambiguous, ellipsis can inherit either resolu...If the sentence were genuinely ambiguous between two distinct scopal readings, e...
    +5 moreShow less
    Russell's analysis of definite descriptions as quantifiers (On Denoting, 1905) e...Sense-generality requires a single semantic value that subsumes all readings, bu...Sentences with genuinely distinct truth conditions across contexts—e.g., 'The Ki...The ellipsis test on 'John thinks that the King of France is not bald and Bob th...The ellipsis test therefore underdetermines the ambiguity/generality distinction...

    Similar

    The distinction between ambiguity and sense-generality depends on a cl...79%When one putative reading entails another, the two 'readings' may refl...78%The mixed approach to semantics for sentences with definite descriptio...78%Names have the same meanings as definite descriptions76%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: ambiguity
    View source passageHide passage
    Clearly, the ‘him’ in (43) can be interpreted as Phil or Stanley. But, crucially, how you interpret ‘him’ will depend on how you connect the two sentences. On the one hand, the interpretation of ‘him’ as referring to Phil goes hand in hand with a causal relation – its was the tickling that caused the poking (known as a result relation. Interpreting ‘him’ as referring to Stanley suggests goes hand in hand with a parallel relation. Of course the inference is defeasible – one can always break the c
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit