Title: Underdetermination, Semantic Value, and Assertion

Abstract: We assert declarative sentences to represent the world as being a certain way. David Kaplan’s framework explains this by equating the semantic content of a sentence at a context with the content asserted by a literal utterance of it in that context. However, philosophers like David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker have convincingly argued that we must distinguish the proposition asserted from the sentence’s semantic value. They propose an alternative model where assertoric content is determined from semantic value by fixing certain semantic parameters, thereby eliminating possibilities incompatible with it from the common ground. In this talk, I argue that this model of the relationship between semantic value and assertoric content is inadequate since it is unable to capture the assertoric contents of our literal uses of semantically underdetermined sentences.