Equipo para cromatografía líquida de alta resolución (HPLC)

As I said, Husserl, apart from a programmatic appeal to laws of mean- ing (that were le unspeci ed) and to some mereological principles (that suggested a meaning-containment view), didn’t say much about justi cation. _{At any rate, the available options seem fairly clear} (and in one form or another they form the basis for most treatments of nonsense).

Firstly, we could appeal to ontology; we could think, that is, that ob- jects come naturally typed. e correct semantic categories, then, are those that respect (or approximate more closely) the natural ones. e view is not unattractive, but let me register the following con- cerns: i) it is not clear that it can succeed in justifying CC, since we canalwaysraise doubts about theactualchoice of categories (in fact, the semantic categories themselveshavechanged over time and words have shied across categories);_{ii)the view would still failrationally} to justify the transition from observed (or presumed) ontological cat- egories to their permanent character with respect to unobserved cases (we can always attack the PoC solution to EP from a Humean perspec- tive, that is, for it is unclear that we canrationallyread off all future use fromanyfeature that we could detect in the building-blocks). A second strategy would appeal to imagination. _{Nonsense is} inconceivable, on this diagnosis, and hence we justify the choice

_{Husserl (1900-01/2001:Investigation III) draws an ontological distinction between dependent}

and independent objects which has a precise correlate in the one between dependent and indepen- dent meanings drawn inInvestigation IV. Husserl (1900-01/2001: 74) also gives transcendental reasons for assuminga priorilaws of meaning that would avoid the dangers of psychologism (recall that theInvestigationsare largely a reaction to Frege’s anti-psychologist critique of Husserl’s early work in the philosophy of mathematics). e account however remains rather short on detail.

_{Perhaps this is David Lewis’ view, perhaps not. It is a view that stands behind every type-}

theoretic approach to NL semantics, for obvious reasons. A particularly strong statement of the view by Martin Joos is quoted in Aarts (2007: 18). Surprisingly, at least to me, the view is endorsed even within pragmaticist frameworks that adopt type coercion techniques to “reinterpret” the (alleged) selectional constraints “forced” by verbs (e.g. Egg 2005: viii).

_{On language change phenomena, see Chamberset al.(2002), Brinton and Traugott (2005),}

Traugott and Dasher (2005), Eckardt (2006) and Cooper and Kempson (2008). e historical in- teraction between grammaticalisation processes and compositionality is highly instructive.

_{ere are very general worries in this area, of the kind raised by the already mentioned Austin}

and Putnam, as well as e.g. Field (1973). I think it would be fairly easy to show that arguments about the indeterminacy of theoretical terms can easily be generalised to most (all) terms in the language. But unlike Field (1973: 193), I don’t think this is without consequence for standard conceptions of the objectivity of meaning. Speci cally, the claim that semantic categories could ever be taken to be absolutely xed in the manner required by PoCU would become hard to sustain.

_{An account of this kind is discussed (but dismissed) in Russell’s (1940: 230). His preferred}

What Compositionality Could Not Be |  of syntactico-semantic categories by aligning them with categorial restrictions on thoughts. Accordingly, meaningfulness is taken to be co-extensive with thinkability, while grammaticality outstrips both. Again, the obvious concerns with this strategy relate to fa- miliar ones about taking conceivability as a general guide to possi- bility, _{as well as to the fairly similar concerns in connection with,} say, analyticity (with the spectre of the analogue of non-Euclidean ge- ometries looming in the background). We would therefore still lack an epistemic guarantee that our choice of categories is appropriately (and timelessly) anchored.

irdly, we could adopt a hybrid strategy incorporating strands from the rst two proposals. at is, we could say that NS are not as- sessable againstanypossible situation/scenario: the representational claim they (appear) to make is (literally)incomparable—there isnoth- ing (no thing, however construed) quite like whatthey say there is (their content, presumably, is however not ineffable, for the kind of nonsense we are interested in is of the kind that respects overt grammaticality; furthermore, the claim made by NS is determinate enough for us to conclude nothing could match it). It’s not, however, that NS are necessarily false: rather, they are simply noteligible for confrontation with reality (or with the standards regulating our

_{“What cannot be thought, cannot be, what cannot be, cannot be thought”—Husserl (1900-}

01/2001: 11). In discussing tonk, Boghossian (2001: 32) endorses (at least) the latter direction. He also takes meaningfulness to require the existence of a determinate way the world could be.

_{See Gendler and Hawthorne (2002).}

_{In conversation (and in that order), Andreas Stokke, Hartry Field and Derek Ball have sug-}

gested that they are. e proposal seems to be that nonsensequarepresentational failure iscounter- sense, or false in virtue of meaning, as Quine (1960: 229) put it. To this I have two retorts: rst, as Russell (1905: 484) grumbled against Frege’s treatment of empty terms, I say that this would give no “exact analysis of the matter” (see Kripke 2005: 1017 for discussion). e sense in which NS are necessarily false (if they are so) is clearly different from the sense in which ‘2 is not a prime number’ is necessarily false. And we want our semantics toexplainthat difference (to paraphrase Davidson (1969: 49), we want to knowhow NS come to befalse-in-virtue-of-meaning). Which in all likelihood would bring us back to a category-mistake analysis. Secondly, the proposal faces a serious problem with negation. To see why, compare the pairs ‘Carnap is interested in metaphysics’ and ‘Carnap is not interested in metaphysics’. vs. ‘e number 3 is interested in metaphysics’ and ‘e number 3 is not interested in metaphysics’. e sentences in the rst pair come out as contra- dictories, those in the second as contraries. But on this proposal their logical form is the same. And to say that we need external negation for the second pair whereas clearly there is no need for that in the rst pair would represent a breach of PoC with nosyntacticjusti cation (why should negation behave differently when embedded in NS?). Quine (1960: 182; 229) is a prominent example of this (ill-fated) strategy. See Lambert (1968), Routley (1969), Haack (1971), omason (1972), Brady and Routley (1973), Bergmann (1977) for discussion. It seems clear thatifwe think thereisa class of NS we need a three-valued semantics and also, as Chomsky (1965: 158) has noted, a nonsense operator that should display sensitivity to an ‘unde ned’ or ‘meaningless’ third value.

 | Chapter 

thought). Nonsense, on this third approach, is thus a failure not just of imagination but ofrepresentationality. It is a case where lan- guage mis res (words fail to ful l theirexpressivefunction).

e problems with this suggestion are, it seems to me, two-fold: a)it rst acknowledges that there issomethingthat NS express (they dohave a sense), but thenb)it says that it is a sense that we are un- able to make sense of, one for which we lack any criteria for assess- ment/evaluation. _{It thus seems as if NS do have a sense (a sense} which suffices for the expression of a thought) and yet their sense is one that isunthinkable (on this diagnosis, it is not that nonsensical sentences aredevoidof sense (sense-less): it is that the sense they do possess is a non-sense).

Language, on this view, seems therefore to possess the remarkable (indeed, paradoxical) capability ofactually expressing the unthinkable (expressing some thing which is unthinkable). _{It thus seems able} both to reach beyond the bounds of (linguistic) sense while still re- maining within it—on the face of it, a rather contradictory state of affairs.

Fourthly, there is the option we have discussed already, the idea that semantic categories are grounded in conceptual structure (regardless of the grounding ofthatstructure)._{Nonsense attempts to combine} incompatible concepts into anunacceptablewhole;_{to rule that out}

_{As Camp (2004: §4) notes, we don’t want to equate lack of empirical scenarios for truth-value}

assessment with nonsensicalitytout courtor else far too many sentences would count as meaning- less.

_{e discussion of the C-sentence in Sorensen (2002: §2) seems to favour an approach along}

these lines.

_{Witherspoon (2000: 342) raises this difficulty for the Carnapian position on nonsense. e}

issue of the proper analysis of nonsense has been much debated in the recent confrontation between two interpretive schools in Wittgensteinian exegesis, the British and the American. Key texts in the discussion are Diamond (1991: ch. 2, 3), Witherspoon (2000), Hacker (2000), Conant (2002), Hacker (2003) and Diamond (2005).

_{See the Schlegel passage quoted in Chomsky (1966: 68). On the notion of impossible meanings}

see Fodor and Lepore (1999) and Johnson (2004).

_{I am not discounting the tenability of such a view—much of the interpretive discussion re-}

garding theTractatusagonises precisely over this issue. To label something as ‘unthinkable’ is nev- ertheless something that should give greater pause than has been the case (the discussion in Priest (2002: §9.4) is useful). Consider a classic case in mathematics: division by zero. Most textbooks will explain the arti cial stipulation for that case by saying “if we try to dividenobjects zero times, we have an operation that makes no sense”. e question is: whatexactlyare we describing here?

Whichoperation makes no sense?

_{Jackendoff (1990: 52).}

_{I’m thinking here of e.g. Peacocke’s (1986: 181) notion ofacceptance conditionfor a given piece}

What Compositionality Could Not Be |  we are entitled to choose those semantic categories that re ect our in- tuitive grasp of concepts (those whose possession conditions match our settled judgements on the matter). As for the metaphysical is- sues underlying our intuitions on this matter, we can leave that to a different branch of enquiry.

In and of itself, this proposal is hard to object to. e critical mov- ing part, however, is how we conceive of conceptual structure (how muchrigiditywe build into it, both in terms of internal and external boundaries). _{And I contend that there are two consequences stem-} ming from this view that the semanticist ought to consider, neither entirely friendly to her project.

First, that the concerns raised so far would afflict any realistically inclined view of conceptual structure. Secondly, and more impor- tantly, that a commitment to the enforcement of semantic categories by conceptual structure considerations will make the semanticistan- swerable to theactual boundaries of our concepts as embodied in our practice. Should those boundaries turn out to be ineradicably uid, the semanticist would have to abide by that nding.

In other words, if our concepts evolve over time and their time- indexed boundaries are not completely xed anyway, the nonsense- predicting powers of conceptual strictures will be again limited in their reach and will indeed be largely ex post facto. And the point is (although I have no space to argue at length for that): it is a matter of record that our concepts do so change.

Clearly, there is a lot of overlap among the suggestions above. And they all suffer, or so I’d argue, from the same difficulties (i.e. substan- tially the same difficulties emerge in different guises, hitting the dif- ferent proposals in relevantly similar places), namely, thati)re ection on past practice shows that conceptual/ontological categories have

_{is move however would amount to a denial of ECE, with the consequent loss of purchase}

on the CC/PoC connection.

_{I.e. of how muchplay(Derrideanjeu) we allow those boundaries to have—I’m thinking here}

of the notions of conceptnarrowingand conceptbroadeningdiscussed in e.g. Wilson and Carston (2007). Bartsch (1998) defends a constructivist view of conceptual structure with which I’ve much sympathy. e classic, and strongly realist, Peacocke (1992), in contrast, defends a view that suffers, I think, from many of the problems I raise in the text. Burge (2005: 55ff.) usefully sketches the contrast between opposing views of concepts (and understanding) by discussing the mathematical example of the concept of ‘limit’.

_{It seems clear that for any given conceptual scheme wecanprovide a diagnosis of nonsense in}

terms of conceptual clash. e point is whether we can do so in the forward-looking manner that isrequiredby CC.

_{Again, the case of theoretical terms is particularly telling in this regard. For some of the prob-}

 | Chapter 

changed and that therefore semantic categorisation principles based on those categories would only be relative to a conceptual scheme (and in any case more uid than what is needed by semanticism) and thatii)even if theywere xed for all time, tracking them appropriately would in ate the lexicon beyond learnability.

Indeed, I’d argue that all attempts to de ne meaning-categories in terms of basic building-blocks have to face our third dilemma for the semanticist:

SD III: e basic building-blocks can either be rigidly xed ahead of use or exible enough to accommodate future use, but they cannot be both, for too much exibility will deprive them of their ability to rule out NS in advance, whilst too much rigid- ity will render them unable toadaptto fresh contexts. However, a PoC-based explanation of CC requires that they be rigidly xed, whereas CC itself states that what is remarkable is words’ ability to adapt to contexts and our capacity to make sense of that exibility.

In short, the dilemma is that the con icting commitments of se- manticism require the building-blocks to have contradictory features: nonsense-busting properties (which require rigidity) and context- adapting ones (which require exibility). I submit that no entity could possess both properties at once and that neither horn of the dilemma would allow the semanticist to respect the constraints im- posed by PoC and CC—which does show, it seems to me, that the two principles are indeed incompatible.