This is the first of a three-volume collection of David Lewis's most recent papers in all the areas to which he has made significant contributions. The purpose of this collection (and the two volumes to follow) is to disseminate even more widely the work of a preeminent and influential late twentieth-century philosopher. The papers are now offered in a readily accessible format. This first volume is devoted to Lewis's work on philosophical logic from the last twenty-five years. The topics covered (...) include: deploying the methods of formal semantics from artificial formalised languages to natural languages, model-theoretic investigations of intensional logic, contradiction, relevance, the differences between analog and digital representation, and questions arising from the construction of ambitious formalised philosophical systems. The volume will serve as an important reference tool for all philosophers and their students. (shrink)

In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and other (...) sententialist theories of belief, intention based semantics, and related issues in ontology. Stephen Schiffer is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

This book is a critical discussion of the principle of compositionality, the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by the meanings of its constituents and its structure. The aim of this book is to clarify what is meant by this principle, to show that its traditional justification is insufficient, and to discuss some of the problems that have to be addressed before a new attempt can be made to justify it.

0. Abstract In this paper, I argue that although the behavior of adjectives in context poses a serious challenge to the principle of compositionality of content, in the end such considerations do not defeat the principle. The first two sections are devoted to the precise statement of the challenge; the rest of the paper presents a semantic analysis of a large class of adjectives that provides a satisfactory answer to it. In section 1, I formulate the context thesis, according to (...) which the content of a complex expression depends on the context of its utterance only insofar as the contents of its constituents do. If the context thesis is false, the content of some complex expression is not compositionally determined. In section 2, using an example due to Charles Travis, I construct an objection to the context thesis based on the behavior of the adjective ‘green’. In section 3 and 4, I look at some of the difficulties surrounding the semantics of ‘good’, which provide the motivation for the thesis that most adjectives are contextually incomplete one-place predicates. In section 5, I discuss how ‘green’ and other color adjectives can be treated within such a semantic theory. Since this theory is compatible with the context thesis, the objection against the compositionality of content looses its force. (shrink)

which he calls general indicatives, are correctly analysed as open indicative conditionals prefixed by universal quantifiers. So they are both analysed as (∀x)(if x gets a chance, x bungee-jumps), where x ranges over girls. This analysis is attributed to Geach.2 Barker then shows that this syntactic analysis, together with other premises, entails that the open conditional occurring under the universal quantifier has to be analysed as having the import of material implication.

This paper falls into two parts. In the first part, I argue that consideration of general indicative conditionals, e.g., sentences like If a donkey brays it is beaten, provides a powerful argument that a pure material implication analysis of indicative if p, q is correct. In the second part I argue, opposing writers like Jackson, that a Gricean style theory of pragmatics can explain the manifest assertability conditions of if p, q in terms of its conventional content – assumed to (...) be merely (p⊃q) – and the conversational implicature contents which utterance of if p, q may gain in certain contexts. I also defend the pragmatic approach against a recent objection by Edgington that appeal to pragmatics cannot explain what we are inclined to say about the believability conditions, as opposed to the assertability conditions, of indicative if p, q. (shrink)

This article discusses the hypothesis of direct compositionality, which is the hypothesis that the syntax and the semantics work “in tandem”. The syntax builds expressions and the semantics works to assign meanings to the representations as they are built in the syntax. DC entails that there are no syntactic expressions of any sort, which do not have a meaning. The first argument for DC is that any theory needs a compositional syntax—that is, a recursive rule system which proves the well-formedness (...) of expressions, often proving the well-formedness of larger output expressions based on the well-formedness of smaller ones. Second, if meanings are computed on representations, which are the output of the syntactic computation, then there is a certain amount of duplication of information. Those representations need to be referred to twice. A third argument in favour of DC architecture concerns the locality of the rules for the compositional semantics. (shrink)

The ideas of contextuality and of compositionality were discussed at the beginnings of the nineteenth century in Germany, but the contextuality was the significant one. In 1880, Wundt published a work called Logik, comprising two volumes, which evolved to the German standard text on logic. Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher, presented contextuality as his basic principle; his solution of the foundational problems is based upon it, he meant the principle literally, and would have rejected compositionality. He introduced (...) the distinction between sense and reference in his paper, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” in 1892. He did not accept the notion the reference of an expression; instead, his approach is based upon the notion the reference of an expression in a given sentence. In the period before Tarski, logics were regarded as deductive theories. Tarski made an important step with his paper on “Truth in formalized languages,” in which he characterized the notion of a true sentence in a purely semantic way. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to Kaplan-style semantics. The formal semantics usually employs the notion of a model, which, besides supplying the sets utterance contexts, circumstances and a domain M 0 of individuals, and also interprets the nonlogical atomic expressions of the language. Standard compositionality applies only to character: Funct makes immediate sense, since character assigns a semantic value directly to expressions. For semantic functions taking contextual arguments, the notion of compositionality must be revised. Notions of contextual compositionality apply directly (...) to the functional version of the setup that starts with the function char, and defines the other semantics from it. The point of evaluation semantics is indeed basic: if it is compositional, so is the content semantics, and the character semantics. (shrink)

Semantic theories account for the literal, conventional meanings of linguistic expressions, and they tend to do so by assigning them one or more semantic values: extensions, intensions, and characters. Lest semantics should be a cul-de-sac, at least some of these values must be interpretable from the outside. The semantic values, are supposed to figure in accounts of preconditions of utterances and their communicative effects, contributing aspects of their literal meaning. The semantic values are assigned to expressions, not to surface strings. (...) The disambiguation of surface strings usually shows in the part-whole structure of the underlying expressions. The semantically relevant parts of an expression need not be determined according to its surface structure. Rather, there is a specific level of syntactic analysis—sometimes called Logical Form —that defines the syntactic input to semantic analysis. The compositional treatment of an expression may call for otherwise unmotivated structuring. (shrink)

This article focuses on the relevance of computational complexity for cognition. The syntactic items may be expressions that are surface strings. But in general, strings are syntactically ambiguous in that they can be generated in more than one way from atomic expressions and operations. The semantic function must take disambiguated items as arguments. When expressions are ambiguous, expressions cannot be the arguments. Instead, it is common to take the arguments to be terms, whose surface syntax reflects the derivation of the (...) string. The semantic function differs in one other important respect from an arithmetic function, since it maps entities between domains, from a syntactic to an ontic or conceptual domain of meanings. Compositionality helps to explain the rate of success in linguistic communication when the sentence used or the content communicated is new. (shrink)

Let me start with an example. Presumably our understanding of the sentence ‘dogs bark’ arises somehow from our understanding of its components and our appreciation of how they are combined. That is to say, ‘dogs bark’ somehow gets its meaning from the meanings of the two words ‘dog’ and ‘bark’, from the meaning of the generalization schema ‘ns v’, and from the fact that the sentence results from placing those words in that schema in a certain order. However, as Davidson (...) was the first to emphasize, it is not possible to produce a strict logical deduction of what ‘dogs bark’ means from these more basic facts alone. So a question arises as to which further premises are required. What assumptions about the character of meaning should be added in order to obtain an explanation of the meaning of the sentence on the basis of the meanings of its words? (shrink)

This book makes a stimulating contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. It begins with a spirited defence of the view that propositions are structured and that propositional structure is 'psychologically real'. The author then develops a subtle view of propositions and attitude ascription. The view is worked out in detail with attention to such topics as the semantics of conversations, iterated attitude ascriptions, and the role of propositions as bearers of truth. Along the way important issues (...) in the philosophy of mind are addressed. Though intended primarily for professional philosophers and graduate students the book will also interest cognitive scientists and linguists. (shrink)

Linguists started to handle the semantics of linguistic constructions with the proper generality only in the twentieth century. Leonard Bloomfield approaches the notion of a construction via the notion of a constituent. A “constituent” of a linguistic form e is a linguistic form, which occurs in e and also in some other linguistic form. It is an “immediate constituent” of e if it appears at the first level in the analysis of the form into ultimate constituents. A “construction” combines two (...) or more linguistic forms as immediate constituents of a more complex form. Bloomfield's notion of a “pronounceable” string of sounds is purely phonetic. So the entire work of distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical expressions of the language L rests on the question whether they are “meaningful.”. (shrink)