Ernie LePore

We give an overview of the arguments of our book Imagination and Convention, and explain how ideas from the book continue to inform our ongoing work. One theme is the challenge of fully accounting for the linguistic rules that guide interpretation. By attending to principles of discourse coherence and the many aspects of meaning that are linguistically encoded but are not truth conditional in nature, we get a much more constrained picture of context sensitivity in language than philosophers have typically assumed. Another theme is the heterogeneous nature of interpretive processes, as illustrated by the distinctive interpretive profile of metaphorical and poetic language. Such effects remind us that the suggestions and connotations of an utterance are often best explained in terms of the hearer’s experiential engagement with language, without appeal to propositional content that the speaker somehow signals either semantically or pragmatically.

A once commonplace view is that only a semantic theory that interprets sentences of a language according to what their utterances intuitively say can be correct. The rationale is that only by requiring a tight connection between what a sentence means and what its users intuitively say can we explain why, normally, those linguistically competent with a language upon hearing its sentences uttered can discern what they say. More precisely, this approach ties the semantic content of a sentence to intuitions about “says that” reports. Cappelen and Lepore forcefully argued against this approach. But given their criticism, what constraints are there on a correct assignment of semantic conent to sentences of a language? Two choices are available regard: either give up the strategy of identifying semantic content by looking at indirect speech reports, or, conclude that the intuition about the connection between meaning and intuitions about indirect reports is basically on the right track, but needs to be further constrained. We will explore both strategies and argue that ultimately we should reject the intuitions about indirect reports as tests on semantic theory, and propose a more direct strategy for identifying semantic content.

This chapter presents an overview of Lewis's theory of convention, and explores its implications for linguistic theory, and especially for problems at the interface of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. It discusses Lewis's understanding of coordination problems, emphasizing how coordination allows for a uniform characterization of practical activity and of signaling in communication. The chapter introduces Lewis's account of convention and shows how he uses it to make sense of the idea that a linguistic expression can come to be associated with its meaning by a convention. Lewis's account has come in for a lot of criticism. The chapter closes in by addressing some of the key difficulties in thinking of meaning as conventional in Lewis's sense. It highlights that Lewis's contribution is achieved through ideas whose influence has only increased over time.

Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have produced a series of original and controversial essays on issues relating to compositionality in language and mind; they have now revised them all for publication together in this volume. Compositionality is the following aspect of a system of representation: the complex symbols in the system inherit their syntactic and semantic properties from the primitive symbols of the system. Fodor and Lepore argue that compositionality determines what view we must take of the nature of concepts. Anyone trying to figure out how language and mind work must take account of this challenging work by two leading figures in the field.

We’re lucky in that many (so far about twenty)1 extremely able philosophers have read and commented on our work in print. A slightly discouraging fact is that all these commentators seem to think we are completely, utterly mistaken. On the positive side: Our critics seem to disagree about what we’re completely wrong about. On the one hand, radical contextualists (e.g. Travis) find our objections against them off the mark, but our objections to moderate contextualism dead-on. On the other hand, the moderate contextualists (e.g. Szabo) think that our objections against them fail, but our objections to radical contextualism are strong (Szabo, concludes that we ‘present strong arguments against radical contextualism, but only a weak case against moderate contextualism’). This means we’ve got our work cut out for us—defending the middle ground from every which way— something we are more than pleased to do.

This book is an examination of the foundations and applications of the program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages introduced in 1967 by Donald Davidson in his classic paper “Truth and Meaning.” This is the second of two books on Donald Davidson’s central philosophical project. The first, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), dealt with the basic framework of Davidson’s truth-theoretic approach to providing a meaning theory for a natural language, and then with his development of his general project in the philosophy of language and theory of meaning by way of the analysis of the empirical confirmation of a meaning theory for a speaker, from the stance of the radial interpreter, that is, the interpreter who starts out without any detailed knowledge of the speakers’ meanings or attitudes. This book turns to the development of details of Davidson’s semantic program, specifically, the pursuit of the project of providing a compositional semantic theory for natural languages by making strategic use of an appropriately adapted Tarski-style axiomatic truth theory. Such a theory aims to provide a specification of the truth conditions of any felicitous utterance of a natural language sentence which serves to interpret it, and exhibits in the proof of the theorem that gives the truth conditions the compositional structure of the sentence and how its truth depends on its context of utterance. The book develops the basic framework, applies it to quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, simple tenses of state and event verbs, temporal adverbs and quantifiers, tense in sentential complements and perfect tenses, opaque contexts, especially indirect discourse and attitude sentences, non-declarative sentences, semantic structure and logical form, and discusses the relation of the framework the metaphysics of truth.

The idea that quotidian, middle-level concepts typically have internal structure -- definitional, statistical, or whatever -- plays a central role in practically every current approach to cognition. Correspondingly, the idea that words that express quotidian, middle-level concepts have complex representations "at the semantic level" is recurrent in linguistics; it's the defining thesis of what is often called "lexical semantics," and it unites the generative and interpretive traditions of grammatical analysis. Recently, Hale and Keyser (1993) have provided a budget of sophisticated and persuasive arguments for the claim that `denominal' verbs are typically derived from phrases containing the corresponding nouns: `singvtr' is supposed to come from something like DO A SONG; `saddlevtr' is supposed to come from something like PUT A SADDLE ON; `shelvevtr' is supposed to come from something like PUT ON A SHELF, and so forth.1 We think these are among the most persuasive arguments for lexical decomposition in the linguistics literature. Still, this paper is going to claim that they are finally unconvincing. In Part 1, we will show that there are quite serious arguments of a familiar kind against the decompositional analyses that Hale and Keyser (henceforth, HK) propose; in Part 2 we'll show that the arguments that HK offer in favor of their analyses are flawed.

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore show that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our metalinguistic practices. In Part II, the authors examine and reject the four leading metalinguistic theories, and offer a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance.