Abstract

The interpretation of indefinite noun phrases poses a dilemma that goes to the heart of the relationship between semantic content and truth. On the one hand, it is argued, indefinites are referring expressions, and contribute their referents to the utterance’s semantic content (the proposition assigned to the situated utterance, by linguistic convention, as its communicated content). On the other hand, it is apparent that the truth conditions of utterances containing indefinites are not object-dependent, but existential; the referents of indefinites, if they have any, must be ignored in the calculation of truth value. These two claims are consistent only if we give up a central assumption of truth-conditional semantics: that the semantic content of an utterance, in conjunction with a circumstance of evaluation, determines its truth value.