Abstract
Fodor (Mind Lang 16:1–15, 2001) endorses the mixed view that thought, yet not language, is compositional. That is, Fodor accepts the arguments of radical pragmatics that language is not compositional, but he claims these arguments do not apply to thought. My purpose here is to evaluate this mixed position: Assuming that the radical pragmaticists are right that language is not compositional, what arguments can be provided in support of the claim that thought is compositional? Before such arguments can be evaluated, the relevant notion of compositionality must be clarified. So I first clarify this notion of compositionality, and then consider three arguments in support of the mixed position. All three of these arguments are found to be inadequate, and thus I conclude that the mixed position is unstable: If one endorses the arguments of radical pragmatics against the compositionality of language, then one should also reject the compositionality of thought.
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Notes
Paradigmatic defenses of various forms of radical pragmatics include Bach (1994), Carston (2002), Neale (2004) and Recanati (2004). For my purposes here I include dynamic semantics, relevance theory, and even semantic relativism as versions of radical pragmatics. What all of these theoretical perspectives have in common is the rejection of the traditional view that natural languages are truth-conditionally compositional.
Though it makes no difference to the arguments of this paper, it seems that Fodor continues to endorse the mixed position. In Fodor’s most recent book he writes, “One can imagine a view according to which only thought is compositional in the first instance and the apparent productivity, systematicity, etc. of languages is parasitic on the thoughts they are used to express. In fact, I am inclined to think that’s the right view [see Fodor (2001)]” (2008, p. 55, note 8).
Carston (2002, pp. 74–83) briefly considers the question as to whether or not Mentalese is truth-conditionally compositional (though she does not put it this way), but she does not come to any definite conclusion.
An occurrence is a type relative to a context. It is plausible then to identify occurrences of types with tokens of the type, but this issue raises a host of metaphysical questions that I cannot pursue here.
Propositionalism, and hence truth-conditional compositionality, apply only to declarative sentences. One who defends the claim that natural language is truth-conditionally compositional probably holds that analogous principles hold for indicative and interrogative sentences. But I will not consider such analogous principles here.
One might object that the “incomplete” definite description ‘the leaves’ is a context sensitive expression. But this is irrelevant, as Travis’ example is designed so that the denotation of this description remains constant across the two utterance contexts.
In the familiar terms of Kaplan (1989), Travis-style counterexamples undermine neither the claim that the content of sentence S in context c is a function of the contents of the words in S (relative to c) and the syntactic structure of S, nor the claim that the character of a sentence (type) S is a function of the characters of the words in S and the syntactic structure of S. In Kaplan’s terms, the target of Travis-style counterexamples is the identification of the content of an occurrence of a sentence with what is said by an assertive use of a sentence.
Carston (2008, p. 339) cites this passage from Fodor with approval, and uses it to support a relevance theoretic version of the mixed view.
Elugardo (2005) notes this tension in Fodor, and proposes a version of semantic minimalism to resolve it.
Note that this passage provides an argument in support of the truth-conditional compositionality of language only if propositionalism is assumed.
There is an extensive literature devoted to systematicity and the associated generality constraint, and within this literature there are significant differences between not only the how these notions are understood, but moreover between the uses to which they are put. Though limitations of space prevent me from comparing truth-conditional systematicity as it is defined and used here with other notions and uses, a brief description of some relevant differences may be helpful. All the notions share the basic idea that if a representation S has some property P, then some range of permutations of S also have P. But theorists differ as to what P is. Indeed, even within Fodor’s writing there are substantial differences as to what property P is: Sometimes (e.g. Fodor and Lepore 1991, pp. 14–15 in Fodor and Lepore 2002) P is taken to be expressing a proposition; other times (Fodor 1987, p. 150) P is taken to be only having a meaning, and still other times (e.g. Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988, p. 38) P is merely being grammatical. (Johnson 2004, considers a version of such grammatical systematicity and argues persuasively that it is vacuous.) Theorists (e.g. Evans 1982; Camp 2004; and Caruthers 2009) also differ as to what the range and nature of the relevant permutation ought to be. Moreover the uses to which the notions are put differs substantially. Evans (1982) initially invoked the generality constraint as a condition of adequacy for theories of human thought. Other theorists (e.g. Camp 2004; Carruthers 2009; Dickie 2010) use it as a criterion for a creature’s being capable of thought. And finally, still others (e.g. Fodor and Lepore 1991) use the notion as a description of an empirical fact in need of explanation.
I interpret the claim that ‘if it can express the proposition that P→Q, then it can express the proposition that Q→P’ as saying that if a sentence of the form P→Q expresses a proposition (relative to a context), then so does the converse of that sentence. I think this is the most charitable interpretation. Note that if ‘the proposition that P→Q’ is interpreted as describing structured propositions of a certain form, then the inference from systematicity to the hypothesis of truth-conditional compositionality is weak at best. Suppose that a certain structured proposition of the form P→Q is expressed in a certain language by ‘♥►♦’ and further suppose that the converse structured proposition (i.e. Q→P) can be expressed, but only by a wholly distinct atomic symbol, ‘♣’. The fact that both propositions can be expressed in the language in this odd way would give us no reason whatsoever for supposing that the language is truth-conditionally compositional. But if ‘the proposition that P→Q’ is interpreted as describing structured propositions, then merely possessing this sort of expressive power would qualify a language as possessing systematicity. If the fact that language possesses systematicity is supposed to provide a compelling reason for thinking that language is truth-conditionally compositional, then systematicity had better have something to do with the relation between the structure of sentences and the truth-conditions occurrences of sentences express.
It is noteworthy that in providing examples to illustrate the truth-conditional systematicity of natural language, Fodor and Lepore do not appeal to utterances of actual sentences of natural language. Rather, they provide only formal sentential schemas, and make no mention of contexts relative to which sentences could express truth-conditions. This ought to raise our suspicions.
A defender of the mixed position could reject the truth-conditional systematicity argument in support of the truth-conditional compositionality of language simply on the grounds that it begs the question against radical pragmatics. For both the premise and the conclusion presuppose propositionalism, which is rejected by radical pragmatics. But an objection that refutes the argument on its own terms, and thereby motivates the rejection of propositionalism, is much more compelling.
Of course a contextualist, following the strategy of Stanley (2000), would deny this. She would claim that in the LF for ‘John is ready’ there is some sort of “hidden-indexical” that has as its value in a context the relevant sort of challenge or activity. Regardless of whether or not contextualism is a viable strategy in general, it is not relevant at this point in the dialectic. Here, in this first step, we are trying to support Fodor’s mixed position by showing how one who denies that language is truth-conditionally compositional, and thus rejects contextualism, can object to the traditional systematicity arguments in support of the truth-conditional compositionality of language. And, as is explained below, invoking semantic minimalism would also be irrelevant at this point.
A competent interpreter is also likely to ask what setback it is that John is recovering from, but let us set this problem aside.
The claim that (1p) does not express truth-conditions in c* implies neither that (1p) does not encode semantic content in c*, nor that (1p) does not have a conventional linguistic meaning. In other words, I have argued that semantically underdeterminate sentences provide good reason to reject the premise that English is truth-conditionally systematic, but this argument does nothing to undermine the weaker claims that English is meaning systematic, or semantic content systematic. And from such weaker systematicity claims, weaker compositionality claims might be supported.
A forceful, albeit somewhat contrived, case involves a sentence S that (in c) is not paradoxical, but whose sentential permutation S p is (in c) paradoxical. Suppose that in context c it is understood that (L) is the liar sentence ‘(L) is not true’. Now let S be ‘(L) is a sentence and something is not true’ and let S p be ‘(L) is not true’. S clearly express truth conditions in c, since it is obviously true. But its sentential permutation S p does not express truth conditions because it cannot be either true or false (unless it is both).
Fodor (2008, p. 59) claims that “As usual, the arguments in the case of Mentalese run parallel to the arguments in the case of English”. Fodor invokes the parallel to support his inference from the premise that that formulas of English “exhibit constituent structure” (2008, p. 58) to his conclusion that the formulas of Mentalese also exhibit such structure. In a similar way I could invoke the parallel to support the inference from the premise that English is not truth-conditional systematic to the conclusion that Mentalese is also not truth-conditionally systematic.
Clearly some relativization to individual interpreters is called for here, as one occurrence of a natural language sentence may correspond to several Mentalese tokens in the brains of different interpreters. But, since nothing of importance for my concerns here depends upon such relativization, for ease of exposition I will suppress articulation of it.
Notice again, however, that there would be no corresponding objection against a meaning systematicity argument in support of the meaning compositionality of Mentalese, nor against a semantic content systematicity argument in support of the semantic content compositionality of Mentalese.
In the passages cited it seems as if Fodor is making the stronger assumption that every natural language type has a corresponding Mentalese type, but, as will be shown in the next section, the argument is best interpreted as relying only on the weaker claim that every occurrence of a natural language sentence has a corresponding token of Mentalese.
See Stanley and Szabó (2000) for a contextualist response to apparent counterexamples involving quantifier domain restriction.
Fodor, actually asserts that compositionality requires this. This is correct, the compositionality of thought would require this, but the premise he needs here is weaker than the claim that thought is compositional, and moreover it would be blatantly question-begging for Fodor to simply assume the compositionality of thought at this point since he is trying to argue that, though language is not compositional, thought is. So it is best to simply ignore this appeal to compositionality.
Perry writes, “there is no reason that thoughts that employ representations in the language of thought should not have unarticulated constituents, just as statements that employ sentences of natural language do,” (1986, p. 145).
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Acknowledgments
Versions of this paper were presented in 2007 at the conference Context-dependence, Perspective and Relativity in Language and Thought at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 2009 at a colloquium at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, and in 2009 at the Seminario Interdisciplinario del Lenguaje at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas in Mexico City. The paper benefited from all of the ensuing discussions, though the contributions of Barry Smith, Robyn Carston, Maite Ezcurdia, Adrian Cussins were particularly valuable. I also owe thanks to Ray Elugardo, Rob Stainton, Fermin Fulda, Manuel Rodríguez, Liza Skidelsky, Laura Duhau, and an anonymous referee for this journal.
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Clapp, L. Is even thought compositional?. Philos Stud 157, 299–322 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9649-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9649-2