The Undeflated Domain of Semantics

Abstract

It is, I suppose, a truism that an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language L will associate each sentence of L with its meaning. But the converse does not hold. A theory that associates each sentence with its meaning is not, by virtue of that fact, an adequate theory of meaning. For it is also a truism that a semantic theory should explain the (interesting and explicable) semantic facts. And one cannot decree that the relevant facts are all reportable with instances of schemata like 's means that p' or 's, by virtue of its meaning, is true iff p'. Investigation suggests that there is much more for semanticists to explain: natural languages exhibit synonymies, ambiguities, and entailments; for any string of words, there are endlessly many meanings it cannot have; there are semantic generalizations, including crosslinguistic generalizations, that go uncaptured and unexplained by merely associating sentences with their meanings; etc. Initially, one might think these facts are "peripheral" and can thus be ignored if the aim is to explain why sentences mean what they do. But the study of natural language suggests otherwise. (One can't tell, in advance of investigation, which facts are peripheral to a given domain. It was initially tempting to think that one could ignore falling bodies, and the tides, if the aim was to explain why planets move as they do.)We find out what a theory of meaning can and should explain by doing semantics. We start by trying to explain a range of facts pretheoretically regarded as semantic; and then we see where inquiry leads. This would be too obvious to mention, much less write about, except that some philosophers seem to have lost track of the point. And this is not harmless ignorance of empirical research. For it has been coupled with the observation that one can, without deploying the theoretical apparatus that semanticists standardly deploy, specify trivial algorithms that associate each sentence of a language with its meaning. Thus, confusion about the aims of semantics-and failure to consider its successes-is easily transformed into skepticism about the need for nontrivial theories of the sort that semanticists try to offer. So I will be stressing that facts like those reported with (1) 'Dogs bark' means that dogs bark reflect the tip of an iceberg.Another truism is that speakers of English understand English sentences. If you know English, then modulo performance limitations, you can associate

Concepts, Meanings and Truth: First Nature, Second Nature and Hard Work

“…But if I‐expressions like ‘Snow is white’ are neither true nor false, the same is true for ‘ Snow is white is true if and only if snow is white’. And deflationary conceptions of meaning, as in Horwich, 1998, do not capture semantic constraints on I‐expressions; see Pietroski, 2000.…”

I—Jennifer Hornsby

“…Replies to Horwich (e.g. Higginbotham 2000, Pietroski 2000, Collins 2003and Heck 2005) argue that the phenomenon of meaning-compositionality must have an explanation of a kind that goes missing from Horwich's trivial theories; and many of the arguments appeal simply to facts about languages which semanticists want to explain. 30.…”