FACTORES QUE AFECTAN EL DESARROLLO DE LOS MICROORGANISMOS

Are there then noremaining reasons to insist on structural (speci - cally: compositional) constraints on linguistic competence? Well, yes, of course there are. ey do not however concern the need to avoid case-by-case meaning stipulations, or the (supposedly tran- scendental) point about making sense of the phenomenon of shared content.

Rather, (some form of) compositionality (and UaGS) is needed to ensure that our system of signs is a language and not a code, that expressions express content and not merely point towards it (or are pairedto it).

at’s no small concession, of course, and by acknowledging the le- gitimacy of this theoretical demand it may seem that I am committing myself to an enormous explanatory task, namely, that of reconciling a distrust in strict compositionality with the recognition of its indis- pensability in ensuring that our signs function as parts of a language

_{If this leaves you unconvinced, go back to my discussion in section 2.4.2. e idea that we}

could form a sense that expresses unthinkable thoughts is the one we are asked to make sense of. I thinkthisidea is nonsense. One could retort thatthe very idea of language changerequires that categoriescanclash—or else, how could we account for the currentacceptabilityof (1)? Again, I think this is a misunderstanding of the facts. At no point were we entertaining the thought of (a putatively literal, and thusstill abhorrentreading of) ‘revolutionary’ combined with ‘ideas’. As soon as the pairing was coined, wesawthe intended meaning (our imaginative rationality delivered us the “new” meaning). One could still complain that I am attening useful distinctions here: children delight in Alice-type nonsense because itisnonsense, don’t they? On the contrary: their delight (and ours too) comes from the fact that syntax does outstrip reality and that their conceptual struc- ture is still (mercifully) uid. But throughout, we (and they) remain rmly within the bounds of sense.

_{Here I echo again Wright’s (1981: 52) question. My thesis is a long (possibly overlong) re-}

ection on that query. In a nutshell: I take this chapter to have given reasons to endorse—via other means—Pietroski’s (2003: 245) (and the Chomskyan’s) view that we can retain structural as- pects to our theories while throwing out the idea thattheyexplain (and provide support to) the meaning/truth-conditions connection. What worries me however is something the Chomskyan seems relatively uninterested in: how can we give an account of competence on which our language use comes out as fullyrationalonce that connection is renounced?

_{e point has been made by e.g. Dummett (1991: 13) and more forcefully still in his (1989:}

172-73). Partee (1988: 49) argued that rather than CC, what PoC explains is inde nitely many semantic facts. Perhaps this is one of them. I am less sure about the o-made claim (e.g. Janssen 1997: 457) that PoC is not an empirical principle but a methodological one—a claim oen wielded to assess the plausibility of a particular meaning-theory (e.g. Wright (2001a: 344) and Chrisman (2011) with regard to Brandom’s assertibilism and metaethical expressivism respectively).

What Compositionality Could Not Be |  properly so called.

I am aware the size of the task is a forbidding one. What I will argue though is that I can go some way towards bridging the gap between these two commitments of mine by proposing that our conception of content (both mental and semantic) ought to be revised downwards, as it were.

at is, I agree with Borg et al. that semantic content is minimal (and so is semantics). But I think content is a lot more minimal than even they think. It is radically, ineliminably minimal, that is, and consequently the compositional machinery operates on radically minimal pieces of content.

It would however be a mistake to think that semantic content mini- mally construed is either amenable to completion (it is not: it remains rmly minimal throughout; it is not a skeleton awaiting eshing out) or to pragmatic enrichment (I don’t think it pragmatically expresses inde nitely many propositions at all) or that it ispropositionallymin- imal. And it would therefore be just as wrong to continue to insist on MDP (at least as long as meaning is conceived in customarily robust terms) and UaKTC.

I am thus fully with Chomsky (b: ) when he says that the language faculty (including the compositional module) outputs ab- stract structures. I just happen to think that those structures are a lot more abstract than anyone thinks and that they remain wholly abstract throughout (semantic content is notincomplete: it is as com- plete ascontentcan ever get).

Clearly, I am running wildly ahead of myself here. All that I wanted to accomplish in this chapter was breaking off the CC/PoC connec- tion and sow the seeds for the idea that content must be radically minimal (i.e. radically disconnected from the determination of truth- conditions). With any luck, I have done enough to convince you of that (or at least to give you some pause for thought).

ere remains a rather large puzzle about what rationally constrains interpretation. _{I take up the challenge fully in the last chapter. By} way of anticipation, my position is (initially, at least) fairly standard: we are rational to the extent that we are sensitive to reasons of the appropriate kind, given a speci c eld of enquiry.

e semanticist answer to the question regarding linguistic com-

_{Explaining why some judgements as to grammaticality and meaningfulness are less inexpli-}

cable than others was, more or less, the challenge thrown by Evans (1981a: 341-2) to the (Wittgen- steinian) opponents of systematicity (the fanatics wrecking the machines, as he colourfully put it on p. 326). at a theory of meaning should make sense of language mastery as a rational activity has also been argued for by e.g. Dummett (1987: 260) and (1991: 91).

 | Chapter 

petence was that we ought to be sensitive to the reasons provided by the atomic meanings. e complex meanings inherit exactly those reasons, and our competence is merely a question of tracking their transmission from below (via the compositional operations), with no additional work required.

By contrast, I shall end up arguing that we are rational language users to the extent that we are sensitiveto a much wider class of rea- sons. We thus require a rationality that is ineradicably situated, one that is sensitive to situated reasons.

e task in this chapter was to try and show what compositionality couldnotbe (i.e. thesoleguarantor of the objectivity of meaning). In the next chapter my task is showing whatsemantic contentcould not be.

Chapter 