The standard paradigm of possible world semantics, which has been in wide use since Montague’s pioneering work, fails to account for the subject-matter preserving nature of entailment as well as for discrepancies between the behavior of the connectives in propositional logic and their counterparts in natural language. These discrepancies show up in a variety of empirical domains such as imperatives and counterfactuals. I argue that this calls for a paradigm shift away from standard possible world semantics and towards a hyperintensional framework. I adopt unilateral truthmaker semantics in the sense of Fine (2017), with a concomitant move from the intersective to the collective theory of conjunction. I conceptualize truthmakers as Davidsonian events and argue for an adaptation of Fine’s semantics for negation to the event domain. This leads to a natural conception of negative events that is novel to event semantics but reminiscent of work done by Higginbotham within situation semantics. I sketch an application to perception reports and show how to embed truthmaker semantics within a standard type theoretical compositional framework. Parts of this talk are based on joint work with Timothée Bernard.
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