Truth and Context Change

Andreas Stokke (Oslo) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Truth and Context Change". Abstract:Traditional semantics rests on the notion that the meaning of a declarative sentence is given by its truth conditions. Beginning in the 1980's this paradigm was challenged by so-called dynamic semantics. According to these theories, the meaning of a sentence is a context change potential, a measure of how an utterance of the sentence in question affects the conversational context. The shift importantly involves the claim that truth-conditional meanings can be derived from context change potentials. I argue that a standard way this has been done has problematic consequences, and I discuss the status of the dynamic turn in light of these issues.