RESULTADOS Y DISCUSIÓN
16. DETERMINACIÓN DE LÍPIDOS
Suppose then that the semanticist has conceded that my case against the rst horn is sound; suppose she has granted that accepting Chom- sky’s notion of grammatical nonsense and saying that we do not un- derstand it is not a viable option for her position. Still, the semanticist will want to resist my conclusion that PoC providesnoexplanation of CC.
e obvious (and I think theonly) way to do so is to say that wedo understand nonsense (that nonsense is indeed meaningful), and that
Let me be brutally Nietzschean: so-called normal sentences are nonsense about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are.
Here’s another casualty of nonsense: Horwich’s (1998: 154) claim that the compositional ma-
chinery is insensitive to the precise constitution of the lexical properties.
e precise nature of that incompatibility depends on the speci c formulation of the three
What Compositionality Could Not Be | accordingly our understandingisunbound (just as CC says) and best (only) explained by the compositionality assumption.
Given EPU and UaKTC, to say that we understand NS commits the semanticist to saying that we know their meaning (by EPU), that is, that we know their truth-conditions (by UaKTC). And that seems to encase the representationalist leanings of semanticism quite aptly (knowing the meaning of a sentence is knowing the representational claim it makes) and in full generality.
Consider now a much-discussed case of semantic aberrancy: ) Max cut the sun
In introducing the example, Searle commented that it poses a prob- lem to compositional theories because although we understand the single words, we don’t understand the sentence as a whole, and hence we do not really know what the truth conditions determined by the meaning of the sentence are supposed to be like.
Mirroring Chomsky’s remarks, Searle argued that without the pro- vision of a context, () all by itself does not provide us with an inter- pretation (in logic-speak, we would say there isno intended modelfor it).
On Searle’s view, there is such a thing as the literal meaning of a sen- tence, but it only determines truth conditions against “a set of back- ground assumptions and practices” (p. ). Two further claims by Searle are of interest to us: that what conditions a sentence deter- mines is always relative to a given set of assumptions and practices (what he calls ‘the background’), and that the background is not part
Could we say that the understanding of the complex ispreciselya function of the understanding
of the atoms? e idea is: any dark area in our understanding of the atoms will transfer to our understanding of the complex—e.g. we do notfullyunderstand ‘green’ until wehavemade sense of ‘green ideas’. Compositionality is thus fully preserved. I cannot see how this could solve our difficulty though, for it would become unclear how bottom-up compositionality could explain CC. PoC would therefore be anex post factoprinciple as far as linguistic understanding goes. Williamson (2003b, 2007) has argued that understanding is a very complex capacity that cannot be reduced to a uniquely speci ed set of abilities. Quite. But this is unwelcome news for the semanticist. Another option is to make recourse to Burge’s (2005: 56) notion of incomplete understanding (see also Ziff 1972: 5, Higginbotham 1989: 156 and Buekens 2005: 71). We could then say that we understand NS only partially. e difficulty here would be that with nonsense there seems to be nothingfurther
to understand. e understanding isex hypothesiterminally incomplete.
In fact, it seems a widely assumed claim: meaninglessness is oen de ned in terms of lack of
representational power. See e.g. Boghossian (2001: 33) for just one example.
Searle (1980: 225).
Strictly speaking, understanding breaks down at the stage in the derivation where the complex
predicate ‘cut the sun’ is formed.
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of the semantic content of the sentence.
I think that Searle’s move (which I largely endorse) should be seen as an attack on the Myth of the Given in its linguistic form, an attack on the idea, that is,that sentences could self-intimate their meanings, that, as Chomsky put it, they(can and do) impose an interpretation on us.
As it happens, the semanticist reply has for the most part con- centrated on arguing that Searle and his followers con ate evaluat- ing sentences with understanding what they say, that the con ation obliterates a fundamental distinction between knowledge of truth- conditions and knowledge of whether those conditions are satis- ed. Knowledge of meaning is knowledge of (and hence under- standing of) truth-conditions only, andthatknowledge does not have to include knowledge of their veri cation procedure, we are told.
To require more than that, the semanticist argues, is “to fall prey to a kind of creeping Veri cationism.” On this line of response, the semanticist is happy to bite the bullet and claim that in a case like () it is not clear “that knowledge of the meanings of the parts of the sentence and their mode of composition does fail to add up to knowledge of the condition under which […] an utterance [of ()] would be true.” Competent speakers, that is, will know that () is
Note how the very way in which Chomsky puts itviolates selectional restrictions! Sentences,
inanimate objects,imposinginterpretations on sentient subjects? Whoever heard of such deviancy! For his part, Searle (1980: 231 and 1983a) includes intentionality within the scope of his argu- ment: contextual dependency is ineliminable for content in general, not just semantic content. I agree entirely. I depart from him in denying that the background can play thesolerole of meaning- determiner. Frame semantics in the Fillmore tradition and meaning-constructivism more gener- ally include further factors, such as speakers’ ‘creative’ input inselectinginterpretations. See for instance Coulson (2001: 81). One could of course include speakers’ input in the background, but then Schiffer’s (2003: 122) objection against the inclusion of intentions in semantic clauses kicks in (intentions makeeverything elsein the clauses redundant).
According to Recanati (2004a: 92, fn. 22), appeal to this distinction seems to originate with
Marcelo Dascal in a 1981 paper.
Borg (2004: 238). e same accusation is made in Cappelen and Lepore (2005b: 57). Jackson
(1998: 74) argues that “understanding does not require knowing the proposition expressed”. His main thought (p. 72, fn. 26) seems to be that, in Stalnaker’s terminology, “understanding requires knowing the propositional concept associated with a sentence, though not necessarily the propo- sition expressed” or, in Kaplan’s terminology, “understanding requires knowing character but not necessarily content.” I think this move, though obvious, is hopeless when applied to NS, for it is utterly obscure how we could properly be said to know a function-like entity (character) that sup- posedlydeterminesa value-at-a-point-of-evaluation (content) without knowing (even in principle) what that value is (and how wecouldcalculate it)—analogies with the classic cases (“He’s a ne fellow”) or the Ackermann function would not help:paceLasersohn (2009), the meaning function
mustbe effectively computable byus.
What Compositionality Could Not Be | true iff Max cut the sun.
Emma Borg is a prominent defender of this strategy and her key de- fensive move is the claim that semantic theories provideliberaltruth conditions—conditions, that is, that unlike their more strict Fregean counterparts “admit satisfaction by a range of more speci c states of affairs.”
Grasp of meaning, on her view, is thus grasp of liberal, rather than robustly Fregean, truth-conditions. And we may grasp a condition without being in a position to grasp what ‘more speci c state of affair’ is at play in a given context.
Once this concession is on the table, it is open to the pragmaticist to reply that it is not at all clearwhat exactlyknowledgeof a condition that we are apparently in no position to evaluate can amount to.
As Travis never tires of pointing out, the traditional semantic project claims to be in the business of establishing a uniquely deter- mined connection between meaning and truth and yet we are now told by the semanticist that the one thing T-theorems cannot do is give conditions for thetruthof sentence-tokens, but can at most in- dicate a (possibly vague) set of such conditions. e fact is, embracing liberal truth-conditions amounts to jettisoning MDP outright.
Unhappily for her, she adds: “that is, just in case [Max] stands inthecutting relation to the
sun” (my emphasis). Unhappily, for it is completely unclear whatthatrelation would amount to. Similarly, Buekens (2005: 71) has argued that “it does not follow from the fact that we do not see in what kind of circumstance a sentence could apply - i.e. could be used as a true sentence - that we do not understand the sentence”. So much for the semanticist’s core principle that meaning and truth team up to establish auniqueconnection between sentence-in-context and world and that knowledge of meaning is knowledge of that uniquely identi ed representational claim. e difficulty for the semanticist is familiar from the discussion in Evans and McDowell (1976) and LePore (1986a): what is required for language mastery is not knowledge of the truth of the meaning- conferring bi-conditionals (knowledge-that), but rather knowledge of the truth of the R.H. side (knowledge-what). See Salmon (2001) for further discussion. Devitt (1997: 271) defends a rather strange conception of knowledge-what.
Borg (2004: 230). I think the defence of semanticism in Predelli (2004, 2005) is vulnerable
precisely along the same lines discussed in the text.
Borg’s position could be seen as a version of what Levinson (2000: 240-41) has called ‘semantic
retreat’, namely an impoverished view of semantics whereby all that the compositional machinery outputs is relatively schematic logical forms. On this view, most interpretive matters are le to pragmatics.
See the essays in Travis (2008). e rst 11 pages of Travis (2006a) will do as an introduction. I doubt it would be much help to do as Atlas (2007: 218) suggests (possibly tongue-in-cheek)
and maintain that ‘determine’ in MDP is best understood as ‘constrain’ (see also Soames (2005a: 274) for a similar suggestion). at however is something that most pragmaticist would be only too happy to grant (see also the discussion in Clapp (2007a,b) and Borg’s (2010) reply). e problem for the semanticist is that liberal truth-conditions are both too strong and too weak: they are too strong in that they require that a sentence determine auniquesuch set; and they are too weak in
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Furthermore, it is also unclear why (and how) appealing to the dis- tinction between knowledge of truth-conditions and knowledge of veri cation methods would help.
Unless I knowwhichcondition Max has to satisfy for () to be true, I’m in no position to evaluatewhetherhe’s actually done so. at is, until we are told what cutting the sun amounts to, we are not in a position to understand not just what would count as satisfying that condition, but also what that conditionis,what it isthat we are sup- posed tocognize when we reach the end of our compositionally-led meaning computation for the sentence.
More generally, linguistic competence is competence in using pieces of linguistic lore (deploying them, reacting to them). A model of that competence that does not provide clear ‘instructions for use’ looks like a miserable failure, as models go. And although knowing a condition and knowing that it is satis ed are two different things, we cannot know a condition without knowing what would count as satisfying it; that is, there’s no giving a condition without stating its applicability conditions.
For illustration, consider the case of a speaker put in front of a strik- ingly novel scenario. Something’s happening to the sun; Max, the mad scientist, is doing something to it. Does that count as cutting the sun?
On Borg’s account, it is the semantics that provides the material
thatwhichspeci c condition applies is le unspeci ed—see Borg (2004: 245).
e distinction between knowing-what and knowing-whether is well present even to a justi-
cationist such as Dummett (2006: 48-9). By the semanticist’s own lights, however, grasp of sense is rst and foremost grasp of knowing-what.
e semanticist will insist we must not con ate competence with performance, meaning with
use—this is in effect the charge made in Katz (1981) against Searle (1980). But the point remains that if the semanticist insists on too strong a separation between competence and performance, most of her claims about the (supposedlyexplanatory) role of the competence-modelling structure will not be justi ed.
Could we say that a competent language user will know one thing for sure, namely, that there
are no ‘safe’ conditions for the use of nonsensical sentences? ere’s a problem with this reply: for it seems to differentiate between knowledgeofmeaning for the standard cases and, in aberrant cases, knowledgethatmeaningfulness is defective.
To make the problem for Borg’s position even more perspicuous, consider the case of vague-
ness. As Wittgenstein (1932-35/2001: I.III.41 p. 83) notes, it is a criterion for one’s being in a po- sition to understand the expression ‘red’ that one be able to pick red objects on demand (if one cannot, then one doesn’t know thesemanticsfor ‘red’; onedoesn’t understand what one is talking about). And similarly for ‘cut the sun’. Incidentally, the substance of my objection to Borg is pretty much aligned with Wright’s (2002a: 97-8, fn. 2) against epistemicism about vagueness.
Here and elsewhere, use of ‘count-as’-language should not be taken as strictly weaker than use
What Compositionality Could Not Be | for a full understanding of the expression (recall: Borg states the re- quirement as abi-conditional!); what counts as cutting the sun in this speci c (and unprecedented) case is supposedlyalreadypart of the set of liberal truth-conditions.
is, I contend, seems hardly plausible. e intuition (if not the evidence) seems to be, rather, that a speakerin a genuinely novel case would have no clue from the semantics as to whether the predicate does or does not apply to the case.
ere is a possible retort here, and one that Borg (: , fn. ) has made. We could say that e.g. the precise way in which one judges whether or not a certain event counts as a token of sun-cutting is a matter ofworldlyknowledge, rather than purely linguistic knowledge (and thus it does not belong to linguistic semantics proper).
e move is inadvisable, however. For it consigns the semanticist to the jaws of yet another dilemma:
SD IV: If we could neatly divide the worldly and linguistic