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The determination of content

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Abstract

I identify a notion of compositionality at the intersection of the different notions philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are concerned with. The notion is compositionality of expression content: the idea that the content of a complex expression in a context of its utterance is determined by its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents in the contexts of their respective utterances. Traditional arguments from productivity and systematicity cannot establish that the contents of linguistic expressions are compositionally determined in this sense. I present a novel argument for this thesis.

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Notes

  1. Fodor (2001): 6.

  2. Fodor (2001): 12.

  3. Fodor (2001): 13.

  4. Such arguments have gained a lot of momentum in the last two decades. Here are a few milestones in the spread of the idea: Searle (1978), Travis (1985), Sperber and Wilson (1986), Perry (1986), Recanati (1989), Bach (1994), Levinson (2000), Carston (2002), Cappelen and Lepore (2005), Soames (2005).

  5. Important exceptions are Lahav (1989) and Travis (1994). The latter will be discussed in detail in Sect. 4 below.

  6. Typical proponents of underdetermination arguments believe that compositionally determined meanings are in some way impoverished (perhaps not even propositional), and hence, that they are usually (perhaps always) distinct from what speakers assert when they utter those sentences. Fodor thinks postulating such impoverished sentences meanings is superfluous—it serves no theoretical purpose beyond defending the dogma of compositionality for natural language.

  7. Compositionality is a demonstrably empty principle if one neglects syntactic and lexical constraints. Janssen (1983) has a proof that we can turn any meaning assignment on a recursively enumerable set of expressions into a compositional one, as long as we can replace the syntactic operations with different ones. Zadrozny (1994) has shown that this can also be done by replacing the old meanings with new ones from which they are uniformly recoverable.

  8. Szabó (2000a) argues that (C) is best construed as the claim that there is a single function across all possible human languages from the structure of any complex expression and the meanings of its constituents to the meaning of that complex expression.

  9. Fine (2007): 26 distinguishes between “compositionality proper” and “intrinsicalism”. The former is the collective reading of (C); the latter is the claim that “the collective meaning of the component expressions is exhausted by their individual meanings.” As Fine notes, the standard construal of (C) is the distributive one, which is the result of combining the collective reading with the intrinsicalist thesis.

  10. The usual assumption is that syntax defines a syntactic algebra; cf. Jannssen (1983).

  11. There is a long-standing debate whether Frege’s commitment to the context-principle can be reconciled with his commitment to compositionality; cf. Janssen (2001) and Pelletier (2001) for recent opinions on the matter. As long as the former is understood as a claim about priority and the latter as a claim about determination, I see no conflict.

  12. The fact that Fodor argues for (Φ), not merely (C) is clear at many places where he discusses compositionality. (He sometimes states the principle as saying that the meaning of a complex expression is inherited from the meanings of its parts; cf. Fodor and Lepore (1991): 14.) He also needs (Φ), not (C) in his argument (mentioned in the second paragraph of this paper) that thought is explanatorily prior to language.

  13. The semantics for attitude ascriptions in Carnap (1947) satisfies (C) but not (Λ). It says that any two tautologies have the same semantic value but the semantic values of sentences ascribing tautological beliefs to the same subject can differ. This is due to the fact that tautologies may differ in their structure, and consequently, in the semantic values of their constituents as well.

  14. For examples of languages for which (C) holds but (Ψ) fails see Szabó (2000c): 77–80. Horwich (1998): 155 suggests that something like (Ψ) is true by definition. This strikes me as a rather unfortunate stipulation. It does not accord with the ordinary meaning of ‘understanding’ and it does not create a theoretically useful novel term either.

  15. When I call these theses the philosopher’s, the linguist’s, and the psychologist’s compositionality, I am not claiming that they are widely held among practitioners of those respective fields. All I am claiming is that they are interesting views to be reckoned with within those fields. By contrast, (C) is too weak to be interesting in itself in any of the three fields.

  16. Cf. Kaplan (1977).

  17. Lewis (1970).

  18. According to Stalnaker (2002), a proposition p is part of the common ground in a conversation iff the speaker and the addressee accept p, they both believe that they accept p, they both believe that they both believe that they accept p, … and so on. Context should not be thought of as all of the common ground, since then context would include linguistic meanings as well. Such a broad conception of context would make all expressions trivially context-dependent.

  19. The ontologically scrupulous might bulk at the move from calling an expression contentful to saying that it has content. I will bracket ontological concerns here.

  20. Higginbotham (1988): 40.

  21. King and Stanley (2005): 128.

  22. If the two occurrences of ‘here’ are uttered in different contexts, what is the context for the utterance of the whole sentence? I assume that it is some sort of composite of the contexts in which the parts of the sentence are uttered. (The mode of composition depends on what exactly contexts are—an issue I would like to remain neutral about.) What content does this composite context assign to the word ‘here’? Within the context of its first utterance ‘here’ picks out one place and within the context of its second utterance it picks out another. The natural thing to say is that within the composite context in which the whole sentence is uttered ‘here’ does not pick out anything. (In general, if we have a number of contexts making up a composite context, the composite context should not assign any content to an expression unless all the contexts that make up the composite context assign that same content to it.) This means that a sentence can have content relative to a context even though some of the words within the sentence do not have content relative to that context.

  23. Cf. Stanley (2000). Szabó (2000b) calls this the context principle.

  24. Pelletier (2003).

  25. There are three such alternatives. Perhaps ‘every man’ always expresses unrestricted quantification over all men, perhaps the content of ‘man’ in a context includes only the men who are contextually salient, perhaps the content of ‘every’ includes a domain of quantification. I favor the second alternative argued for in Stanley and Szabó (2000).

  26. What sort of knowledge (if any) is involved in one’s understanding a word or syntactic structure is a matter of considerable disagreement. Wittgensteinians tend to argue that it is a certain practical ability or knowledge-how, Davidsoneans tend to see it as a theoretical disposition or knowledge-that. Intermediate positions are also possible—e.g. Paul Horwich thinks knowledge of word meaning is an implicit knowledge-that constituted by use. I take no stand on this issue here.

  27. Still, isn’t it true that competent speakers typically know the content of complex expressions they encounter for the first time? Of course it is. What is the best explanation of this fact? Most likely that they know the structure of the complex expression, the contents of its simple constituents, and that they are aware of the context. To turn this into a successful abductive argument for the compositionality of expression content one would need to show that awareness of context is typically dispensable or reducible to the other factors. This is a substantive thesis and it is vigorously denied by many linguists and philosophers.

  28. The literature on compositionality contains several challenges to the principle. These include the semantics of conditionals, cross-sentential anaphora, adjectives, propositional attitudes, and much else; for discussion see Szabó (2007) Section 4.2. Typical arguments against compositionality apply indiscriminately at the level of character or content. Underdetermination arguments are used by some of their proponents (e.g. Lahav (1989)) to argue only against compositionality of content, not against compositionality of character.

  29. Not that there is anything wrong with assuming the principle as a working hypothesis and take assurance in the fact that such a practice has turned up some valuable results. It’s just that we don’t really know how important adherence to this principle really is to obtaining those results.

  30. The distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts has been criticized by Searle (1968). As I read him, Searle does not want to call in question the existence of locutionary acts, only their significance. He insists that some speech-acts acts are both locutionary and illocutionary (which is controversial), and that some speech-acts—such as referring and predicating—are neither (which is plausible).

  31. There may be many other cases besides figurative speech when the contents of the illocutionary and locutionary acts come apart. According to a reasonable interpretation of Donnellan (1966), this is exactly what Donnellan thinks happens when definite descriptions are used referentially. By contrast, Kripke (1977)—and following him many others—have contended that referential use is a phenomenon at the level of what the speaker meant, not at the level of what the speaker said.

  32. One may perform multiple illocutionary acts in uttering a single sentence. Nonetheless, I assume that in all but a negligible percentage of those cases (e.g. the case of the famous utterance of ‘Peccavi’ discussed by Paul Grice) there is one principal speech-act performed. For example, in uttering ‘Fortunately, Bill did not come’ one arguably asserts both that Bill did not come and that this is fortunate. The former is the principal illocutionary act, which can be seen from the fact that the response ‘That’s not true!’ is naturally taken to express that Bill did not come. When I speak of illocutionary content, in cases when multiple illocutionary acts are performed by uttering a single sentence, I mean the content of the principal illocutionary act.

  33. I said that when A utters ‘I am happy’ he refers to himself. I would not say that he refers to himself in uttering ‘I am happy’. Rather, he refers to himself in uttering ‘I’ – uttering the rest of the sentence had nothing to do with it.

  34. Uttering expressions while being asleep is not an act, and hence, not a speech act. Utterances made when one is memorizing poems, teaching language, practicing pronunciation, etc. are certainly acts, but not speech-acts because they do not involve communicative intent.

  35. This formulation leaves it open that assertions might be performed by uttering complex expressions other than sentences. For a defense that this can indeed happen, see Stainton (2006). What matters for my purposes is only that expressions used to perform assertions should not contain unuttered elements at the topmost level in their structure.

  36. Travis (1994): 171–2.

  37. Since “compositionality” might mean so many different things, there is not much point asking whether this is an alleged counterexample to compositionality. Travis, for example, does not object to the idea that a contextually insensitive meanings (what I called ‘characters’) of the constituent expressions of ‘The leaf is green’ together with the syntax of this sentence fix the contextually insensitive meaning of the sentence. But he thinks that the contextually insensitive meaning of the sentence underdetermines what one says (in the illocutionary sense of the word) when one utters it.

  38. This is by no means obvious. There is no straightforward way to generalize Travis’s considerations even to sentences like ‘The car is green’. Unlike trees, cars don’t have a natural color, so it is hard to see why it could ever be correct to call a car red, just because under its green coat of paint there is a red one. Still, Travis is on firm grounds claiming that similar arguments can be presented for many other sentences.

  39. See, for example, Pelletier (1994).

  40. One may reject this suggestion. Perhaps A and B said the very same thing, something that is true in the context of A’s utterance, but false in the context of B’s utterance. (This would be the sort of view John MacFarlane has called non-indexical contextualism applied to assertion content; cf. MacFarlane (2008). But if this is so, Travis’s argument against (Cac) doesn’t even get off the ground.

  41. This is not to say that he said the same thing on both occasions. Arguably, in uttering ‘the leaf is green’ A said of the painted leaf that it is a leaf, but in uttering ‘it is green’ he said no such thing.

  42. I am assuming here that in uttering a word within a larger expression a single speech-act is performed. It would suffice to assume that all speech-acts performed in uttering a word within a larger expression have the same content. I see no reason to doubt this weaker claim.

  43. There is an important putative counterexample to the principle of compositionality of speech-act content I did not discuss. According to Fine (2007), ‘Cicero is Cicero’ and ‘Cicero is Tully’ differ in content, even though proper names are directly referential. If so, (Cec) fails for English and assertions of these sentences presumably yield counterexamples to (Cac) too. However, I think an application of the general argumentative strategy pursued above suggests strongly that if we accept that speakers who utter these sentences assert different things then we should also accept hat in uttering ‘is Cicero’ and ‘is Tully’ they predicate different things of the famous Roman orator.

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Acknowledgements

I thank audiences at Columbia, Rutgers, Santa Cruz, the 2007 Pacific Division Meeting of the APA in San Francisco, and the 15th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Geneva, where I had the opportunity to present earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to Sandra Chung, Chris Gauker, Tamar Szabó Gendler, Martin Jonsson, Peter Lasersohn, Ernie Lepore, John MacFarlane, Josep Macia, Christopher Peacocke, and Daniel Rothschild for discussion. I also thank an anonymous referee for the Philosophical Studies for comments and insightful criticism.

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Szabó, Z. The determination of content. Philos Stud 148, 253–272 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9296-z

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