Abstract

Philosophers of language standardly accept the semantic compositionality principle : a satisfactory theory of meaning for a natural language must show how the meaning of each sentence of the language depends on the meanings of its parts. The standard argument for CP is that if we do not show how the meanings of sentences of a natural language depend on the meanings of their parts, we will be unable to account for the fact that competent speakers of natural languages are able to understand an indefinite number of sentences they have not previously encountered. ;In what sense does this standard line of reasoning show that the meanings of sentences depend on the meanings of their parts? There are two very different kinds of compositional dependence which are discussed, but not always clearly distinguished, in the literature. There is the weak compositional dependence of the meaning of a sentence S, according to which the relationship between the fact that S means M, as used in a particular population, and the fact that S has a compositional structure is only a contingent one: S might have meant M even if it were not compositionally structured. And there is the strong compositional dependence of the meaning of S, according to which the fact that S has a compositional structure is a necessary condition for its having the meaning that it does. I show that the standard argument for CP can only establish that the meanings of sentences of natural languages are weakly compositionally dependent. ;I argue that the meanings of many natural language sentences are strongly compositionally dependent. My argument is based on reflections about radical interpretation. The central idea is that a necessary condition for the justified attribution of some kinds of contents to a person's utterances is that those utterances are compositionally structured. The point is not just epistemological: the fact that a particular uttered sentence is compositionally structured is in some cases a necessary part of what makes it true that the sentence has the meaning that it does