Sense as sampling propensity

Michael Eric Goodale (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris)

Both individuals and predicates can be referred to in different ways which carry different senses or connotations. Despite this being discussed since at least Frege, it poses a deep problem to standard extensional semantics. For example, as discussed by Jennifer Saul, “Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Superman came out” simply means something different from “Superman went into the phone booth and Clark Kent came out”. I introduce a novel way of modelling these kinds of semantic phenomena using Sampling Propensity (Icard, 2016). The core idea is that the basic atoms of semantic calculus are generated from a set of potential candidates via a generative cognitive procedure. In other words, when one thinks of Clark Kent, they directly think of someone wearing glasses or being a mild-mannered journalist, whereas Superman draws to mind blue-and-red leotards and heroics. This sampling procedure is also at play with common nouns in generic sentences like “lions have manes” or “mosquitoes carry malaria”. Crucially, it can distinguish co-extensional nouns like “drink” and “beverage”, which occasionally yield different truth conditions in the same kinds of generic sentences. The compositional framework provides an account of both individual concepts as well as common nouns using a fuzzy logic. The sampling approach also links competence and performance. Finite sampling yields performance and sampling repeatedly converges on competence. This provides a straightforward way to distinguish previously reported phenomena such as the generic flavour of non-partitive “all” which is distinguished from “every”.