Towards a Neutral Semantics

Manuel Rebuschi (1)

1 LHSP - Laboratoire d'Histoire des Sciences et de Philosophie - Archives Henri Poincaré

The purpose of this paper is to show that procedural semantics should be thought of as independent from representational semantics. According to the standard representational view, semantics is expected to account for the relations that hold between language and reality. This conception, grounded in the universalistic tradition, is directly challenged by the dynamic turn that focuses on procedural semantics, i.e. on the way one understands the meaning of a discourse. The paper will concentrate on the special case of Hintikka's Game-Theoretical Semantics (GTS) and its enlightenment of several dynamic phenomena of natural language. It will be claimed that GTS should be reinterpreted as a procedural and non-committing, i.e. ontologically neutral semantics.

Mots clés: procedural semantics; dynamic turn; universalism.; universalism; game-theoretical semantics

Domaines: Philosophie

Manuel Rebuschi. Towards a Neutral Semantics. 2003. ⟨halshs-00174686⟩