Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Lasersohn, Peter N.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Lasersohn, Peter N.
Committee Member(s)
McCarthy, Timothy G.
Livengood, Jonathan M.
Levinstein, Benjamin A
Department of Study
Philosophy
Discipline
Philosophy
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
semantics
pragmatics
vagueness
probability
game theory
artificial intelligence
reinforcement learning
Bayes
Bayesian
linguistics
philosophy
statistical inference
cognitive science
Grice
formal semantics
Montague
Sorites
logic
dynamic semantics
truth-conditions
Abstract
In this dissertation I argue that truth-conditional semantics for vague predicates, combined with a Bayesian account of statistical inference incorporating knowledge of truth-conditions of utterances, generates false predictions regarding negations and metalinguistic inference. I thus propose a fundamentally probabilistic semantics for vagueness on which the meaning of a vague predicate is a likelihood function on the states it encodes, with these likelihoods being generated via reinforcement learning in a signaling game.
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