Abstract: Logical semantics includes once again structured meanings in its repertoire.

The leading idea is that semantic and syntactic structure are more or less isomorphic. A key motive for reintroducing sensitivity to semantic structure is to obtain fine-grained meanings, which are individuated more finely than in possible-world semantics, namely up to necessary equivalence. Just getting the truth-conditions right is deemed insufficient for a full semantic analysis of sentences. This talk surveys some of the most recent contributions to the program of structured meaning. I suggest that to make substantial advances the program needs to address at least two outstanding problems. One is how fine-grained structured meanings ought to be. The other is the problem of propositional unity. This problem, in its simplest form, is to account for how an individual a and a property F combine into the proposition P that a is an F.

My working hypothesis is that predication serves as unifier, at least for atomic propositions, and that the logical operation of functional application (i.e. the procedure prescribing the application of a function to an argument) is the logic of predication. In short, the talk explores what procedural semantics can do for propositional unity.

This talk is based in part on my paper ‘Recent work on structured meaning and propositional unity’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 7 (2012), 620-30. The background theory is set out in: Duží, M., B. Jespersen, P. Materna, Procedural Semantics for Hyperintensional Logic, vol. 17 of LEUS, Springer. 

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