Semantic Under-Determinacy, Comprehension and Meta-Representation

Abstract

The problem I will be concerned with in the present chapter may be stated as follows: how is utterance comprehension possible, given semantic under-determinacy? The question concerns in particular the mechanisms through which a hearer comes to understand what the speaker means with the utterance of a semantically under-determined sentence. Utterance comprehension may be equated with knowledge of the truth-conditions of a certain utterance u; if semantically under-determined sentences fail to determine a truth-condition for their utterances (even provided ambiguity and indexicality resolution), how do hearers manage to understand utterances of them?