propertieswhether

Propertieswhether is a neologistic term used in philosophy of language and formal semantics to refer to the collection of properties that influence how statements containing a “whether” clause are interpreted and evaluated. It captures the idea that the truth-conditions of such statements depend on context, evidence, and possible alternatives rather than on a single static proposition.

Origin and scope: The term does not represent a widely adopted technical standard; it appears in discussions intended to describe context-sensitive aspects of truth-conditional semantics. It is used to cluster features such as evidential status, scope of negation, modal dependence, and discourse context under one label.

Formalization: In a simplified model-theoretic view, the truth of a sentence of the form “whether P” is determined by propertieswhether(P), a function mapping a proposition to a set of features that influence its evaluation under a “whether” construction. Features may include evidence strength, competing hypotheses, temporal or situational context, and the presupposed or asserted stance of the speaker. These features can shift the assertability or certainty of the embedded proposition.

Applications and examples: In linguistics, propertieswhether helps explain why some “whether” clauses are more robust under negation or how questions within “whether” influence sentiment. For instance: “Whether it will rain tomorrow depends on atmospheric conditions” illustrates contextual dependence. In natural language processing, annotators may tag sentences with propertieswhether to improve disambiguation and belief-tracking.

See also: whether (conjunction), disjunction in logic, modal logic, context-dependence, intensional semantics.