Robert J. Stainton

Words and thoughts : subsentences, ellipsis, and the philosophy of language

PART ONE: THE APPEARANCES AND SOME BACKGROUND 1. 1. Introduction: The appearances, and what they might mean 2. Further Background Issues PART TWO: THE GENUINENESS ISSUE 3. Not A Full-fledged Speech Act? 4. Extra-Grammatical Manoeuvres 5. Semantic Ellipsis 6. Syntactic Ellipsis 7. A Divide and Conquer Strategy 8. A Positive Representational-Pragmatic View PART THREE: IMPLICATIONS 9. Language-Thought Relations 10. Sentence Primacy 11. The Sentences, Assertion and the Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary

Non-sentential assertions and semantic ellipsis

ConclusionThe restricted semantic ellipsis hypothesis, we have argued, is committed to an enormous number of multiply ambiguous expressions, the introduction of which gains us no extra explanatory power. We should, therefore, reject it. We should also spurn the original version since: (a) it entails the restricted version and (b) it incorrectly declares that, whenever a speaker makes an assertion by uttering an unembedded word or phrase, the expression uttered has illocutionary force.Once rejected, the semantic ellipsis hypothesis cannot account for the many exceptions to the syntactic ellipsis hypothesis. So, we can safely infer that the Claim is true.(1)The Claim: Speakers can make assertions by uttering ordinary, unembedded, words and phrases.To the degree that the Claim reallyis in tension with the primacy of sentences (i.e., the view that (a) only sentences can be used to make assertions and (b) only sentences are meaningful in isolation) this doctrine must also be rejected.

Logical Form and the Vernacular

Vernacularism is the view that logical forms are fundamentally assigned to natural language expressions, and are only derivatively assigned to anything else, e.g., propositions, mental representations, expressions of symbolic logic, etc. In this paper, we argue that Vernacularism is not as plausible as it first appears because of non-sentential speech. More specifically, there are argument-premises, meant by speakers of non-sentences, for which no natural language paraphrase is readily available in the language used by the speaker and the hearer. The speaker can intend this proposition and the hearer can recover it (and its logical form). Since they cannot, by hypothesis, be doing this by using a sentence of their shared language, the proposition-meant has its logical form non-derivatively, which falsifies Vernacularism. We conclude the paper with a brief review of the debate on incomplete definite descriptions in which Vernacularism is assumed as a suppressed premise.

On 'the denial of bivalence is absurd'

Timothy Williamson, in various places, has put forward an argument that is supposed to show that denying bivalence is absurd. This paper is an examination of the logical force of this argument, which is found wanting.

On Restricting the Evidence Base for Linguistics

Publisher Summary The chapter investigates two questions about the appropriate evidence base for linguistics. The first question is should the evidence base for linguistics be restricted a priori and in principle in any fashion? The second question is should evidence from the cognitive sciences be excluded? Scientists pursue these two questions by considering three prorestriction answers to them — answers that favor restricting the evidence base for linguistic enquiry, specifically setting aside neuropsychological evidence. These negative answers aim to clarify two things: first, the views of language (and language study) underlying each answer, and second, the way each of these views leads to the restriction of the evidence base. The chapter discusses the prorestriction arguments and provides some novel antirestriction arguments. A detailed example of the way neuropsychological evidence has provided very surprising evidence about morphology, syntax, and compositional semantics is illustrated in the chapter.

The Context Principle

The context principle holds that only sentences have meaning in isolation. Three readings of this principle are introduced and explained: a methodological reading, a metasemantic reading, and an interpretation/psychological reading. Reasons for endorsing the principle are introduced, as is an objection from the use in isolation of sub-sentences. It is a near truism of philosophy of language that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence, sometimes formulated as the claim that only sentences have meaning in isolation. This is the Context Principle, first stressed in Western philosophy by Frege (1884), endorsed early on by Wittgenstein (1922: 51), and sanctioned more recently by Quine (1951: 42) among many others. (I say ‘in Western philosophy’ because the Fregean Principle, and several different ways of understanding it, seem to have been foreshadowed in classical Indian philosophy. See Matilal and Sen (1988).) In what follows, I provide some background to the Principle, I canvass three ways of reading it (a methodological reading, a metasemantic reading, and an

The Contribution of Domain Specificity in the Highly Modular Mind

Is there a notion of domain specificity which affords genuine insight in the context of the highly modular mind, i.e. a mind which has not only input modules, but also central ‘conceptual’ modules? Our answer to this question is no. The main argument is simple enough: we lay out some constraints that a theoretically useful notion of domain specificity, in the context of the highly modular mind, would need to meet. We then survey a host of accounts of what domain specificity is, based on the intuitive idea that a domain specific mechanism is restricted in the kind of information that it processes, and show that each fails at least one of those constraints.

Jerry A. Fodor, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong

For such a short book (165 pages of text, plus a three page Preface), Jerry Fodor’sConcepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong covers a lot of ground. There are very many trees, or maybe better, multiple woods, to keep track of: theses, preliminaries, assumptions, caveats, appendices, etc. We’ll start off, then, by sketching the central flow of argument, as background. We will then critically discuss two novel aspects of the book.

The Molecular Sememe: A Model for Literary Interpretation

The theory of Molecular Sememics was born of Caldwell’s frustrations with standard theory’s inability to adequately speak to literary criticism. The molecular sememe, understood as a new paradigm for linguistic study, can shed a great deal of light on such an heretofore neglected branch of linguistics. Caldwell shows that understanding meaning to belong to the molecule as marked by the word chosen in context allows for a deep and nuanced engagement with any text. A reader’s understanding of an author’s intentions can be greatly enhanced by reconstructing highly marked molecules, using both historical context and clues found within the text itself, to find the missing terms – the words not chosen – of the molecules. Deconstructionism in literature turns on the same argument, requiring a critic to rewrite the text by choosing the originally unmarked terms of a molecule; but it takes this conclusion to an unhappy extreme, often losing the author’s message in the process. Recognizing that language is not a single system or structure, but rather a set of conventionalized micro-structures, Molecular Sememics offers a view of language that allows for the creativity witnessed not just in poetry and grand works of prose, but in everyday, ordinary speech.

A Deranged Argument Against Public Languages

Abstract Are there really such things as public languages? Are things like English and Urdu mere myths? I urge that, despite an intriguing line of thought which may be extracted from Davidson’s ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, philosophers are right to countenance such things in their final ontology. The argument rebutted, which I concede may not have been one which Davidson himself ultimately embraced, is that knowledge of a public language is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful conversational interaction, so that such shared languages are explanatorily otiose. In particular, the ability of interlocutors to communicate in the face of linguistic novelty and error seems to support this conclusion. I respond with two main points. First, initial impressions aside, knowledge of things like English and Urdu is explanatorily necessary. Second, even if successful conversation could be explained without positing such knowledge, we have other reasons to take public languages ontologically seriously. The ultimate result is that what I label a ‘deranged argument against public languages’ is unsound.