Monday, 25 November 2024 – MSDRT: A formal framework for a communication-theoretic semantics and pragmatics of natural language

Zveřejněno: 13. 11. 2024

Hans Kamp (Universität Stuttgart)

MSDRT (‘Mental State Discourse Representation Theory’) is an extension of DRT that was originally designed to provide a semantic treatment of multiple attitude attributions, like ‘John believes there is a new drug against high blood pressure and he wants to get hold of it as soon as possible.’ This can be a true report of what John believes and wants, even if John’s belief is false and there is no such new drug. But how is the anaphora of ‘it’ to ‘a new drug’ to be construed so that the right predictions are made about the truth conditions of such complex attributions?

The central idea behind MSDRTs treatment of attitude attributions is that what attributors are trying to do is to give a picture of the mental state of the attributee. To this end the theory has developed a formal notion of mental state description, its ‘MSDs’ (Mental State Descriptions). MSDs occur as constituents of the Logical Forms that MSDRT assigns to simple and complex attributions. The semantics for MSDs guarantees that the Logical Forms for attitude attributions assign them the correct truth conditions.

MSDRT gained new powers through the introduction of Entity Representations (ERs): MSDs are now typically combinations of (i) PAs (Propositional Attitudes) and (ii) ERs; moreover, the ERs can serve as arguments in the content representations of PAs and thereby make these content representations the representations of singular contents (contents that are about the entities represented by these ERs). With the addition of ERs to MSDs has come a wide range of new applications for MSDRT, to many of the classical philosophical puzzles about reference and belief (‘Hesperus-Phosphorus’, ‘London-Londres’, ‘Paderewski the musician-Paderewski the politician’, ‘Vulcan’ etc), and to aspects of the theory of intention and action – the formation of intentions, the design and maintenance of plans and plan execution.

Lastly (and this will be the central topic of the talk) MSDRT can be used as a communication-theoretic framework for natural language semantics, by using MSDs to describe the mental states of utterance producers and recipients. Within this framework it is possible to define: (i) what it is for a speaker to use the correct words for expressing what she wants to say, given the rules of her language; (ii) what it is for an utterance recipient to assign to the utterance he receives an interpretation that is in accord with the rules of the language; (iii) what it is for the recipient to have correctly captured what the speaker wants to communicate. (When it is taken for granted that (i)-(iii) are satisfied, this communication-theoretic framework will reduce to the classical approach to natural language semantics, in which truth, satisfaction and reference conditions are assigned to linguistic expressions qua elements of languages as abstract, user-independent systems.)

The talk will proceed by showing examples; we will develop the theory as we go along.

Termín: 14:00

Místo konání: MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, 4th floor, room S1

Více informací: https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/events/msdrt-formal-framework-communication-theoretic-semantics-and-pragmatics-natural-language