QUANTIFIER DOMAIN RESTRICTION, HIDDEN VARIABLES AND VARIADIC FUNCTIONS

• Authors: Moldovan Andrei
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In this paper the author discusses two objections raised against von Fintel’s (1994) and Stanley and Szabó’s (2000a) hidden variable approach to quantifier domain restriction (QDR). One of them concerns utterances of sentences involving quantifiers for which no contextual domain restriction is needed, and the other concerns multiple quantified contexts. The author looks at various ways in which the approaches could be amended to avoid these problems, and he argues that they fail. He concludes that we need a more flexible account of QDR, one that allows for the hidden variables in the LF responsible for QDR to vary in number. Recanati’s (2002; 2004) approach to QDR, which makes use of the apparatus of “variadic functions”, is flexible enough to account successfully for the two phenomena discussed. The author ends with a few comments on what he takes to be the most promising way to construe variadic functions.

Keywords

EN

HIDDEN VARIABLES; QUANTIFIER DOMAIN RESTRICTION; QDR; RECANATI; VARIADIC FUNCTIONS

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 384 – 404

Contributors

author

Moldovan Andrei

• Department of Philosophy, Logic and Aesthetics, University of Salamanca, Edificio F. E. S Campus Miguel de Unamuno, 37007 Salamanca, Spain