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The Complexities of Syntax

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Abstract

The concepts of syntax and semantics have nowadays become commonplace, both in logic and linguistics; moreover, they seem to belong to the cornerstones of their foundations. Yet the two concepts are far from transparent. It is not only that the terms syntax and semantics are used in different ways within logic and within linguistics; even within each of the two enterprises they tend to be ambiguous. At the same time it turned out that a meticulous specification of both of the concepts may be extremely useful: in logic, an advance in their clarification underlay the breakthrough effected by Gödel, while in linguistics it may help us disentangle the discussions about the nature of semantic theories, as they come to the fore for example in the discussions between Chomskyans and their opponents. Intuitively, we may hold that the contrast between syntax and semantics is clear enough (perhaps just a version of the age-old distinction between form and content?), but this intuition is treacherous. In this paper I try to show that the analyses of the concepts as carried out by Carnap and others revealed their unexpected complexities, and that such analyses may help us map the intricacy of this conceptual entanglement. Also I try to show that getting clear on this is not only needed for strengthening the foundations of logic and linguistics, but also for throwing new light on some widely discussed philosophical problems, such as the discussions about computers having “syntax, but no semantics” initiated by Searle.

Work on this paper was supported by the grant No. 20-18675S of the Czech Science Foundation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Similar ideas can be found already in his earlier writings—viz., e.g., Carnap (1939). It is not without interest that, as was pointed out to me by A. Klev, Carnap (1932) uses the term semantics as a synonym for logical syntax . See Tuboly (2017) for a thorough discussion.

  2. 2.

    Of course, they all have the trivial property «to be simple, not to be composed of anything».

  3. 3.

    Remember that the classification of a property as syntactic depends on what we take the system in question to be. If, for example, we took the list as a part of a more exclusive system containing also all the letters of the English alphabet, then the items would have a lot of properties that would be syntactic.

  4. 4.

    It is this obliqueness that Quine (1940), §6, proposed to dispose of by means of his concept of quasiquotation: according to him, we should write ┌S∧S′┐, which “amounts to quoting the constant contextual backgrounds and imagining the unspecified expressions written in the blanks”. In our case “the constant contextual background” would be “∧” and “the unspecified expressions” would be S and S′.

  5. 5.

    See Peregrin (2014), Chap. 7, for a more detailed discussion of the issues hinted at in this section.

  6. 6.

    Cf. Peregrin (2018).

  7. 7.

    Cf. Peregrin (2020a).

  8. 8.

    We have seen that if we have a finite set of items formally distinct from each other, then the set itself is formally characterizable (such a characterization can be produced as the disjunction of the distinctive properties of the individual items); hence for every property of elements of a finite domain there is a formal property that is co-extensional with it. Thus, any finite set of sentences can be delimited syntactically.

  9. 9.

    It is not without interest that one of the original senses of finitism concerned the finiteness of the universe, for its proponents took for granted that any usable language cannot but have such kind of limited universe (Frost-Arnold 2013).

  10. 10.

    Unless, of course, we accept the “generalized” transformation rules of Carnap, which may render syntax in fact equivalent to semantics.

  11. 11.

    The founding father of this movement is usually taken to be Montague (1974); for a compendium of the achievements of the movement see van Benthem and ter Meulen (1996).

  12. 12.

    See Francez (2015).

  13. 13.

    As Button and Walsh (2018) put it: “model theory seems to be providing us with a perfectly precise, formal way to understand certain aspects of linguistic representation.”

  14. 14.

    See Peregrin (1995).

  15. 15.

    See, for example Bozşahin (2018).

  16. 16.

    See Peregrin (2010) for an analysis of the relationship between inference and truth-based meaning.

  17. 17.

    Cf. also Rapaport (2000).

  18. 18.

    It is not the purpose of the present paper to argue for an inferentialism, the view that meaning is an inferential role (see Peregrin (2014)). The point is merely that its rejection is not something that can be taken for granted.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Jaroslav Peregrin

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  1. Jaroslav Peregrin
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Correspondence to Jaroslav Peregrin .

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  1. Philosophy Department, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Ryan M. Nefdt

  2. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Carita Klippi

  3. Science and Technology Studies Rathenau Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Bart Karstens

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Peregrin, J. (2020). The Complexities of Syntax. In: Nefdt, R.M., Klippi, C., Karstens, B. (eds) The Philosophy and Science of Language. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55438-5_2

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