Abstract
Wayne Davis’s Meaning, Expression and Thought argues that linguistic meaning is conventional use to express ideas. An obvious problem with this proposal is that complex expressions that have never been used are nonetheless meaningful. In response to this concern, Davis associates conventions of use not only with linguistic expressions but also with the modes in which such expressions can combine into larger expressions. I argue that such constructive conventions are in conflict with the principle of compositionality (as it is usually understood) and that (at least in the cases Davis considers) they are unnecessary for semantic explanations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Linguistic meaning is relative to languages. I will suppress reference to language relativity throughout my discussion whenever that leads to no confusion.
As Davis notes (167), the analysis of linguistic meaning in terms of speaker meaning is often viewed as a rival of any analysis in terms of use. This is largely because the use theory of meaning has been a longtime ally of behaviorism. Wittgenstein and Austin presupposed that the use of an expression can be identified without appeal to mental states. But the presupposition is suspect and can be dispensed with. Grice’s own theory can be viewed as an attempt to identify a particular illocutionary act—saying—that is simultaneously definable in terms of speaker meaning and defines linguistic meaning.
I neglect concerns about synonymy. Most of these are specific instances of completely general worries about vagueness that have not much to do with meaning per se.
Standard truth-conditional semantics delivers a partial answer. ‘Dogs bark’ has the truth-conditions it does because ‘dogs’ is true of dogs and ‘bark’ is true of things that bark and because the sentence is composed from these constituents in a certain fashion. But when the question is raised why ‘dogs’ is true of dogs and why ‘bark’ is true of things that bark, truth-conditional semantics remains silent. While explanations must undoubtedly end somewhere, it does not seem promising to declare that here we have already hit rock bottom.
Davis uses double quotes, so he would have ‘ “no” means “no” ’ and ‘ “dog” means “dog” ’ instead. It is important that the double quotes are interpreted differently in their two occurrences. The claim should certainly not misconstrued as saying that ‘dog’ is synonymous with itself (146).
For a forceful recent statement that they do, see Schiffer (2003): 100–5.
Dummett (1974) says such considerations are superficial (7). He mentions that although a successful investigation should tell us the identity of the murderer, we do not expect it to deliver a true sentence of the form ‘The identity of the murderer is …’. This is a nice example, but the analogy between identity-talk and meaning-talk breaks down when it comes to quantification. ‘Some words have more than one meaning’ is true if interpreted in a straightforward fashion. ‘Some murderers have more than one identity’ is also true, but it cannot be read as saying that some murderers are identical to more than one murderer. My claim is that ‘meaning’—unlike ‘identity’ in the sense in which it is true that a successful murder investigation must tell us the identity of the murderer – is an ordinary count noun. If we accept this much, and if we go along with the truth of sentences like ‘Some words have more than one meaning’ we should accept that ‘meaning’ has a non-empty extension.
See Davis (2003): 175, fn. 16 for a representative list.
There is an extreme view in this neighborhood associated with Frege’s dictum that only in the context of a sentence does a word have a meaning. Davis calls this the sentential confinement thesis (176) and points out that it seems plainly false, at least when it concerns Sinn rather than Bedeutung. (If words are meaningless in isolation but some sentences are meaningful, it must be that when we put together a bunch of meaningless things in the right way each of them somehow becomes meaningful. I don’t think this is incoherent, but it sure sounds like something straight out of a Borges story!).
Szabó (2004a).
Davis calls it the explanation problem (195).
Davis views conventions in a broadly Humean fashion as socially useful, self-perpetuating and arbitrary regularities (206).
For example, any string of words consisting of a finite number of occurrences of ‘buffalo’ is a meaningful English sentence.
Larson (1998).
Davis says that he believes that compositional semantics provides the only explanation for productivity (239). I suspect that by compositional semantics he means nothing more than recursive semantics.
There are plenty of reasons for doubting whether natural languages are compositional. (For some arguments pro and con, see Szabó (2004b).) One reason for doubting whether syntactic structure contributes to the meaning of complex expressions in a uniform manner in English is the fact that many (perhaps all) declarative sentences can be used with proper intonation to express questions. Prima facie, the sentence ‘Hugo likes broccoli’ pronounced in a particular way may mean what ‘Does Hugo like broccoli?’ does, although pronounced more naturally it means something else. Now, I happen to think that there is a good case to be made for intonation making a difference to syntactic structure. But if I am wrong about that we have a widespread violation of compositionality at our hands.
References
Davis, W. (2003). Meaning, Expression, and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dummett, M. (1974). What is a theory of meaning I. In The Seas of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 1–33.
Fodor, J., & Lepore, E. (2002). The Compositionality Papers. Oxford: Blackwell.
Higginbotham, J. (2000). On Events in Linguistic Semantics. In J. Higginbotham, F. Pianesi, & A. Varzi (Eds.), Speaking of Events (pp. 49–80). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Larson, R. (1998). Events and modification is nominals. In D. Strolovitch & A. Lawson (Eds.), Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) VIII. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
Pagin, P. (2003). Communication and strong compositionality. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 32, 287–322.
Parsons, T. (1990). Events in the Semantics of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schiffer, S. (2003). The Things We Mean. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Szabó, Z. G. (2004a). Review of J. Fodor and E. Lepore. The Compositionality Papers, Mind 113, 340–344.
Szabó, Z. G. (2004b). Compositionality. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Szabó, Z.G. Structure and conventions. Philos Stud 137, 399–408 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9125-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9125-9