Peter Pagin

This is the second part of a two-part article on compositionality, i.e. the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together. In the first, Pagin and Westerståhl (2010), we provide a general historical background, a formal framework, definitions, and a survey of variants of compositionality. It will be referred to as Part I. Here we discuss arguments for and against the claim that natural languages have a compositional semantics. We also discuss some problem cases, including belief reports, quotation, idioms, and ambiguity.

This paper is an attack on the Dummett-Prawitz view that the principle of bivalence has a crucial double significance, metaphysical and meaning theoretical. On the one hand it is said that holding bivalence valid is what characterizes a realistic view, i.e. a view in metaphysics, and on the other hand it is said that there are meaning theoretical arguments against its acceptability. I argue that these two aspects are incompatible. If the failure of validity of bivalence depends on properties of linguistic meaning, then there are no metaphysical consequences to be drawn. The case for this view is straightforward as long as we are discussing a language different from our own. But it seems that the distinction between failure because of meaning and failure because of reality cannot be applied to our own language, simply because our own language is just what we use to represent reality. I argue that this impression is illusory. In order to draw a conclusion about reality, meaning must be connected with truth in a non-trivial way, and precisely this cannot be done in the language for which the meaning theory itself is correct.

As the expression itself indicates, ‘point of view’ is in the first place applied to spatial locations for visual observation. I can see a certain group of objects from different positions, or points of view. When seen from certain points, a particular object in the group is hidden behind others, from other points it isn’t. It is still the same group of objects, so in one sense I see the same thing. In another sense, I don’t see the same thing, for I see different parts, sides or aspects of that same group of objects. My visual impression is different as well, unless perfect symmetry of the group makes the difference in perspective phenomenologically unnoticeable.

In his recent paper ‘Analyticity: An Unfinished Business in Possible-World Semantics’ (Rabinowicz 2006), Wlodek Rabinowicz takes on the task of providing a satisfactory definition of analyticity in the framework of possible-worlds semantics. As usual, what Wlodek proposes is technically well-motivated and very elegant. Moreover, his proposal does deliver an interesting analytic/synthetic distinction when applied to sentences with natural kind terms. However, the longer we thought and talked about it, the more questions we had, questions of both philosophical and technical nature. Hence the idea of this little paper – for how better to honor a philosopher than by trying very hard to criticize him? After quickly running over some background in possible worlds semantics and setting out Wlodek's proposal against that background, we shall bring up and discuss our questions in sections 3 – 5. In the final section, we shall also make a stab at a different solution to the problem, making use of our own earlier idea of relational modality.

In earlier work (Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2006. Proper names and relational modality. Linguistics & Philosophy 29: 507–35; Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2008. Relational modality. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17: 307–22), we developed a semantics for (metaphysical) modal operators that accommodates Kripkean intuitions about proper names in modal contexts even if names are not rigid designators. Graeme Forbes (2011. The problem of factives for sense theories. Analysis 71: 654–62.) criticizes our proposal. He argues that our semantics predicts readings for certain natural language sentences which these simply do not have. These sentences contain mixed contexts involving factive attitude verbs. We argue that the readings our semantics predicts do indeed exist, even if it might take a little work to bring them out. Moreover, denying their existence would have some rather unattractive consequences

Peter Pagin Is the principle of semantic compositionality compatible with the principle of semantic holism? The question is of interest, since both principles have a lot that speaks for them, and since they do seem to be in conflict. The view that natural languages have compositional structure is almost unavoidable, since linguistic communication by means of new combinations of words would be virtually incomprehensible otherwise. And holism too seems generally plausible, since the meaning of an expression is directly connected with the way that expression interacts with other.

In Michael Dummett’s manifestability challenge to truth conditional semantics, it is argued that the meaning of sentence cannot be its truth conditions, for then a speaker’s knowledge of the meaning would not in all cases be manifestable. In those cases, the speaker would not know how to find out whether the truth conditions are satisfied or not. By contrast, knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence would pass the manifestability test, since a speaker is supposed always to be capable of deciding whether or not a given object is a proof of a given sentence. There is a problem for the positive part, however, for there is no guarantee that a compositional proof-theoretic semantics in all cases provides knowledge sufficient for recognizing any proof of a provable sentence for which the meaning is given. In those cases, the speaker need not know how to find out whether a given object is a proof of the sentence. Hence, if knowledge of meaning is required to be manifestable, there is no guarantee in general is compositionally specifiable.

This article focuses on the relevance of computational complexity for cognition. The syntactic items may be expressions that are surface strings. But in general, strings are syntactically ambiguous in that they can be generated in more than one way from atomic expressions and operations. The semantic function must take disambiguated items as arguments. When expressions are ambiguous, expressions cannot be the arguments. Instead, it is common to take the arguments to be terms, whose surface syntax reflects the derivation of the string. The semantic function differs in one other important respect from an arithmetic function, since it maps entities between domains, from a syntactic to an ontic or conceptual domain of meanings. Compositionality helps to explain the rate of success in linguistic communication when the sentence used or the content communicated is new.

Tänk dig att du kommit som Robinson Crusoe till en nästan öde ö, dvs till en ö du trodde var öde till dess att du träffade Fredag. Fredag förefaller tala ett språk, men det är helt olikt varje språk du hittills stött på. Du bestämmer dig efter ett tag för att försöka lära dig det. Det förefaller gå bra. Av allt att döma får du god kontakt med Fredag. Ni delar med er av mat till varandra. Ni lyckas uppfatta en del av varandras åtbörder: pekgester, uttryck för uppskattning, en anmodan att komma eller gå, och annat. På grundval av detta lyckas du, eller åtminstone förefaller det så, inleda ett samarbete med Fredag ifråga om att skaffa fram mat. Fredag börjar till och med hjälpa dig att bygga en inhägnad för några höns ni fångat. Under tiden detta pågår börjar du försöka använda en del ord eller andra uttryck du hört Fredag yttra. Du har t.ex. hört honom ibland yttra "ptocha" när ni pekat ut hönsfåglar för varandra, och försöker göra detsamma själv. Några gånger ler han uppmuntrande men andra gånger brummar han misstroget och gör en huvudrörelse som du börjat uppfatta som nekande. Du förstår först inte varför. Senare märker du att en fågel du pekat ut när Fredag gjort den nekande rörelsen plötsligt fäller ut vingarna och flyger ut ur inhägnaden. Samma sak händer igen. Och efter ett tag börjar du märka små skillnader i färg, ifråga om näbbens storlek och klornas längd, så att du själv kan skilja mellan fåglar som flyger iväg och fåglar som inte gör det. Du drar slutsatsen att "ptocha" står för den art av hönsliknande fåglar som har flygförmåga. Den här processen fortsätter. Du identifierar verb och adjektiv, pronomen, prepositioner och räkneord, liksom logiska partiklar som (Fredags motsvarigheter till) "och", "eller", "inte", "om..., så...". Du kan sätta ihop hela meningar som Fredag själv inte yttrat, men som består av delar som han yttrat..

The term ‘meaning holism’ has been used for a number of more or less closely interrelated ideas. According to one common view, meaning holism is the thesis that what a linguistic expression means depends on its relations to many or all other expressions within the same totality. Sometimes these relations are called ‘conceptual’ or ‘inferential’. A related idea is that what an expression means depends, mutually, on the meaning of the other expressions in the totality, or alternatively on some semantic property of this totality itself. The totality in question may be the language to which the expressions belong, or a theory formulation in that language.

Naive speakers find some logical contradictions acceptable, specifically borderline contradictions involving vague predicates such as Joe is and isn’t tall. In a recent paper, Cobreros et al. (J Philos Logic, 2012) suggest a pragmatic account of the acceptability of borderline contradictions. We show, however, that the pragmatic account predicts the wrong truth conditions for some examples with disjunction. As a remedy, we propose a semantic analysis instead. The analysis is close to a variant of fuzzy logic, but conjunction and disjunction are interpreted as intensional operators

Treating the principle of charity as a non-empirical, foundational principle leads to insoluble problems of justification. I suggest instead treating semantic properties realistically, and semantic terms as theoretical terms. This allows us to apply ordinary scientific reasoning in meta-semantics. In particular, we can appeal to widespread verbal agreement as an empirical phenomenon, and we can make use of probabilistic reasoning as well as appeal to theoretical simplicity for reaching the conclusion that there is a high rate of agreement in belief between speakers who have a high rate of verbal agreement. Although this does not by itself imply that the beliefs agreed upon are generally true, it does imply that any single speaker who is party to such a verbal agreement is justified in taking the other speakers to have mostly true beliefs. She is so justified because of the fact that it is incoherent to take her own beliefs not to be mostly true. Indirectly, this justifies a version of the principle of charity as an empirically correct principle.

This is the first part of a two-part article on semantic compositionality, that is, the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together. Here we provide a brief historical background, a formal framework for syntax and semantics, precise definitions, and a survey of variants of compositionality. Stronger and weaker forms are distinguished, as well as generalized forms that cover extra-linguistic context dependence as well as linguistic context dependence. In the second article, we survey arguments for and arguments against the claim that natural languages are compositional, and consider some problem cases. It will be referred to as Part II.

Can there be rules of language which serve both to determine meaning and to guide speakers in ordinary linguistic usage, i.e., in the production of speech acts? We argue that the answer is no. We take the guiding function of rules to be the function of serving as reasons for actions, and the question of guidance is then considered within the framework of practical reasoning. It turns out that those rules that can serve as reasons for linguistic utterances cannot be considered as normative or meaning determining. Acceptance of such a rule is simply equivalent to a belief about meaning, and does not even presuppose that meaning is determined by rules. Rules that can determine meaning, on the other hand, i.e., rules that can be regarded as constitutive of meaning, are not capable of guiding speakers in the ordinary performance of speech acts

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.

Starting from the familiar observation that no straightforward treatment of pure quotation can be compositional in the standard (homomorphism) sense, we introduce general compositionality, which can be described as compositionality that takes linguistic context into account. A formal notion of linguistic context type is developed, allowing the context type of a complex expression to be distinct from those of its constituents. We formulate natural conditions under which an ordinary meaning assignment can be non-trivially extended to one that is sensitive to context types and satisfies general compositionality. As our main example we work out a Fregean treatment of pure quotation, but we also indicate that the method applies to other kinds of context, e.g. intensional contexts

Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher–order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism during the past 15 years provides strong evidence for the existence of such speakers. Some persons with autism have linguistic abilities that qualify them as speakers, but manifest a severely impaired capacity to understand what it is to have beliefs.