Thank you.

Right, oh, it's Tuesday again. So that means theory or in this case, philosophy.

See.

There we go.

And I did share the screen.

For some reason, it doesn't want to.

There we go.

It doesn't like me.

What do I do here?

It looks like.

Where's my skin.

There we go.

Zoomies, you can see the screen, is that correct?

Yes.

Last Tuesday, we looked at natural language phenomena, and I just wanted to briefly skim them again. We talked about adjectives.

We looked at intersective, subsective, and general adjectives, kind of what the meaning is.

And propositional attitudes a bit, we embed things like this diamond into a larger context, that actually does interesting things to the meaning.

We looked at ambiguities of all kinds, lexical ambiguities, attachment ambiguities, quantifier scope ambiguities, intentional phenomena where designators like the president of the US kind of reference.

Yes, we can only see you and not the slides.

Okay.

That's not an intended behavior.

Let's see.

I'll just try and share the screen again. Can you see the slides now?

Now it's working. Yeah, thank you.

Excellent. Good that you spoke up.

So basically where the designation, the president of the US changes designee over time.

Right.

An afro we talked about.

Also, in the context of ellipses, those two elides actually what should be transported.

And finally, presupposition, where we have kind of additional truth conditions that make the sentence meaningful at all.

So this unique description here actually has the presupposition that there's a determiner that has the presupposition that it refers to a unique being, an object that is in that set.

And in this case, the set King of America is empty.

And do all kinds of things like embed this inside a knot or inside a conditional.

Those kind of fix some parts, sometimes, of the presupposition or not.

And the last thing we talked about is that these presuppositions, the sentences meaningful is

They're so strong. They're so strong that they're actually kind of you turn around and use the same presupposition to convey more meaning.

That's something we're going to see quite a lot.

There's a philosopher, Rice, who put this idea into what he calls discourse principles, which he puts as imperatives, basically, which is be truthful.

That means the being truthful is addressed to the speaker.

Which means that if the speaker is reasonable, the hearer can assume that the speaker believes what they're saying because they're supposed to be truthful.

And if you aren't, then something is wrong in the dialogue.

And also, there's another maxim, which is going to stumble over those things from time to time is be informative, which means every sentence you say should have at least a little bit of new information.

Sounds reasonable. But if again, if you turn this around, this means if you have readings of a sentence that contains no new information, you can discard this reading.

And there are local versions of that.

You should only have conditionals where the condition has a chance of being true.

Those kind of things.

So in all of these cases, these discourse principles really allow us to know more about the language and understand things where we kind of, in the transmission of meaning, get more mileage than we should really have.

Just like the CEO of Westinghouse.

So I don't see any questions about this.

So, I'd like to give you a brief taste of language philosophy. I'm assuming that you haven't, that most of you don't have a bachelor's in philosophy.