Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Herman Cappelen & Ernest Lepore (2007). The Myth of Unarticulated Constituents. In Michael O'Rourke Corey Washington (ed.), Situating semantics: essays on the philosophy of John Perry.This paper evaluates arguments presented by John Perry (and Ken Taylor) in favor of the presence of an unarticulated constituent in the proposition expressed by utterance of, for example, (1):1 1. It's raining (at t). We contend that these arguments are, at best, inconclusive. That's the critical part of our paper. On the positive side, we argue that (1) has as its semantic content the proposition that it is raining (at t) and that this is a location-neutral proposition. According to the view we propose, an audience typically looks for a location when they hear utterances of (1) because their interests in rain are location- focused: it is the location of rain that determines whether we get wet, carrots grow, and roads become slippery. These are, however, contingent facts about rain, wetness, people, carrots, and roads – they are not built into the semantics for the verb 'rain'.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Discussion (1) | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
| Export citation | Scholar
Discussion of Herman Cappelen & Ernest Lepore, The myth of unarticulated constituents
|
MLE seminar comments on Lepore
This forum
|
Alastair Wilson 2009-05-15 |
No follow-ups | 1 |
|
MLE seminar comments on Cappelen
This forum
|
Alastair Wilson 2009-05-15 |
No follow-ups | 1 |
Similar books and articles
In this paper I want to explore the arguments for so-called ‘unarticulated constituents’ (UCs). Unarticulated constituents are supposed to be propositional elements, not presented in the surface form of a sentence, nor explicitly represented at the level of its logical form, yet which must be interpreted in order to grasp the (proper) meaning of that sentence or expression. Thus, for example, we might think that a sentence like ‘It is raining’ must contain a UC picking out the place at which (...)
In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: reading.ac.uk | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: reading.ac.uk | Scholar | More.. In a recent paper (Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 4, June 2000), Jason Stanley argues that there are no `unarticulated constituents', contrary to what advocates of Truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) have claimed. All truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, he says. In this paper I maintain that there are unarticulated constituents, and I defend TCP. Stanley's argument exploits the fact that the alleged unarticulated constituents can be `bound', that is, they can be made to vary with the values (...)
John Perry has argued that language, thought and experience often contain unarticulated constituents. I argue that this idea holds the key to explaining away the intuitive appeal of the A-theory of time and the endurance theory of persistence. The A-theory has seemed intuitively appealing because the nature of temporal experience makes it natural for us to use one-place predicates like past to deal with what are really two-place relations, one of whose constituents is unarticulated. The endurance view can be treated (...)
