Meaning and use of indefinite expressions (Q1610621)

Sentences containing an indefinite expression like `he' (pronoun) or `a man' (indefinite noun phrase) are said to express open propositions, i.e. propositions that display gaps to be filled. The author presents a unified and compositional analysis of those expressions in first-order logic that is based on the notions of content, update and support. For the propositional case, content (meaning) is defined in terms of sets of possible worlds, i.e. the meaning of a sentence, \([[\Phi]]\), is a set of possible worlds. The update of an information state \(t\) with (the utterance of) a sentence \(\Phi\), \((t)[[\Phi]]\), is defined by \(t \cap [[\Phi]]\). Finally, an information state \(t\) supports a sentence \(\Phi\) just in case \(t \subset [[\Phi]]\). Given those definitions, it can be shown that if an information state \(s\) supports \(\Phi\) then \(s \cap t \subset (t)[[\Phi]]\). In addition, the notions of update and support relative to complex sentences can be defined in a compositional fashion. Starting from the propositional case, the author construes first-order informational structures that generalize the Boolean inclusion and meet operations and that are used to define first-order notions of update and support. The key concepts used in the definition are that of an information aggregate, i.e. an entity containing information about the world and about certain numbers of individuals in that world, a relation of (information) containment on the domain of information aggregates, and a merging operation on sets of information aggregates. In the final section the author shows that the formal definitions subsume the intuitive concepts of update and support for the propositional case.