Seth P. Yalcin

This dissertation proposes a generalization of a standard idea in the philosophy of language and mind. The standard idea is that natural language expressions and mental states serve to represent the world as being a certain way, and they do it by having truth conditions. The generalization is that natural language expressions and mental states have truth-conditions only as a special case of having what this study terms “probability conditions.” The objective of this dissertation is to introduce this more general notion of representation and demonstrate its utility to epistemology, semantics, and the study of foundational issues in the philosophy of language and mind.