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Chomskyan Arguments Against Truth-Conditional Semantics Based on Variability and Co-predication

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Abstract

In this paper I try to show that semantics can explain word-to-world relations and that sentences can have meanings that determine truth-conditions. Critics like Chomsky typically maintain that only speakers denote, i.e., only speakers, by using words in one way or another, represent entities or events in the world. However, according to their view, individual acts of denotations are not explained just by virtue of speakers’ semantic knowledge (since, according to them, semantic knowledge is very scarce: see as reported by Pietroski in Conjoining meanings: semantics without truth values, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018). Against this view, I will hold that, in the typical cases considered, semantic knowledge can account for the denotational uses of words of individual speakers.

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Notes

  1. I do not mean to say that only sentences have predicative structure. The claim is that if a representation has a predicative structure, then its accuracy conditions are truth-conditions.

  2. Here I will be concerned with cases similar to the London and the water case. For other examples and responses, see Kennedy and Stanley (2009), Forbes (2012), and Segal (2012).

  3. See Chomsky (2000; 37): “London is not a fiction, but considering it as London—that is, through the perspective of a city name, a particular type of linguistic expression—we accord it curious properties: as noted earlier, we allow that under some circumstances, it could be completely destroyed and rebuilt somewhere else, years or even millennia later, still being London, that same city. […].We can regard London with or without regard to its population: from one point of view, it is the same city if its people desert it; from another, we can say that London came to have a harsher feel to it through the Thatcher years, a comment on how people act and live. Referring to London, we can be talking about a location or area, people who sometimes live there, the air above it (but not too high), buildings, institutions, etc., in various combinations (as in London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away, still being the same city). Such terms as London are used to talk about the actual world, but there neither are nor are believed to be things-in-the world with the properties of the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates”.

  4. That sentences have meanings that determine truth-conditions does not imply that sentences have univocal truth-conditions. It can be that sentences have several meanings, and that each of these meanings determines a set of truth-conditions. That is, in the view, as it is stated, sentential meanings cannot be captured in a simple T-schema.

  5. Also, I have to note that I will be less concerned with sentences and truth-conditions than with (certain) words and denotations. That words have denotations is a pre-requisite that has to be satisfied so that sentences can have truth-conditions. But then it has to be explained how composition rules work: this is the part that I will be less concerned with in this paper. Also, the paper will be focused on nominals and what nominals denote because the arguments based on variability and co-predication affect nouns (proper or common). As I will argue, this is also the case with respect to Travis cases. The thesis that I defend may not be valid for other classes of words (though see below). But the dialectics of the paper is: if the biggest problem that truth-conditional semantics has to face is the one that the critics signal, truth-conditional semantics is not in such big trouble.

  6. Although explaining how this semantic mechanism works is no easy task (see Asher 2011; Gotham 2016).

  7. What can be called a “rich meanings” or multidimensional account of verbs can be found in Zeevat et al. (2017) as applied to the polysemy of fall, and especially in Loebner’s (ms) cascade account of verbs meanings. According to Loebner, verb meanings can be explained in terms of levels of what I will here call “realization”. A case in point is the example above of writing, which can denote different actions that are in realization relations. Loebner makes use of frame semantics to flesh out his proposal. Frame semantics are also close in spirit to the proposals here presented, though I prefer not to commit to any particular account in linguistic semantics (not even to Pustejovsky’s, which I will take as a starting point later on). Thanks to a reviewer for directing me to Loebner’s work.

  8. The book case is not so easy either: in yes, the book is beautiful but not credible we seem to denote two different senses associates to the “text” meaning: say, the writing and the plot. Thanks to my student Marina Ortega-Andrés for pointing this to me.

  9. Riaño, a village in the North of Spain, was flooded after a dam was constructed. The Government built a new village by the side of the lake that emerged, but many people refused to go to the new Riaño. Suppose that all the inhabitants of the old Riaño, including the major and the town council, refused to move to the new location. In that case, the following three assertions would have been true:

    1. (1)

      Riaño is now in the middle of the lake.

    2. (2)

      Riaño is an ugly village.

    3. (3)

      Riaño refused to move to the new location and ended up settling down in a different place.

    Nobody would utter (1–3) in a row, but each of (1–3) says something that is true. One cannot react, to any utterance of (1–3), by saying: ‘well, strictly speaking, Riaño does not exist anymore’. My point, thus, is that, contrary to intuitive ontological principles, the defender of dot objects has to commit to the view that a particular dot object would persist even when its constitutive parts are pulled apart, with the consequence that the dot object entity is then able to persist in several different entities.

  10. It also explains cases like these, where the words in italics take a prototypical denotation:

    1. (1)

      Your friend is very German

    2. (2)

      The platypus is more a mammal than a bird (Sassoon, 2017).

    Cases like (1) have been typically treated as cases of coercion, where the denotation of the predicate, which is not gradable, is turned into a gradable property: the prototype/stereotype associated to Germans. However, both in (1) and in (2), cases that Sassoon (2017) uses to assign a prototypical meaning to common names, can be seen as exhibiting that kind of polysemy that results from having different conceptual structures, or ways of categorizing, associated with a particular word.

  11. Again, it is interesting to compare the approach to Loebner’s study case of writing. The high-level action of writing (as when one writes movingly) requires realizers. The typical realizer of that action used to be moving a pen in certain ways on a sheet of paper. Perhaps that is still the prototypical realizer of writing-high-level, even though it is now more usual to realize that action by typing.

  12. Thanks to a reviewer for the example and for pressing the point.

  13. This is the account that Löhr (manuscript) is exploring.

  14. It would be good to be able to support these claims with empirical results, but, unfortunately, there is very little work done on co-predication. The interest that co-predication is receiving lately will hopefully change the situation soon.

  15. The example was provided by an anonymous referee of a different journal and of a different paper.

  16. Even some nouns can have thinner meanings. Pritchard (2018) analyzes relational nominals such as target and argues that they have an abstract schematic meaning.

  17. Typically, because words can also be meaningfully used in novel, ad hoc, ways (Carston 2015).

  18. An anonymous reviewer suggests that the view here presented may not differ from Chomsky’s much after all. I think it is dissimilar in at least two ways: (i) it is not internalist, since I try to explain how words relate to denotations; and (ii) it is not “mysterian” in any way. Chomsky has it that meanings emerged at some point in evolution, unconnected to communication systems in animals, basically because he thinks lexical meanings are not referential. What I try to say is that lexical meanings are referential, although multiply so. That a word is polysemous does not mean that it lacks a reference, only that it does not have a single reference. On the other hand, many of those who endorse a Chomskyan (internalist) semantics program take it that co-predication and variation show that meanings are underspecified or underdetermined representations that connect to concepts. I do not think that this is Chomsky’s own (elusive) view, though, again, the view here presented differs from this other view in that meanings are taken to be multidimensional concepts directly. Underdetermined representations are unnecessary intermediate stations and it is unclear what role they could play in semantic theorizing and interpretation.

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Acknowledgments

Versions of this paper, or parts of it, have been presented at the conferences CONTEXT (2017) and Semantics and Philosophy in Europe (2017), also at the Workshop on Ambiguity and Context-Sensitivity in Berlin, and at a talk at UCL. Thanks to audiences in these events, especially to Tim Pritchard, Robyn Carston, Manuel García-Carpintero, Elliot Murphy, François Recanati and Emanuel Viebahn. Thanks also to John Collins, Elena Castroviejo, Guido Löhr and two anonymous referees from Erkenntnis. Very special thanks to Marina Ortega-Andrés. Discussing co-predication and related issues with her has shaped up my views significantly.

Funding

Financial support for this work was provided by MINECO, Spanish Government, research project PGC2018-093464-B-100. funded by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Spain), and by a Start-up grant by the Ikerbasque Foundation.

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  1. Linguistics and Basque Studies Department, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria, Spain

    Agustín Vicente

  2. Ikerbasque: Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain

    Agustín Vicente

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Vicente, A. Chomskyan Arguments Against Truth-Conditional Semantics Based on Variability and Co-predication. Erkenn 86, 919–940 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00138-x

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