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- 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. Mit Press.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'.Reading list | Discussion (1) | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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It is a common experience of mental life that we come to articulate meanings which we had initially grasped in only a sketchy way. In this paper, I consider how this idea of an initially unarticulated meaning may fit in a general theory of mental representation. I propose to identify unarticulated meanings with what I callspecific concepts, which are quite similar to Rosch's categories of basic objects and are distinct both from images and generic concepts (which come to articulate meanings). I argue that unarticulated meaning is non-representational in an important respect, a claim which relies on a distinction amonglevels of representation.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This paper contains a discussion of how the concept of compositionality is to be extended from context invariant to context dependent meaning, and of how the compositionality of natural language might conflict with context dependence. Several new distinctions are needed, including a distinction between a weaker (e-) and a stronger (ec-) concept of compositionality for context dependent meaning. The relations between the various notions are investigated. A claim by Jerry Fodor that there is a general conflict between context dependence and compositionality is considered. There is in fact a possible conflict betwee ec-compositionality and context dependence, but not of the kind Fodor suggests. It turns on the presence of so-called unarticulated constituents, in John Perry’s sense. Because of this phenomenon, on some semantic accounts there might be a variation in the meaning of a complex expression between contexts without any corresponding variation in any of the syntactic parts of that complex. The conflict can be resolved in several ways. One way is to make the unarticulated context dependence explicit only in the meta-language, which makes it into an unarticulated constituent account. A recent argument by Jason Stanley against such accounts is discussed. According to Stanley, certain readings of English sentences involving binding of contextual variables, are unavailable in these theories. After considering a reply to Stanley by François Recanati, I present an outline of a fully compositional theory, of the unarticulated constituent variety, which does deliver these readings. Concluding remarks on, inter alia, the semantics/pragmatics distinction.
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| | Other links: people.su.se | Scholar | At my library | More options ... It starts to rain and I open the umbrella or, if I don"t have one, I ask my colleague, who is walking with me, if he has an umbrella in the bag. Why do I do so? There are many ways to answer this question, but if I adopt the strategy to explain the causes of my acting or speaking by looking for the reasons that I have for doing it (for instance, I notice that it is raining and I don"t want to get wet), I commit myself to an explanation of a psychological kind (Davidson 1980). The following discussion tackles an internal problem of psychological explanations concerning the taxonomy (or categorization) of intentional contents. Intentional contents define what beliefs, desires, hopes, etc., are about. One believes that something is so-and-so (for instance, one believes that it is raining); one desires that something is going to be so-and–so (that tomorrow it isn"t going to rain), etc. The content of intentional states is the object of those so-called that-clauses: "it is raining" is, for instance, the content of the belief that it is raining.
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| | Other links: sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080 | Scholar | More options ... 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 in a similar way; the temporal boundaries of temporal parts of objects are unarticulated in experience and this makes it seem that the very same entity exists at different times.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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 introduced by operators in the sentence. I show that Stanley's argument rests on a fallacy, and I provide alternative analyses of the data.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain’, in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article in this journal, I provided a counter-example, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining’ receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I argued that when there is tacit references to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. Since then, several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts and argue that my account is superior.
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| | Other links: jstor.org springerlink.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Attempts to characterize unarticulated constituents (henceforth: UCs) by means of quantification over the parts of a sentence and the constituents of the proposition it expresses come to grief in more complicated cases than are commonly considered. In particular, UC definitions are inadequate when we consider cases in which the same constituent appears more than once in a proposition that only has one word with the constituent as its semantic value. This article explores some consequences of trying to repair the formal definitions.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org doi.wiley.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... It is natural to think that the relationship between ‘rain’ and the location of rain is different from the relationship between ‘dance’ and the location of dancing. Utterances of (1) are typically interpreted as, in some sense, being about a location in which it rains. (2) is, typically, not interpreted as being about a location in which the dancing takes place.
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| | Other links: interscience.wiley.com analysis.oxfordjournals.org folk.uio.no dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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 the speaker of the sentence asserts it to be raining. In §1 I will explore the nature of UCs a little further, and, in §2, suggest that we can recognise two different forms of argument for them..
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| | Other links: reading.ac.uk | Scholar | More options ... Philosophers and logicians use the term “indexical” for words such as “I”, “you” and “tomorrow”. Demonstratives such as “this” and “that” and demonstratives phrases such as “this man” and “that computer” are usually reckoned as a subcategory of indexicals. (Following [Kaplan, 1989a].) The “context-dependence” of indexicals is often taken as a defining feature: what an indexical designates shifts from context to context. But there are many kinds of shiftiness, with corresponding conceptions of context. Until we clarify what we mean by “context”, this defining feature remains unclear. In sections 1–3, which are largely drawn from [Perry, forthcoming(a)], I try to clarify the sense in which indexicals are context-dependent and make some distinctions among the ways indexicals depend on context. In sections 3–6, I contrast indexicality with another phenomenon that I call “unarticulated constituents.”.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Herman Cappelen & Ernest Lepore, The myth of unarticulated constituents
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| 2009-05-15 | |
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Alastair Wilson
University of Birmingham |
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/
... The original paper for this week is here; the handout is here. Some even-more-inchoate-than-usual comments follow. I knew virtually nothing about this debate before the meeting and found the paper very helpful in setting out the landscape. My biggest concern with the main argument is that the authors don’t say enough to rule out a ‘location-general’ reading of utterances like ‘it’s raining’, according to which the semantic content of the utterance is true if and only if it is raining anywhere in the world at the context of utterance. They focus instead on a ‘location-neutral’ reading of the utterance, according to which the semantic content of the utterance is true if and only if it is raining at the context of utterance (forget where it’s raining.) It seems open to reject this location-neutral sense altogether, recognise only the location-general sense, and then use the location-general sense to analyse all of the propositions which C ... (read more)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/935
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| 2009-05-15 | |
|
Alastair Wilson
University of Birmingham |
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/
... The original paper for this week is here; the handout is here. Some even-more-inchoate-than-usual comments follow. I knew virtually nothing about this debate before the meeting and found the paper very helpful in setting out the landscape. My biggest concern with the main argument is that the authors don’t say enough to rule out a ‘location-general’ reading of utterances like ‘it’s raining’, according to which the semantic content of the utterance is true if and only if it is raining anywhere in the world at the context of utterance. They focus instead on a ‘location-neutral’ reading of the utterance, according to which the semantic content of the utterance is true if and only if it is raining at the context of utterance (forget where it’s raining.) It seems open to reject this location-neutral sense altogether, recognise only the location-general sense, and then use the location-general sense to analyse all of the propositions which C ... (read more)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/934
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