Introduction

Abstract

The topic of this book is the idea that the sentences that we use generally fail to express something that could determinately be true or false. Borrowing the term from Robyn Carston (2002a), I will refer to this phenomenon as semantic under-determinacy. The specific focus of this book are those sentences whose semantic content, even provided disambiguation, indexicality ellipsis or vagueness resolution, is still incapable of determining a truth-condition for their utterances. Examples of semantic under-determinacy thus characterised abound, and we may encounter dozens of them every day. It may be useful to survey some examples.