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
Date of Ingest
2020-03-02T21:58:22Z
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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