The classical view of meaning in model theoretic semantics is based on the notion of truth in a model or possible world. While truth is of central importance in semantics, the notion of truth in a possible world seems an unlikely foundation for the kind of natural reasoning that humans engage in as they wander about the actual world gathering partial information about it. In this paper we will explore a notion of judgement derived from rich type theoretic approaches to semantics. We will claim that truth is supervenient on judgements that a situation is of a given type. We will argue for this on the basis of important classes of natural language examples where meaning is defined only in terms of subjective judgement and there is no objective truth of the matter, for example predicates of personal taste such as "This soup is delicious", expressions of artistic judgement such as "Stockhausen's 'Gruppen' is a masterpiece" and expressions of moral or political judgements such as "Women should be allowed to drive". An important part of our approach has to do with the kind of reasoning that takes place during interaction in dialogue and the notion of dialogue gameboard as proposed by Ginzburg (2012) will play a significant part in the analysis.
School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University.