On the Dynamics of Conversation
Daniel Rothschild, Seth Yalcin · Noûs · 2015
Abstract There is a longstanding debate in the literature aboutstaticversusdynamicapproaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem ( , ) is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of aconversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a generalization of the class of systems that van Benthem's result concerns. These are thestronglystatic conversation systems. The second class is broader, and allows for a certain commonly recognized form of context sensitivity. These are theweaklystatic conversation systems. In the vein of van Benthem's result, we supply representation theorems which independently characterize these two varieties of conversation system. We observe that some canonically dynamic semantic systems correspond to weakly static conversation systems. We close by discussing some hazards that arise in trying to bring our formal results to bear on natural language phenomena, and on the debate about whether the compositional semantics for natural language should take a dynamic shape.