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Metalinguistic disputes, semantic decomposition, and externalism

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Abstract

In componential analysis, word meanings are (partly) decomposed into other meanings, and semantic and syntactic markers. Although a theory of word meaning based on such semantic decompositions remains compatible with the linguistic labor division thesis, it is not compatible with Kripke/Putnam-style indexical externalism. Instead of abandoning indexical externalism, a Separation Thesis is defended according to which lexical meaning need not enter the truth-conditional content of an utterance. Lexical meaning reflects beliefs about word meaning shared in a speaker community, and these may rest on possibly erroneous world-level theories. It is argued that this type of lexical meaning is indispensable for explaining word composition processes and the rationality of metalinguistic disputes.

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Notes

  1. See, for instance, Plunkett and Sundell (2013), Plunkett (2015), Plunkett and Sundell (2019) versus Cappelen (2018).

  2. Examples in this article primarily concern noun meaning but occasionally other syntactic categories such as verbs also play a role. The term expression is used to encompass all of these. Occasionally, I will also use word and term because these have become customary in the literature about metalinguistic negotiation. Italic font is used for mentioning expressions.

  3. Cf. Pericliev (2013) for a refined version of this type of analysis for Bulgarian kinship terms.

  4. See Murphy (2010) for a comparison between Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff), the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky), and NSM Theory (Wierzbicka, Goddard).

  5. See Plunkett and Sundell (2013, p. 2; pp. 13–14), cf. Barker (2002).

  6. See Plunkett and Sundell (2013, pp. 20–21).

  7. See Putnam (1975, pp. 139–144).

  8. \(\hbox {Oscar}_{1}\) consists mostly of \(\hbox {H}_{2}\mathrm{O}\) and \(\hbox {Oscar}_{2}\) mostly of XYZ, and Putnam presumes that this fact plays no substantial role in a functional description of their psychological states. I believe this to be correct if one buys into the other premises of the thought experiment, but it is worth noting that the existence of Twin Earth is physically impossible according to our best current knowledge.

  9. In more elaborate approaches such as Prototype Theory of Rosch (1983), properties are ordered according to how close they are to a prototypical exemplary. Conceptual Spaces of Gärdenfors (2000) go even further and model concepts as regions in metric space, allowing for distance measures between them.

  10. This does not hold for partially descriptive proper names. See Soames (2002) for an account of these compatible with Kripke (1972).

  11. See Moore (1903, Sects. 13–14).

  12. The following point does not concern atomist internalism of Fodor (1975, 1987). Fodor’s approach has been criticized elsewhere and not many internalists nowadays consider themselves atomists, given that the main attraction of semantic internalism is precisely that it fares well with the decomposition thesis.

  13. See Culler (1976, pp. 23–24).

  14. As Montague (1974b) showed in contrast to the use of logic IL in Montague (1974a), we do not have to translate to a logic since the same mathematical constraints can also be expressed by directly translating from a disambiguated natural language representation to algebraic structures. Cf. Dowty (1979, pp. 29–32).

  15. It becomes relevant in an explicitly modal approach like Ulrike Haas-Spohn’s original PhD thesis (Haas-Spohn, 1994). However, even if natural kind terms like water are rigid with respect to metaphysical modalities, which is questionable, this modeling is still based on the current scientific consensus and water could turn out to be XYZ from an epistemic perspective. This epistemic lack of rigidity may be expressed by diagonalizing content, but it can also simply be expressed by distinguishing metaphysical and epistemic modalities in the first place. A powerful general critique is that metaphysical modalities of the sort presumed by Kripke (1972) are way more problematic and less clear than epistemic and logical modalities. However, this discussion goes beyond the scope of this article.

  16. See Potts (2004, pp. 49–73).

  17. See Dahl and Fraurud (1996).

  18. See Levinson (1983, pp. 130–132).

  19. See Rast (2020) for a more in-depth analysis of how theory-based disagreement relates to metalinguistic disputes.

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Acknowledgements

Work on this article was conducted under contract DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0002 and project UIDB/00183/2020 with funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

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    Erich Rast

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Rast, E. Metalinguistic disputes, semantic decomposition, and externalism. Linguist and Philos 46, 65–85 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-022-09357-y

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