The 2022 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy was awarded to David Kaplan ‘for his contributions to the understanding of the role played by the extra-linguistic context for the semantics of natural language, for the logic of natural language sentences, and for the nature of belief’.

In connection with the Prize ceremony, a symposium on Kaplan's philosophy took place on 25 October at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Stefano Predelli, University of Nottingham, Gillan Russell, then at Australian Catholic University and Andreas Stokke, Uppsala University, were invited as speakers. This special issue of Theoria is based on the symposium.1

David Kaplan's Rolf Schock Prize lecture, with the title ‘The meaning of Ouch and Oops. Explorations in the theory of meaning as use’, was delivered in the morning of 25 October. It was a fantastic 90-min performance, fascinating throughout, in front of a large, captivated audience. The editors are very happy that the paper version of the lecture is now included in this special issue of Theoria. Below is a brief summary of the paper.

The aim of the paper is to provide a framework for a rigorous treatment of the linguistic use of what Kaplan calls expressives. These include such expressions as ‘ouch’, ‘oops’, ‘alas’ and ‘goodbye’, as well as slurs and other pejoratives. These expressions do not have meaning, in the sense that there is nothing to fill in the blanks with, in for example, “goodbye” means …’. But they do have a use.

This paper concerns the connection between speech act theory, especially the theory of assertion, and deduction, especially Natural Deduction. From a very abstract point of view, an assertion of a content p can be described as the ascription of the property of being p to the actual index, or point of evaluation. This is the abstract characterization of assertoric force. Let’s assume that the actual index is a possible world, namely the actual world. Thus, the conclusion of a closed argument, as an act, is an assertion, and thereby characterized as the ascription of the conclusion content as a property to the actual world. The question that will concern us in this talk is how this idea extends to the status of other acts in the practice of Natural Deduction. In these terms, what is the force of an inference that depends on one or more open assumptions? What is the force of the assumption itself? What is the force of an assertion that depends on an entire derivation? Do we need to ascribe a force to the derivation as a whole? Is there a coherent complete theory of act forces of Natural Deduction along these lines? What is the relation of such a theory to the theory of validity of an argument?

It is traditional, at least since Grice, to make a distinction between what is called the literal meaning of an utterance and what is meant by that utterance. The former notion is sometimes thought of as "the dictionary meanings of words plus standard semantic effects of the syntactic rules" that were employed in the utterance. The latter notion is often thought of as the "all things considered" information that is conveyed by the utterance in the context it is used. The former is often said to be the "context independent meaning" or "the meaning that is constant across all contexts of use". The latter is often called "what is conveyed in a context". The former is sometimes called "the timeless meaning" or "the meaning-in-the-language" or "the meaning of the linguistic type of the utterance". The latter is sometimes called "the meaning of the speech act being performed" or "the meaning of the token being uttered".

This short paper has the character of a critical notice of Una Stojnić’s book Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence (Stojnić 2021). It is mainly concerned with Stojnić’s strong claim that linguistic phenomena related to prominence and coherence, in particular the interpretation of pronouns, are governed by linguistic conventions and are not pragmatic in nature. On these matters, my views are opposite to Stojnić’s.

Asserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for instance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make assertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend arguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its central role in communication, assertion has been investigated in several disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and logicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theorizing about meaning, truth and inference.

The nature of assertion and its relation to other speech acts and linguistic phenomena (implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been subject to much controversy. This entry will situate assertion within speech act theory and pragmatics more generally, and then go on to present the current main accounts of assertion.[1]

By an account of assertion is here meant a theory of what a speaker does (e.g., expresses a belief) in making an assertion. According to such accounts, there are deep properties of assertion: specifying those properties is specifying what asserting consists in. There must also be surface properties, which are the properties by which a competent speaker can tell whether an utterance is an assertion, for instance that it is made by means of uttering a sentence in the indicative mood.

We shall classify accounts according two parameters. Firstly, we distinguish between normativeand descriptive accounts. Normative accounts rely on the existence of norms or normative relations that are essential to assertoric practice. Descriptive accounts don’t. Secondly, we distinguish between content-directed and hearer-directed accounts. Content-directed accounts focus on the relation between the speaker and the content of the proposition asserted, while hearer-directed accounts focus on the relations between speaker and hearer. Some theories have both normative and descriptive components.

The standard argument against ordered tuples as propositions is that it is arbitrary what truth-conditions they should have. In this paper we generalize that argument. Firstly, we require that propositions have truth-conditions intrinsically. Secondly, we require strongly equivalent truth-conditions to be identical. Thirdly, we provide a formal framework, taken from Graph Theory, to characterize structure and structured objects in general. The argument in a nutshell is this: structured objects are too fine-grained to be identical to truth-conditions. Without identity, there is no privileged mapping from structured objects to truth-conditions, and hence structured objects do not have truth-conditions intrinsically. Therefore, propositions are not structured objects.

This paper presents an account of notional belief attributions, that is, belief attributions where the belief content is fully specified. The proposal combines a Hintikka style possible-worlds semantics for the belief operator and a structured meanings approach for giving a structured mode of presentation of the belief content. The semantics is not standard compositional, but it satisfies a more general notion of compositionality, explained in the paper. This notion, general compositionality, allows semantic switching: the semantic function relevant for an embedded term is distinct from that which applies to the term in which it is embedded. The general relation between compositionality and hyperintensional contexts is discussed in detail. In the first section, it is argued that we need to combine structured and unstructured meanings.