[Funes] invented a numbering system original with himself [...]. Instead of seven thousand thirteen (7013), he would say, for instance, ‘Máximo Pérez’; instead of seven thousand fourteen (7014), ‘the railroad’; other numbers were ‘Luis Melián Lafinur,’ ‘Olimar,’ ‘sulfur,’ ‘clubs,’ ‘the whale,’ ‘gas,’ ‘a stewpot,’ ‘Napoleon,’ ‘Agustín de Vedia.’ [...] I tried to explain to Funes that his rhapsody of unconnected words was exactly the opposite of a number system. [...] Funes either could not or would not understand me.
(Jorge Luis Borges – Funes, His Memory)
Abstract
It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of ‘pragmatic’ compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a plausible formulation of the view. The major results are threefold. First, a basic distinction that contextualists make between mandatory and optional pragmatic processes needs to be revised. Second, the pragmatic theory can with stand a Davidsonian objection only by rejecting the importance of a distinction between primitive and non-primitive semantic items. Thirdly, however, the theory is now open to a worry about how it should be understood: either the theory consists in a very broad functionalist generalization about communication, which makes it explanatorily inert, or it boils down to a highly particularist view about linguistic meaning. Finally, I argue that Recanati’s notion of ‘occasion meaning’ is problematic and suggest replacing it with the notion of speaker meaning, which is explanatorily more basic.
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Notes
I have changed the formulation of these rules so that the context-subscripts follow the function letters rather than the parentheses. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
Recanati acknowledges that it is hard to pinpoint the difference between optional and mandatory processes (2010, pp. 20–22).
As Recanati points out (3) can also be interpreted such that ‘asleep’ has the metaphorical meaning of ‘quiet’ or ‘silent’.
To see that this way of thinking about compositionality is still alive and kicking, see Lepore and Ludwig (2010).
In terms of Pagin’s (2005, pp. 303–305) helpful distinction: standing meaning is context-sensitive because its output is different in different contexts, but it’s not context-dependent since it itself remains the same in all contexts. Only the output or semantic value of the function determined by standing meaning is context-dependent.
Note that the last two objections, need to be addressed even by Kaplanian theories of indexicals. By which syntactic principle exactly, for instance, does one compose an addressee and a second-person pronoun? But since such theories are more restricted in their scope, they stand a better chance of giving credible answers.
Arguably, it is more accurate to assign meaning-context pairs as inputs to mod, rather than expression-context-pairs. First, as Recanati (2010, p. 41) stresses, modulation is determined by an incompatibility between meanings and contexts. Second, since higher-level modulations such as irony must take outputs of lower-level modulation as inputs, and those outputs are definitely meanings, it seems like mod must take meanings rather than expressions as inputs. It is, for example, the metonymic occasion meaning of (3) that would be intended ironically, not its invariant standing meaning. But, of course, Recanati’s own formulation should be followed here.
(Fodor (1981), pp. 11–14) makes a similar point about functionalist explanations in general. But of course, as Fodor points out, this doesn’t show that all functionalist explanations are vacuous. There must be constraints and these can be given, e.g., by the notion of Turing-computability.
See footnote 9. Pagin (2005, p. 318) discusses this problem for a specific compositional analysis of ‘It rains’: “...to introduce context sensitivity in the composition rule, may be claimed to violate compositionality, the reason being that in compositional semantics, the rules must not be context sensitive.” But he thinks this is both right and wrong. Stanley (2007, p. 34) makes a similar point.
Anglophones correct each other in some cases where ‘literally’ is used, because the expression ‘figuratively’ would have been more appropriate: “My mother literally hangs around the house all day.”—“Is your mother a bat by any chance?” I think this is simply wrong; speakers are not guilty of any error and ‘figuratively’ would just not do the work which it would be intended to do.
I’m ignoring at least one alternative explanation, but it would require a much longer discussion. I have in mind Ruth Millikan’s claim that expression types (or ‘linguistic devices’ in general) have direct proper functions while token expressions may have specific derived proper functions. I hope to address this theory elsewhere. See Millikan (1984, 1989a, b), but also Origgi and Sperber (2000).
Thus I disagree with (King and Stanley (2005), pp. 123–124) when they claim that only contents compose, never characters (or ‘unrelativized semantic values’). They think a theory need not assign characters to sentences since it is sufficient to assign them only to simple expressions. But it seems trivial that once one assigns character to the constituents of a sentence one has already assigned a character to the sentence as a whole (cf. Pagin and Pelletier 2007).
Cf. Heim and Kratzer (1998). Yet it’s important that the argument in this paper doesn’t depend on the idea that composition is (largely) function application. I think more recent ideas about propositions as act types or event types may be more promising—even from the standpoint of compositionality (cf. Hanks 2011; Soames 2010).
Cf. Searle (1978, p. 209): “Barring diachronic changes, special codes, and the like, the meaning of the token is always the same as the meaning of the type.”
A reviewer suggests that the meaning arrived at by the hearer in interpreting an utterance might be construed as the occasion meaning of the utterance. Of course a theory of interpretation needs such an entity, but, in my opinion, it is ill-suited as occasion meaning. Occasion meaning is the correct interpretation of the utterance and it’s supposed to be a property of the actual token uttered. And our theory must allow for the possibility of misunderstanding: the hearer may come up with the wrong interpretation. I don’t see much use in calling wrong interpretations occasion meanings. Neale’s (2005, pp. 179–180) remarks on epistemic asymmetry in communication are relevant here.
Even if we consider an ‘eternalized’ version of (8), such as ‘I had breakfast at 9am, May 24, 2011,’ this will still be the case. But the point is not important for my present argument, since I can concede that full determination is possible in principle. But I’m not sure how interesting this is in light of the fact that people almost never communicate by using such ‘eternalized’ sentences.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Daniel Harris, Stephen Neale, Ben Phillips, Guillermo Del Pinal, participants in the 9th BPPA Masterclass with Recanati in London in 2011, and many anonymous referees, for for all their comments and discussions. Special thanks to François Recanati for helpful conversations and for his comments on an early version of the paper.
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Unnsteinsson, E.G. Compositionality and sandbag semantics. Synthese 191, 3329–3350 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0449-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0449-7